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Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
Reverse Trickle Down Boeing CEO Jim McNerney succinctly summarized a recent study by Northwestern University's Center for Labor Market Studies regarding unemployment rates for different income brackets: The Center analyzed the labor conditions faced by income-grouped U.S. households during the fourth quarter of 2009. In the face of one of the worst economic environments in memory, those in the highest income groups had nearly full employment levels, with just a 3.2 percent unemployment rate for households with over $150,000 in income and a 4 percent rate in the next-highest income group of $100,000-plus. The two lowest-income groups -- under $12,500 and under $20,000 annually -- faced unemployment rates of 30.8 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively. The study - published in February - notes that the poor are suffering Depression levels of unemployment: Workers in the lowest income decile faced a Great Depression type unemployment rate of nearly 31% while those in the second lowest income decile had an unemployment rate slightly below 20% .... Unemployment rates fell steadily and steeply across the ten income deciles. Workers in the top two deciles of the income distribution faced unemployment rates of only 4.0 and 3.2 percent respectively, the equivalent of full employment. The relative size of the gap in unemployment rates between workers in the bottom and top income deciles was close to ten to one. Clearly, these two groups of workers occupy radically different types of labor markets in the U.S.
Basra as 2017’s Nigerian Delta I have been of the opinion that onshore and near-shore oil is only exportable from an area with either the consent of the governed or a massively repressive security regime that does not mind killing 5% to 20% of the local population. Anything in between allows for the formation of non-state actors who can block oil exports relatively cheaply if the local population does not believe that they are getting a fair deal. This is not a problem in Norway, or Alaska as the locals believe that they are getting a good deal from either state funding for their Olympic curling team or from annual dividend checks. This is also not a big deal in Sudan as security forces are willing to crack down hard against any group that could potentially disrupt oil export flows. This is a problem in Nigeria as most oil production is concentrated in a very small region, the Niger River Delta. This region has had a successful oil based insurgency that has effectively shut in a quarter to half of all Nigerian oil production for most of the past decade. The group is called MEND. MEND’s demands have been for more oil profits to remain in the region instead of being shipped to the central government and distributed from there. MEND also makes money through extortion, kidnapping and most crucially stealing and reselling oil on the black-market. Their coercive ability has been the capacity to kidnap and threaten expat oil workers and blow up oil pipelines that isolate wells from the refining and distribution central nodes. Basra looks like it has the right dynamic to replicate the Nigerian Delta quandrary [sic]. more from Dave Anderson
cartoonist matt bors
Current Economics 101 I've attempted, for some time now, to keep readers of this blog aware of what is really happening with the economy. As most of you know, what is reported in the mainstream media is primarily spin, lies and distortions. The one remaining thoughtful, independent voice on network television is Bill Moyers. His shows are well-worth watching each week on PBS, and last week's episode was particularly excellent. In fact, if you take the time to watch the show by using the link below, you will benefit from the best, clearest, and most concise synopsis of what went wrong on Wall Street, and what needs to be done in order to avoid another major crash. Moyer's two guests are doing important work, and are eloquent spokesmen for the citizens of this country. read the transcript here or, better yet, watch the show in streaming video
Did You Pay $1 or More in Taxes for 2009? If so, then you paid more to the U.S. Government than General Electric. That's right – GE paid nothing. General Electric got bailed out by American taxpayers. Specifically, it was given $139 billion in FDIC guarantees and support by the Federal Reserve for it's commercial paper (see this). So you'd think that GE would return the favor by paying American taxes, right? Wrong. GE paid no U.S. taxes for 2009. As CNN points out: GE had plenty of earnings last year -- just not in the United States. For tax purposes, the company's U.S. operations lost $408 million, while its international businesses netted a $10.8 billion profit. Unfortunately, GE is not alone. more from Washington's Blog
Inverse Relationships To State Taxes Surprise, surprise... Do you ever wonder which states offer the worst education, have the highest school dropout rates, have the most hungry children, and have the unhealthiest citizens? It's easy to find out: just consult the newest state rankings issued by the conservative Tax Foundation. The states that were ranked tops for their "business tax climate" and had the lowest tax burdens were the places whose citizens were, in the words of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, "last in everything good and first in everything bad." Let's look at Mississippi, the the state hailed by the Tax Foundation as having the lowest tax burden per capita. Here's is what else Mississippi is tops in: States with highest rate of food hardship: #1 Let's take Nevada, which is ranked #4 for business tax climate for 2010 by the Tax Foundation. What other categories does Nevda lead the country? Here are a few examples: Crime rate ranking: #1 (branded "most dangerous state in America") How about Florida? The Tax Foundation ranks it 5th for Business Tax Climate: Crime rate ranking: #6 And then there's Vermont, which the Tax Foundation ranks 12th for its tax burden and 41st for its business tax climate: Safest states in America: #2 Where would you rather live? via David Dobbs
