|
|
 |
Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
Our Fault, Too There were hearings on Capitol Hill this week regarding the Gulf oil disaster, and virtually everyone involved - from witnesses to experts to government officials - had a grand old time throwing rocks at British Petroleum. The Obama administration and various government agencies have also been taking it in the teeth over their failure to quell the oil boiling up from the bottom of the sea. Beaches are closing, animals are dying, livelihoods are being destroyed, and unbelievable as it may seem, the worst is yet to come. New reports indicate the well may have been releasing oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez spill every eight to ten days since this whole thing started. BP is taking the lion's share of the beatings, and justly so. They ran a shoddy operation out there on the Deepwater Horizon, and knew even ten years ago that such operations were incredibly risky. They lied and lied again about the scope of the disaster. They have been attempting to limit press access to the disaster zone to keep people from finding out what is actually going on. Their corporate officers have denied the existence of oil plumes beneath the surface, and have held pity-parties for themselves on television over how trying this whole situation is for them. This mess is their fault, and the world knows it. Their stock value has cratered, and even the BP shareholders are beginning to revolt. They are going to be sued for God only knows how much money, and will be saddled with the cost of the clean-up, which may take years. But here is something to remember: it's our fault, too. Yours and mine. more from William Rivers Pitt
BP: Managing the Story When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request. “We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ” Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials. To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP. more from the NY Times and an interesting related story from the CS Monitor about BP "buying" search terms from Google
What drives Israel? Probably the most bewildering aspect of the Gaza flotilla affair has been the righteous indignation expressed by the Israeli government and people. The nature of this response is not being fully reported in the UK press, but it includes official parades celebrating the heroism of the commandos who stormed the ship and demonstrations by schoolchildren giving their unequivocal support for the government against the new wave of anti-Semitism. As someone who was born in Israel and went enthusiastically through the socialisation and indoctrination process until my mid-20s, this reaction is all too familiar. Understanding the root of this furious defensiveness is key to comprehending the principal obstacle for peace in Israel and Palestine. One can best define this barrier as the official and popular Jewish Israeli perception of the political and cultural reality around them. A number of factors explain this phenomenon, but three are outstanding and they are interconnected. They form the mental infrastructure on which life in Israel as a Jewish Zionist individual is based, and one from which it is almost impossible to depart – as I know too well from personal experience. The first and most important assumption is that what used to be historical Palestine is by sacred and irrefutable right the political, cultural and religious possession of the Jewish people represented by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel. Most of the Israelis, politicians and citizens alike, understand that this right can’t be fully realised. But although successive governments were pragmatic enough to accept the need to enter peace negotiations and strive for some sort of territorial compromise, the dream has not been forsaken. Far more important is the conception and representation of any pragmatic policy as an act of ultimate and unprecedented international generosity. Any Palestinian, or for that matter international, dissatisfaction with every deal offered by Israel since 1948, has therefore been seen as insulting ingratitude in the face of an accommodating and enlightened policy of the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Now, imagine that the dissatisfaction is translated into an actual, and sometimes violent, struggle and you begin to understand the righteous fury. As schoolchildren, during military service and later as adult Israeli citizens, the only explanation we received for Arab or Palestinian responses was that our civilised behaviour was being met by barbarism and antagonism of the worst kind. According to the hegemonic narrative in Israel there are two malicious forces at work. The first is the old familiar anti-Semitic impulse of the world at large, an infectious bug that supposedly affects everyone who comes into contact with Jews. According to this narrative, the modern and civilised Jews were rejected by the Palestinians simply because they were Jews; not for instance because they stole land and water up to 1948, expelled half of Palestine’s population in 1948 and imposed a brutal occupation on the West Bank, and lately an inhuman siege on the Gaza Strip. This also explains why military action seems the only resort: since the Palestinians are seen as bent on destroying Israel through some atavistic impulse, the only conceivable way of confronting them is through military might. The second force is also an old-new phenomenon: an Islamic civilisation bent on destroying the Jews as a faith and a nation. Mainstream Israeli orientalists, supported by new conservative academics in the United States, helped to articulate this phobia as a scholarly truth. These fears, of course, cannot be sustained unless they are constantly nourished and manipulated. From this stems the second feature relevant to a better understanding of the Israeli Jewish society. Israel is in a state of denial. more from Ilan Pappe, professor of history at the University of Exeter, in The Herald