Israel: A Democracy? What is misleadingly being called in Israel the “Anat Kamm espionage affair” is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has worshipped for decades at the altar of a security state. Next week 23-year-old Kamm is due to stand trial for her life — or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying. Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too. This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial. Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order — a gag on the gag, so to speak — were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers began making the restrictions futile [including notably Richard Silverstein]. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story. So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes supposedly committed by Kamm and Blau? During her conscription, Kamm is said to have copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank. Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law. His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law). In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile. more from Jonathan Cook
Tax Time, So Chew on This... Over at ThinkProgress, Ben Armbruster highlighted a Forbes report on the taxes paid by top corporations last year. According to Forbes, General Electric managed to make $10.3 billion in pretax income, but paid nothing into the U.S. Treasury, as it counted its losses in the U.S., while registering its profits overseas. As Forbes put it, “GE Capital has displayed an uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the U.S. (posting a $6.5 billion loss in 2009), and make lots of money overseas (a $4.3 billion gain).” And then there’s Exxon-Mobil, which paid more in income taxes than any other U.S. company last year, just none of it to the U.S.: Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Instead, the $15 billion was divided among the countries where Exxon has set up one of its hundreds of foreign subsidiaries. In total, Exxon 122 foreign subsidiaries, including 32 in countries that are officially labeled tax havens by the U.S. government. It has 18 subsidiaries in the Bahamas, and 3 each in the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, and Singapore. more from Think Progress
The WikiLeaks Video A week ago, I wrote about the war being waged on WikiLeaks by the Pentagon and other governments and corporations around the world, and noted at the time -- as a result of my interview with editor Julian Assange -- that WikiLeaks had obtained classified videos that were highly incriminating of the Pentagon and was planning on releasing them shortly. Earlier today, I wrote about the cover-up by the U.S. military in Afghanistan of the deaths of five civilians, the Pentagon's forced retraction of its story, and the way in which the U.S. media (as usual) mindlessly disseminated their original false claims. Those two stories came together perfectly when WikiLeaks today released a video of the U.S. military, from an Apache helicopter, slaughtering civilians in Iraq in 2007 -- including a Reuters photojournalist and his driver -- and then killing and wounding several Iraqis who, minutes later, showed up at the scene to carry away the dead and wounded (including two of their children). much more on this important story from Glenn Greenwald and bagnewsnotesand Dan Froomkin and Invictus
The Bust-Out The work of Bill Black—who spent a decade as a federal bank regulator—is about how bad economic theory has given people whose jobs should be understanding fraud a screwy sense of how fraud works in the real world. One way of seeing this, as Black describes in a terrific article, is to think about the mob “bust-out.” The bust-out is what happens when the mob moves in to take control of a business that's heavily indebted to a loan shark. As Black tells it, why the heck a mobster would ever want to take over a bar or liquor store in this way is incomprehensible to a classical economist. Why take over the business when you're already getting every cent of profit and more in your weekly vig? Except that in the real world, things don't work that way, explains Black, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The reason to take over the business is to loot it 1,000 ways to Sunday, from buying vast amounts of liquor on credit to, ultimately, torching the place for the insurance money. Prosecutors and mobsters know this. Economists who think the mob operates like a bank that happens to charge high interest rates miss it. The problem here is that none of the ugly realities of how a business can be stripped of everything valuable make their way into the economic and regulatory theories that have been ascendant for the last two decades. How did we get to this point? Well, here's a story: Back in the early days of the savings and loan crisis, Bill Black was involved in the efforts of bank regulators to close down two savings and loans, Lincoln Savings—the bank run by Charles Keating, later to become the poster boy for the S&L crisis—and CenTrust Savings. The two S&Ls held massive portfolios of junk bonds issued by the (now long-defunct) investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, then the junk bond kings. Black and other regulators believed that Lincoln's and CenTrust's junk bonds and bad loans were a disaster in the making. To help make the case for their financial stability, Lincoln and CenTrust went to a consulting company called Lexecon, created by Daniel Fischel, a University of Chicago Law School professor and one of the preeminent authorities on the economics of regulation. Lexecon reported that Lincoln and CenTrust were extremely unlikely to fail, and in the (nearly impossible) case that they did, a failure would cost the bank insurance program less than a penny for every $1,000 of deposits. Lincoln and CenTrust did fail—in the case of Lincoln, at a cost to the government of $3 billion. Daniel Fischel went on to become dean of the University of Chicago Law School. Not long after the Lincoln and CenTrust debacle, Fischel (who defended Keating and his patron Michael Milken in a 1995 book) and his fellow Chicagoan Frank Easterbrook went on to publish The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, the standard text on the intersection of law and economics. Wait a second, how can a guy who was so utterly wrong in evaluating the economics of the S&L crisis come to be the go-to guy on regulatory theory? Fischel's theories were based on the premise that in the main markets were very good at evaluating the true worth of loans, bonds, and equities, and certainly better at it than regulators. On Fischel's view—a view that Black marvels at, given what the Chicago professor knew about the inner workings of Keating's bank—no fraud could grow too fast or get too big before the markets punished it. read Mark Gimein's full post at Slate
"Extend and Pretend" In another example of fine citizen journalism, Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker currently living in Chile, writes the following: In 1982, many of the banks hit by the Latin American debt crisis were effectively insolvent. Paul Volcker, as the then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve—charged with overseeing the banking system—effectively cast a blind eye on this banking insolvency. Volcker’s reasoning seems to have been that the US banks were not broke—they were just getting temporarily squeezed. Volcker seems to have concluded that time would heal the balance sheet wounds caused by the Latin American defaults. Therefore, to hold the banks to the letter of the accounting rules would likely drive one or more of them broke, to no useful purpose—and it could potentially cause a bank panic and general financial crisis. But to pretend (for a while) that all was right with the US banks would avoid a potential panic—so long as the crisis sorted itself out and the banks repaired themselves by writing off and renegotiating their toxic Latin American debt. Volcker gambled, and won: The US banks indeed took the Latin American debt hit, but grew their way out of their hole. None of the large American banks were pushed to bankruptcy in 1982, and by 1983, the worst had passed. By 1984, the biggest chunks of Latin American debt had either been renegotiated or written off—so far as the American banking system was concerned, the crisis was over, with not a single name bank going broke. And most importantly, stability and calm reigning all the while. Score for Volcker and what we could say was the Volcker Call. In 2008, when Lehman went bankrupt because of all the “toxic assets” on its balance sheet, the severe credit crisis that happened as a result was because everyone realized that Lehman was the canary in the coal mine. All of the American banking system was insolvent, for more or less the same reason: Assets on their books simply were not worth anything close to their nominal value. These assets were clustered around CDO’s, mostly in the real estate and commercial real estate markets. To relieve the credit crunch that peaked in September, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board opened the money spigots—all kinds of lending windows were opened, with a dizzying array of acronyms, all of them doing basically the same thing: Lending out wads of cash at zero interest to the American banking system, all in an effort to keep it from going broke. Between September, 2008, and March 2009, the Fed backstopped the entire US banking system—but it still wasn’t enough. The losses were too great, the holes in the balance sheets too big. So on April 2, 2009, a key FASB rule was suspended: Specifically, rule 157 was suspended, related to the marking of assets to market value—the so-called “mark to market” rule. Essentially, the mark-to-market rule means marking an asset to the value it can fetch in the open market at the date of the accounting period. If I own a share of XYZ stock which I purchased at $100, but today it’s quoted at $60, I mark it on my books at today’s market price—$60—not at the purchase price—$100. The reason is obvious: By marking the asset to market value, I’m giving a realistic picture of the financial shape of my company or bank. However, ever since April 2, 2009, when the FASB rules were suspended, the American banking system has been floating on nothing by air. By suspending rule 157, none of the banks have had to admit that they’re insolvent. With the suspension of mark-to-market, accounting rules are now basically mark-to-make-believe. Why was FASB rule 157 suspended? read on at Naked Capitalism
Orwell Would be Proud “The Federal Reserve recognizes the importance of transparency to its financial stability efforts and will continue to review disclosure practices with the goal of making additional information publicly available when possible,” the New York Fed said in yesterday’s statement. Bloomberg filed freedom of information lawsuits against the Fed in April and November of 2008. The Fed fought Bloomberg every step of the way. Sanity prevailed in court. With this disclosure, everyone should now be able to clearly see what many of us knew all along: The Fed was not seeking to protect weak banks as it alleged, but rather to protect itself from having to disclose billions of dollars of pure garbage on its balance sheet. more from Mike Shedlock