About That Blockade... In recent days, coverage of the attack on the aid flotilla headed to the Gaza Strip has focused on the lack of availability of certain humanitarian goods. This fact sheet is a reference tool based on data collected by international aid agencies and human rights groups on the impact of the siege on the population of Gaza. Electricity: The siege has led to a significant lack of power in the Gaza Strip. In 2006, Israel carried out an attack on Gaza's only power plant and never permitted the rebuilding to its pre-attack capacity (down to producing 80 megawatts maximum from 140 megawatts). According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), the daily electricity deficit has increased since January of 2010 with the plant only able to operate one turbine producing only 30 megawatts compared to its previous average of 60-65 megawatts in 2009. The majority of houses have power cuts at least eight hours per day. Some have no electricity for long as 12 hours a day. The lack of electricity has led to reliance on generators, many of which have exploded from overwork, killing and maiming civilians. Oxfam reported that "[in 2009], a total of 75 Palestinians died from carbon monoxide gas poisoning or fires from generators, and 15 died and 27 people were injured in the first two months of this year." Water: Israel has not permitted supplies into the Gaza Strip to rebuild the sewage system. Amnesty International reports that 90-95 percent of the drinking water in Gaza is contaminated and unfit for consumption. The United Nations even found that bottled water in Gaza contained contaminants, likely due to the plastic bottles recycled in dysfunctional factories. The lack of sufficient power for desalination and sewage facilities results in significant amounts of sewage seeping into Gaza's costal aquifer--the main source of water for the people of Gaza. more at ForeignPolicy.com
Why Homeowners Should (and will) Default What we are experiencing is called the global credit crisis for a reason. There is too much debt in the world. More and more economists are talking about the threat of a deflationary crisis ahead. What does this mean for you? Well, if you have a house that is under water, or more debt than you can reasonably hope to repay, your best options may be the unthinkable. But it really should not be unthinkable to default on a loan or even to declare bankruptcy. Don’t stop reading. It is really a good option for many, it is moral, legal and good for the country. It is also become very common. You and your children will look back in a generation with pride. In small amounts, debt is good. Home ownership is only possible for the young with mortgages, and many college degrees are partially supported with student loans. Working capital for growing businesses allow for inventory and distribution expenses. Lenders benefit as well: high interest rates are paid to pensioners on their life savings. When debt exceeds a certain level it becomes a cancer on society. Easy credit fuels speculation which triggers bubbles. These bubbles lead to a temporary lift in apparent wealth, which increases economic activity beyond its sustainable level. But eventually more and more debt triggers economic decline with the inevitable glut of goods produced by an overheated economy. What people are discovering too late is that their debt is not repayable. Ever. They once had a hope they could wait out their bad times. This is true of many homeowners, many businesses and many governmental bodies. The “great unwind” is going to be deflationary. Prices and salaries will decline, jobs will become more scarce, and debt will continue to increase. The earlier you pull the rip cord the better off you will be later. In many states mortgage loans are non-recourse. Never make another mortgage payment. Turn over the keys after foreclosure. You will lose all of your down payment, but the lender can never get another penny from you. Your credit score will fall. But you do not want any more credit. Right? If you are trying to quit crack, how would feel about your pusher reducing your crack score? Stay off credit for a few years, and they will take you back with open arms. There should no longer be any moral question about whether it is wrong to walk away from debt legally. The advent of limited liability corporations and the legal ‘personhood’ of corporate shells have allowed business to create one sided bets for years, and they happily walk away when the tide shifts. This is the calculus of 21st century finance, and you are a bit player in this game. more from Bob Goodwin, via Yves Smith's excellent Naked Capitalism
Israel's Latest Revealing, Brutal, Self-Destructive Blunder By now you'll all have heard about the IDF's unwarranted attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a fleet of six civilian vessels that was attempting to bring humanitarian aid (i.e., medicines, food, and building materials) to Gaza. The population of Gaza has been under a crippling Israeli siege since 2006. Israel imposed the blockade after Gaza's voters had the temerity to prefer Hamas in a free election held at the insistence of the Bush administration, which then refused to recognize the new government because it didn't like the results. Late Sunday night, IDF naval forces and commandos attacked one of the unarmed ships in international waters, killing at least ten of the peace activists and injuring many more. IDF spokesman claim that the use of force was justified because the passengers resisted Israel's efforts to board and commandeer the ship. Other Israeli officials have sought to portray the activists, whose ranks included citizens from fifty countries, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a former U.S. ambassador, and an elderly Holocaust survivor, as terrorist sympathizers with ties to Hamas and even al Qaeda. My first question when I heard the news was: "What could Israel's leaders have been thinking?" How could they possibly believe that a deadly assault against a humanitarian mission in international waters would play to their advantage? Israel's government and its hard-line supporters frequently complain about alleged efforts to "delegitimize" the country, but actions like this are the real reason Israel's standing around the world has plummeted to such low levels. This latest escapade is as bone-headed as the 2006 war in Lebanon (which killed over a thousand Lebanese and caused billions of dollars worth of damage) or the 2008-2009 onslaught that killed some 1300 Gazans, many of them innocent children. None of these actions achieved its strategic objective; indeed, all of them are just more evidence of the steady deterioration in Israel's strategic thinking that we have witnessed since 1967. My second question is: "Will the Obama administration show some backbone on this issue, and go beyond the usual mealy-mouthed statements that U.S. presidents usually make when Israel acts foolishly and dangerously?" President Obama likes to talk a lot about our wonderful American values, and his shiny new National Security Strategy says "we must always seek to uphold these values not just when it is easy, but when it is hard." The same document also talks about a "rule-based international order," and says "America's commitment to the rule of law is fundamental to our efforts to build an international order that is capable of confronting the emerging challenges of the 21st century." more from Stephan Walt and Glenn Greenwald
Why Not Indeed? Why hasn't the government launched a criminal investigation into BP? That's the question several former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials have been asking in the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last month that killed 11 employees and ruptured a newly drilled well 5,000 feet below the surface that has spewed tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf if Mexico. Scott West, the former special agent-in-charge at the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division, who spent more than a year probing allegations that BP committed crimes in connection with a massive oil spill on Alaska's North Slope in 2006, said the company's prior felony and misdemeanor convictions should have immediately "raised red flags" and resulted in a federal criminal investigation. "If the company behind this disaster was Texaco or Chevron I would have likely waited a couple of days before I started to talking to people," West said. "And the reason for that is those corporations do not enjoy the current criminal history that BP does." West, who Truthout profiled in an investigative report last week about the Bush administration's scuttling of West's criminal probe into BP in 2007, was harshly critical of the way the disaster has been handled by the government. He said in an interview that BP and the oil conglomerate's executives are "known as liars" and the fact that the government has treated "and continues" to treat the company with kid gloves is "outrageous." "BP is a convicted serial environmental criminal," West said. "So, where are the criminal investigators? The well head is a crime scene and yet the potential criminals are in charge of that crime scene. Have we learned nothing from this company's past behavior?" more from Jason Leopold at Truthout and much more from Emptywheel
Do as We Say, Etc. A judge granted parole Tuesday to Lori Berenson, the 40-year-old New York activist who has spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons on a conviction of aiding leftist rebels. . . . Berenson had for many years denied any wrongdoing, maintaining she was a political prisoner and not a terrorist. But her defense team said in papers submitted to the judge that she "recognized she committed errors in involving herself in activities of the MRTA" . . . . Berenson was arrested in 1995 and initially accused of being a leader of the MRTA, which bombed banks and kidnapped and killed civilians but was nowhere near as violent as the better-known Shining Path insurgency. It is blamed for, at most, 200 killings. . . . She was convicted of treason by a military court in 1996. But after an intense campaign by her parents. . ., she was retried in a civilian court in 2000. It convicted Berenson of the lesser crime and reduced her sentence to 20 years. . . The U.S. State Department had pushed hard for the civilian trial, saying Berenson was denied due process by the military tribunal. more from Glenn Greenwald
Hypocrite in-Chief Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team." But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely." But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates' ruling. As the NYT put it about that appeal: "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight." Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan). So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind. read Glenn Greenwald's full piece at Salon.com