Those Were The Days... In early February of 2006, I submitted a book proposal about the wartime relationship between Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower to a group of New York publishers. I had worked on the proposal for nine months and believed it would garner significant interest. Two weeks after the submission, I received my first response — from a senior editor at a major New York publishing firm. He was uncomfortable with the proposal: “Wasn’t Marshall an anti-Semite?” he asked. I’d heard this claim before, but I was still shocked by the question. For me, George Marshall was an icon: the one officer who, more than any other, was responsible for the American victory in World War Two. He was the most important soldier of his generation — and a man of great moral and physical courage. That Marshall was an anti-Semite has been retailed regularly since 1948 — when it became known that, by that time as US Secretary of State, he not only opposed the U.S. stance in favor of the partition of Palestine, but vehemently recommended that the U.S. not recognize the State of Israel that emerged. Harry Truman disagreed and Marshall and Truman clashed in a meeting in the Oval Office, on May 12, 1948. Truman relied on president counselor Clark Clifford to make the argument. Clifford faced Marshall: the U.S. had made a moral commitment to the world’s Jews that dated from Britain’s 1919 Balfour Declaration, he argued, and the U.S would be supported by Israel in the Middle East. The Holocaust had made Israel’s creation an imperative and, moreover, Israel would be a democracy. He then added: Jewish-Americans, were an important voting bloc and would favor the decision. Marshall exploded. “Mr. President,” he said, “I thought this meeting was called to consider an important, complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here.” Truman attempted to calm Marshall, whom he admired — but Marshall was not satisfied. “I do not think that politics should play any role in our decision,” he said. The meeting ended acrimoniously, though Truman attempted to placate Marshall by noting that he was “inclined” to side with him. That wasn’t true — the U.S. voted to recognize Israel and worked to support its emerging statehood. Marshall remained enraged. When Marshall returned to the State Department from his meeting with Truman, he memorialized the meeting: I remarked to the president that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by him. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not, in fact, achieve this purpose. The great dignity of the office of the president would be seriously damaged. The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford’s advice was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem confronting us was international. I stated bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against the president. Put more simply, Marshall believed that Truman was sacrificing American security for American votes. more from Mark Perry at War in Context
Obama's Economic Brain Trust America is held out to the world as a meritocracy. You work hard, you play by the rules, you make sound judgment calls, you succeed. That’s the American dream. Right? That’s what the President of the United States should exemplify in his actions. Right? Then how does one explain the individuals who represent the abject failures of financial and regulatory theory chosen by the President to dominate the dialogue on financial reform. How does one reconcile President Obama appointing Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council after Mr. Summers played a central role in rolling back the safeguards that led to the current financial crisis. This is what Mr. Summers had to say at the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the draconian legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed commercial banks holding insured deposits to merge with investment banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies: the very same combinations that led to the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression: “Let me welcome you all here today for the signing of this historic legislation. With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st century, one that will benefit American consumers, business, and the national economy for many years to come…I believe we have all found the right framework for America's future financial system.” Mr. Summers was wrong. This was not the “framework for America’s future” but the framework for epic financial collapse. Why isn’t Mr. Summers in an unemployment line along with the millions of Americans his bad judgment call put out of work? Then there is Neal Wolin, confirmed by President Obama as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury on May 19, 2009. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 19, 2009, Robert Scheer had this to say about Wolin: “Wolin, Geithner and Summers were all proteges of Robert Rubin, who, as Clinton's treasury secretary, was the grand author of the strategy of freeing Wall Street firms from their Depression-era constraints. It was Wolin who, at Rubin's behest, became a key force in drafting the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended the barrier between investment and commercial banks and insurance companies, thus permitting the new financial behemoths to become too big to fail. Two stunning examples of such giants that had to be rescued with public funds are Citigroup bank, where Rubin went to ‘earn’ $120 million after leaving the Clinton White House, and the Hartford Insurance Co., where Wolin landed after he left Treasury.” Rounding out the list of those who got it wrong in the Clinton administration who have been brought back to get it wrong again in the Obama administration: Gary Gensler, one of those supporting the de-regulation of derivatives under Clinton, now head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Obama; Gene Sperling, thanked by Lawrence Summers in the opening remarks at the signing of the legislation to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, now counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner; and, of course, Geithner himself, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who served under Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department from 1999 to 2001. Many Americans have suspected for some time that meritocracy has died an uncelebrated death and was quietly laid to rest in a paupers’ graveyard. Many Americans also believe something has gone terribly wrong not just with our economic model but the moral compass that guides that economic model. more from Pam Martens at Counterpunch