The Heresy of the Greeks Offers Hope As Britain's political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon, but as a "junk country" getting its comeuppance for its "bloated public sector" and "culture of cutting corners" (the Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House. The crisis that has led to the "rescue" of Greece by the European banks and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the product of a grotesque financial system which itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich. What makes Greece different is that within its living memory is invasion, foreign occupation, betrayal by the West, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labor) government of George Papandreou, was described by the French sociologist Jean Ziegler as "a machine for systematic pillaging the country's resources." The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve Board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs and other American hedge fund operators, which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited 360 billion euros in Swiss banks. The largest Greek shipowners transferred their companies abroad. This hemorrhage of capital continues with the approval of the European central banks and governments. At 11 percent, Greece's deficit is no higher than America's. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the American corporate ratings agencies, which "downgraded" Greece to "junk." These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called subprime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008. What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar, scale. more from John Pilger at Truthout
The More Things Change... You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourself Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans or Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. – Jack London (The Iron Heel, 1908) vie Distant Ocean
The Oil Rush to Hell It took President Obama 24 days to finally get publicly angry and “rip” into BP and its partners for the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. What was he waiting for? The pattern has been obvious enough: however bad you thought it was, or anyone said it was at any given moment, it’s worse (and will get worse yet). Just take the numbers. In the first days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th, reports from the Coast Guard and BP indicated that no oil was leaking into the Gulf from the damaged well. Then, the oil giant reported that, actually, about 1,000 barrels a day were coming out of it. Almost immediately the federal government raised that figure to 5,000 barrels, which remained the generally accepted estimate until, under pressure, BP finally released a dramatic 30-second clip of the actual leak at the wellhead. By then, according to ABC News, both the company and the White House had had access to the video for three weeks and obviously knew that the gold-standard estimate was wrong by a country mile. Since then, estimates by scientists viewing the video clip (who have been prevented by BP from visiting the site itself, looking at more material, or taking more accurate measurements), run from 25,000 barrels to a staggering 70,000 barrels a day or more -- up to, that is, 3.4 million gallons of oil daily, which would mean an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every few days. The BP disaster in the Gulf may prove historic in the worst sense -- especially since much of its damage still remains out of sight, hidden below the surface of the Gulf’s waters in what already are gigantic plumes of oil in the water column going down 4,000 feet that threaten to rob Gulf waters of oxygen and create vast dead zones in areas previously rich in sea life. Simply put, this is scary stuff, environmental damage on a scale we don’t normally contemplate. And it’s probably just a start, given that whatever news story comes next only seems to have more of the same -- including the fact that the Obama administration’s Interior Department followed in the infamous footsteps of the Bush administration. In 2009, it “exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis.” (And, of course, mere weeks before the explosion, the president was urging yet more deep-water off-shore drilling and reassuring Americans that it wasn’t terribly dangerous, while less than two weeks before its oil rig blew, BP was vigorously lobbying to expand its exemptions.) At TomDispatch, Michael Klare, author of the invaluable Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, has been warning for years that the easy oil and natural gas energy reserves on Planet Earth are quickly disappearing and that we’re entering a “tough oil” era. Thanks to the depletion of other crucial natural resources as well, the century to come is likely to prove more extreme in many ways, including the climate. read Michael Klare's piece at tomdispatch.com
Is BP Criminally Negligent? Several weeks before the Gulf oil explosion, a key piece of safety equipment - the blowout preventer - was damaged. As the Times of London reports: Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, and one of the last workers to leave the doomed rig] claimed that the blowout preventer was then damaged when a crewman accidentally moved a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force. Pieces of rubber were found in the drilling fluid, which he said implied damage to a crucial seal. But a supervisor declared the find to be “not a big deal”, Mr Williams alleged. Bea also said that - despite the damage - BP ordered the rig operator to ignore an even more critical safety measure. Specifically, BP ordered the rig operator to remove the "drilling mud" - a heavy liquid used to keep oil and gas from escaping - before the well was sealed. According to Bea, the accident would not have occurred had drilling mud been used. much more from GWB