Obama and the age of permanent war Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence", Robert Gates, complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war, they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare. According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marjah" from the Taliban's "command-and-control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise. more from John Pilger in the New Statesman
Yemen: How Big of a Threat? I left for Yemen as Obama was insisting that ‘large chunks’ of the country were ‘not fully under government control’, after Senator Joseph Lieberman had cheerfully announced that it was a suitable target for war and occupation. The sad underwear bomber who tried to blow up the Amsterdam flight on Christmas Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in Britain, his crash course in suicide terrorism, mercifully inadequate, had been provided by AQAP somewhere in Yemen. Yemen is a proper country, unlike the imperial petrol stations dotted across other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, where the ruling elites live in hurriedly constructed skyscrapers designed by celebrity architects, flanked by shopping malls displaying every Western brand, and serviced by wage-slaves from South Asia and the Philippines. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was founded when the Old Testament was still being written, edited and collated. It’s true that the new Mövenpick hotel in the heart of the city’s diplomatic enclave is reminiscent of Dubai at its worst – when I was there it was pushing its Valentine’s Day Dinner Menu – but in Yemen the elite is careful and doesn’t flaunt its wealth. The old walled city was rescued from extinction-via-modernisation by Unesco (and later the Aga Khan Trust) in the 1980s, and the old wall rebuilt. The ninth-century Great Mosque is currently being restored by a team of Italian experts working with local archaeologists who are uncovering artefacts and images from a pre-Islamic past. Whether they will manage to locate a small structure said to have been built on the same site during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime remains to be seen. Sana’a’s architecture is stunning, like nothing else in Arabia or anywhere else in the world. Its buildings – skyscrapers eight or nine storeys high – were constructed in the tenth century and renovated 600 years later in the same style: lightly baked bricks, decorated with geometric patterns in gypsum and symmetrical stone carvings (wood was unavailable or in short supply). What is missing are the hanging gardens on every floor that gripped the imagination of medieval travellers.[*] The net result of the West’s worries about the AQAP effect is that the US will send $63 million in aid to Yemen this year. A fifth has already been earmarked for weaponry, much of the rest will go to the president and his cronies, and some into the pockets of the military high command. What’s left will be fought over by the bosses of different regions. (The sum doesn’t include the Pentagon’s remittance for counterterrorism, which last year amounted to $67 million.) A Yemeni businessman told me that he’d been taken aback a few years ago when the then prime minister, an apparently respectable and moderate man, demanded a 30 per cent rake-off from a deal he’d been negotiating. Seeing the shock on the businessman’s face, the PM reassured him: 20 per cent of that was for the president. I wondered how serious the threat from AQAP really was. How many members of the organisation were in the country and how many were visitors from the other side of the Saudi border? Abdul Karim al-Eryani, a 75-year-old former prime minister and still an adviser to the president, received me in the large library in the basement of his house. He spoke interestingly and at length about Yemeni history, stressing the continuities between pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures in the region. He complained that the Arabic dialect spoken by the bedouin of Nejd (an area now part of Saudi Arabia) had been the largest single source for the modern Arabic dictionary at the expense of the real root of the language, the dialect used by the Sabeans (who lived in what is now Yemen), 5000 words of which were excluded by the dictionary-makers. Later he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He didn’t speculate on the cause of the infection. But when I asked Eryani to estimate the size of AQAP, his response was a mischievous smile. ‘Three or four hundred?’ I pressed. ‘At the maximum,’ he replied, ‘the very maximum. The Americans exaggerate greatly. We have other problems, real and more important.’ much more from Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books
Ian Welsh on Health Care Reform ...having the Federal government mandate that people buy a private product that costs as much, in many cases, as their tax bill, or the IRS will fine them, sets a bad precedent. Saving a private industry which was in a death spiral (the insurance companies were only maintaining profits by cutting customers) sets a horrible precedent. And refusing to do the right thing, which would have cost less, well, doesn’t set a precedent, but does continue a very tiresome trend of the US being unwilling to do the brain dead simple thing that has worked everywhere else, because its government is captured by moneyed interests. Ian's blog
A false promise of reform The following statement was released today by leaders of Physicians for a National Health Program. Their signatures appear below. As much as we would like to join the celebration of the House's passage of the health bill last night, in good conscience we cannot. We take no comfort in seeing aspirin dispensed for the treatment of cancer. Instead of eliminating the root of the problem - the profit-driven, private health insurance industry - this costly new legislation will enrich and further entrench these firms. The bill would require millions of Americans to buy private insurers' defective products, and turn over to them vast amounts of public money. The hype surrounding the new health bill is belied by the facts: About 23 million people will remain uninsured nine years out. That figure translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering. Millions of middle-income people will be pressured to buy commercial health insurance policies costing up to 9.5 percent of their income but covering an average of only 70 percent of their medical expenses, potentially leaving them vulnerable to financial ruin if they become seriously ill. Many will find such policies too expensive to afford or, if they do buy them, too expensive to use because of the high co-pays and deductibles. Insurance firms will be handed at least $447 billion in taxpayer money to subsidize the purchase of their shoddy products. This money will enhance their financial and political power, and with it their ability to block future reform. People with employer-based coverage will be locked into their plan's limited network of providers, face ever-rising costs and erosion of their health benefits. Many, even most, will eventually face steep taxes on their benefits as the cost of insurance grows. Health care costs will continue to skyrocket, as the experience with the Massachusetts plan (after which this bill is patterned) amply demonstrates. The much-vaunted insurance regulations - e.g. ending denials on the basis of pre-existing conditions - are riddled with loopholes, thanks to the central role that insurers played in crafting the legislation. Older people can be charged up to three times more than their younger counterparts, and large companies with a predominantly female workforce can be charged higher gender-based rates at least until 2017. Women's reproductive rights will be further eroded, thanks to the burdensome segregation of insurance funds for abortion and for all other medical services. It didn't have to be like this. Whatever salutary measures are contained in this bill, e.g. additional funding for community health centers, could have been enacted on a stand-alone basis. Similarly, the expansion of Medicaid - a woefully underfunded program that provides substandard care for the poor - could have been done separately, along with an increase in federal appropriations to upgrade its quality. But instead the Congress and the Obama administration have saddled Americans with an expensive package of onerous individual mandates, new taxes on workers' health plans, countless sweetheart deals with the insurers and Big Pharma, and a perpetuation of the fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable system that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and economy today. This bill's passage reflects political considerations, not sound health policy. As physicians, we cannot accept this inversion of priorities. We seek evidence-based remedies that will truly help our patients, not placebos. more from pnhp.org
Citizen Journalists As regular readers of this blog know, the mainstream media has not been a reliable source of important information for many years now. And while that fact is certainly very discouraging, the task of performing serious journalism has been impressively taken up by concerned citizens across the country, and the world. Some of these citizen journalists have, deservedly, become very well known, and (at least) reasonably well remunerated for their efforts (e.g. Glenn Greenwald). Most, however, are inspired to work for free. Whether such people work tirelessly out of a sense of community action, are catalyzed by outrage, or are spurred by some combination of factors, they are playing crucially important roles. One such journalist is a NY-based lawyer who posts under the pseudonym The Talking Dog. He posts, among his own thoughts, semi-regular interviews with important players in today's most pressing political dramas. He has been particularly well-focused on the torture and Guantanamo issues, and recently posted a superb interview with Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), who is described as follows: [He] spent fourteen years in the U.S. Air Force and is now part of the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He has personally conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised more than 1,000. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his achievement in Iraq, has two advanced degrees, and speaks three languages. He is the co-author of "How to Break A Terroristt: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq" and is credited with having conducted the military interrogations that led directly to the killing of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musad al Zarqawi. Here's a long excerpt (the entire interview can be read by following the link below), and bear in mind that it would be absoluetly impossible to access these extremely important insights were it not for citizen journalists like TTD: The Talking Dog: We seem to have a plethora of t.v. shows demonstrating detectives at their work (the Law and Order franchise, NCIS in the military context, the CSI's and so forth), and yet, you have observed, police officers continue to get suspects to confess despite the prevalence of these programs, just as you managed to get subjects to provide information, despite the presumed familiarity with general methods. Why do you think, despite the success that good old guile and trickery and what I'll call non-coercive methods of persuasion in both law enforcement (real and fictional), and, of course, in your own personal experience, has something as insidious as the purported effectiveness of torture as depicted in "24" managed to sink into the national consciousness, not only of our politicians, but of a huge number of people? I take it you would agree with me that our reputation for engaging in this kind of activity (such as what a number of members of Congress particularly of one party that shall remain nameless have been recently suggesting about the Christmas underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, notwithstanding that he had actually been cooperating with good old law enforcement, he should still have been subjected to "enhanced interrogation" better known as torture) is by far the best recruiting tool our enemies have? Matthew Alexander: First, shows like 24 that show torture are fiction. I’ve been on the set of 24 with Eric Maddox, the interrogator who found Saddam Hussein, to talk to the executive producer and writers about showing interrogations that are exciting and effective instead of torture. In the premier episode of the following season Jack Bauer tortures a suspect and it works. Our expertise fell on deaf ears. Why? Because torture sells. The truth is that torture doesn’t work and the long term negative consequences are dramatic, as we’ve already experienced. Much of the fictional ballyhoo is accepted by the public because they simply are not educated on the art and science of interrogations and unaware of the success we’ve had in the past without torture or abuse. There are legendary interrogators from World War II such as Marine Major Sherwood Moran, TSgt Grant Hirabayashi, The Fort Hunt Interrogators, Colonel Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, and even the German interrogator Hanns Scharff, who all successfully conducted interrogations lawfully. Also, Orrin DeForrest, a contract CIA interrogator in Vietnam, had tremendous success using relationship building approaches and taught the South Vietnamese to quit torturing. It’s disappointing that the American people, wrongly informed by elected officials and others who spread stereotypes about Muslims and absolute falsehoods about interrogations, are not better educated about our rich history of successfully conducting non-coercive interrogations. I plan to change that. The Talking Dog: I understand that your account of your interrogation of the subject you refer to as "Abu Haydar," a very senior figure in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamea" organization whose information led directly to Zarqawi, which you indicate was conducted over an extremely compressed time frame of about 6-8 hours (or what amounted to a "peer to peer" conversation using techniques of respect, trickery and playing to the subject's ego... one certainly is inclined to "compare and contrast" similar egomaniacal figures like KSM...) before he would have been transferred to Abu Ghraib and out of your control, was originally the subject of military censorship, and that you eventually had to obtain a court order to get permission to publish a number of pieces of unclassified information; am I correct that in your view, the reason for the censorship was not to protect any matters of national security, so much as to protect the military from the embarrassment of revealing that it's seemingly preferred method of "fear-up" and "disrespect-based" interrogations, despite having gone on for days if not weeks, just weren't particularly effective? Did you see a political angle in this attempt at censorship? Matthew Alexander: I’m not sure there was a political angle, but certainly there was an attempt by some entity in the Department of Defense to censor my manuscript such that the public would not know that we found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi by using non-coercive techniques. In fact, fear and control based techniques nearly cost us that opportunity. It may be that the unit I worked for in Iraq also did not want it to be known that they nearly transferred the guy who handed us Zarqawi because they refused to accept that there was a better way to interrogate than the methods used by the ‘old school’ interrogators. The Talking Dog: One of the more poignant accounts in your book are of your interrogation of a bomb-maker, who seemed to have joined al-Qaeda not so much for the reasons many did (of trying to protect his family from rampaging Shiite militias unleashed by the American invasion and unchecked by the American occupation), but for money to satisfy the lifestyle demands of his young second wife, and of the case of the completely innocent men, who had the misfortune of owning the same make and model vehicle as a terrorist suspect. Let's start with this one, who you eventually tricked through the brilliant ruse of a fabricated Iraqi legal document. You noted that it was a category error of American mindset-- as confirmed by your attempt to brief a general on the subject-- that members of Al Qaeda in Iraq were all hard-core militants, motivated by the stereotypical ideology of trying to reconstruct the Caliphate, impose Sharia law throughout the former Caliphate and so forth, and could never be swayed out of this ideology-- rather than the harsh realities described earlier in this question (and of course, for other reasons). I believe you have said that in the hundreds of interrogations you did, and over a thousand you monitored, you encountered perhaps one "true believer zealot," and even in that case you found the subject to be potentially malleable if interrogated properly. And so my question on this is: Despite the reality you observed, why was it taken almost as an article of faith that the enemy's motives were purely ideological (if not "comic book" clear) , and do you believe (as I do) that such a belief has actually proven counter-productive at fighting a much more complex and fluid enemy? Matthew Alexander: As I stated earlier, stereotyping our enemies led down a disastrous path in Iraq and significantly harmed our interrogations. It goes back to that old Sun Tzu saying, “Know they self, know they enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” Even some of the Iraqis who joined Al Qaida for social or economic reasons and then adopted the ideology were fairly easy to win back as Iraqis are very secular and tolerant. I actually believe that the most fanatical Al Qaida members are the easiest to interrogate simply because they are driven by emotions (probably how they were recruited) and those emotions can then be used by the interrogator. The Talking Dog: The second, subject I found extremely compelling were an innocent pair of brothers, picked up based on a misidentification of their vehicle. As you know, one of the areas I focus in is American detention policy, particularly related to Guantanamo, from where almost 600 of the nearly 800 men who have passed through there have been released, six or seven have died, and a whopping three have been convicted by military commissions (and of those, one who stood mute during his trial received a life sentence, and the other two men have been released to Australia and Yemen respectively), and even over half of those remaining have been "cleared for release" by the executive and/or judicial branches. My point is that it has become clear that in picking up these men (a tiny number of whom were "captured on the battlefield," and many turned over for bounties by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance) that even had interrogators at Kandahar, Bagram or Guantanamo made a determination as you did in the case of the "BMW brothers" that "hey, we have the wrong guy," there was simply no mechanism at the operational level to make this call of "innocence" (indeed, famously, every Arab who arrived at Bagram was sent on to Guantanamo), notwithstanding how important it would have been culturally and politically to have shown our reasonableness in releasing innocent men and apologizing (and perhaps even compensating them) for wrongfully detaining them. I'm just wondering if you could comment on that situation, and tell me if in your view, the ability to determine that you had, rather than a recalcitrant hostile, an actual "innocent person," was something of an exception (if you like, unique to YOU), or was it somewhat more common than I think it was, or something else entirely? Also-- could you comment on the "adjudication" system in Iraq associated with those you interrogated-- such as, for example, if there were article 5 tribunals in place in Iraq, if you know, the Iraqi justice system, or anything else of relevance to this question (!)? Matthew Alexander: What I can say is that for my last month in Iraq I was on a raid team and conducted interrogations at the point-of-capture (aka in a home, car, street…) and over half the time we raided a house it was the wrong house. I quickly learned that what you do in the wrong house is more important than what you do in the right house. I’d rather let a dozen guilty people go than detain one innocent one because the larger battle isn’t a tactical one – it’s a strategic one based on winning hearts and minds. That’s the nature of counterinsurgency and it’s extremely difficult to get accurate, timely intelligence information. But that’s why we wear the uniform, because we don’t shy away from our duties just because they are difficult. Instead, we have to risk letting guilty people go which may later cost us lives because it helps us in the long run which will ultimately end up saving more lives. The critical node in this process is the commander in the field. They make the decisions on who gets detained or released. They are the ones that must use discretion. read the full interview here
Organic? You sure about that? That faint, “We told you so” ringing in your ears might be coming from the folks at the Cornucopia Institute, the Wisconsin-based watchdog group that has being complaining for years that the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) enforcement of federal organic laws was, to put it kindly, pathetic, clearly favoring industrial operations who bent (or broke) every rule they could to out-compete small, conscientious farmers who hewed to the letter and spirit of organic policy. Guess what. Cornucopia and other organic consumer advocates were right. This week the USDA’s own Office of Inspector General came out with a formal report on the UDSA’s monitoring of its organic program during the Clinton and Bush II years. It couldn’t have been more scathing. The inspector cited 14 areas of major concern, including: – California inspectors are simply not equipped to enforce the organic laws. Bad news for all of us. With 2,000 “organic” farms exporting to every corner of the nation, that state tills the most organic acreage in the country. – In five cases where companies were known to be selling inorganic food illegally under the USDA Organic label, the USDA completely failed to take action on one. The four others took as long as 32 months to resolve, during which time the firms continued to sell mislabeled produce. – Since 1990, organic laws have called for periodic residue testing. None of the regulating agencies the inspector investigated had done any residue testing. The reason? Too expensive. more from Politics of the Plate
Word We have guided missiles and misguided men. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
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