The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. – BP CEO Tony Hayward
Might the U.S. Listen to One Who Knows? Akbar Ganji, the celebrated Iranian journalist and former political prisoner who will be honored with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Liberty Prize for 2010 Thursday, spoke at the National Press Club here Monday, and, while he didn’t break any especially new ground, it’s worth noting a few things that he said about his views of the implications of policy options the U.S. faces vis-a-vis Tehran in the coming months. First, he stressed, “democracy and human rights have taken root in Iran” despite the actions of increasingly arbitrary and iron-fisted rule of the current regime. “A military attack (on Iran) would destroy all of that,” he declared. The Green Movement, which Ganji obviously supports, would “melt away” if such an attack took place. In that context, he noted that the Bush administration’s military threats against Iran made it impossible for the Green Movement to emerge. But “the mere fact that Obama didn’t make military threats made the Green Movement possible,” Ganji said. With respect to economic sanctions, Ganji noted that the Green Movement consists mostly of middle-class adherents and that “economic sanctions would destroy the middle class (and) … the Green Movement.” In any event, he went on, “the more economic sanctions are applied against Iran, the more the government will control the economy” due to the prevailing structures. more from Jim Lobe
Business As Usual Everything you need to know to understand just how ridiculous our American approach to the interaction between government and industry has become is contained in this exchange: It's from the Coast Guard's hearing on the oil spill that was held on Tuesday. The USCG's Captain Hung Nguyen asked about the blowout preventer that was supposed to, you know, prevent the blowout, "It's my understanding that it's designed to industry standard and it's manufactured by the industry, installed by the industry, with no government witnessing or oversight of the construction or installation. Is that correct?" To which Michael Saucier of the disgraced Minerals Management Service responded, "That is correct." You got that? The very thing that's supposed to prevent, say, a massive, environment-despoiling, economy-wrecking incident was not subject to any government oversight. more appropriate upbraiding from the Rude Pundit (note: don't follow the link if naughty words offend you more than the systemically corrupt connection between American business and politics)
Priorites, Priorities... The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It spent $152 million on the the Columbia disaster investigation. It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission. And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis? Just $8 million. You can tell alot about the questions which the government is truly interested in finding answers to by the amount of money it authorizes for the various investigations.
The (Unfortunate) Kagan Nomination The most important point to note about Kagan now is the one highlighted this weekend by Talk Left's Armando, as first reported by The Los Angeles Times: in 1995, Kagan condemned the Supreme Court confirmation process as "a vapid and hollow charade" and an "embarrassment," arguing that Senators should "insist that any nominee reveal what kind of Justice she would make, by disclosing her views on important legal issues." Kagan should absolutely be held to her own position in that regard. Her argument that nominees should be compelled to answer such questions was absolutely right, and that's especially applicable to Kagan in light of her own glaring lack of a real record on virtually everything. She ought to be held to her own position and "reveal what kind of Justice she would make" and "disclose her views on important legal issues." I'm certainly willing to listen if she does that and then make a rational assessment of her based on those answers. Anyone wanting to form a rational choice should demand that she do the same. much more from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and from Firedoglake
Postcard from Tehran TEHRAN—Memo to Secretary Clinton: Iran is neither a military dictatorship nor or a police state. Yet. There is no visible military presence at the international airport, where despite a European ban on flights to and from its capitals in mid-April when I arrived, jumbo jets discharged and loaded thousands of passengers a day arriving and leaving for points east and west. Tehran's sleek and bustling Imam Khomeini international airport reminded one that an Icelandic volcano had temporarily managed to do to Europe what no American administration has succeeded in doing to Iran: isolating it -- though not for lack of effort. There is also no visible military presence in the sprawling city of some 12 million souls and at times it seems an equal number of cars -- save for the occasional hapless-looking, newly shorn, and unarmed young army conscript in fatigues, begging a ride on the back of a motorcycle or in a shared taxi, a presence that has always been visible in any city in Iran, even in days of the monarchy. The mind-numbing traffic congestion, complete gridlock, on the newly transformed one-way Valiasr Avenue, the broad boulevard that runs from the south of the city all the way to the foothills in the north, the Sunset Boulevard of Tehran and the scene of many past marches and demonstrations in support of the Green Movement that sprang up after last year's disputed election, is as it always was. Drivers -- men, and often mal-veiled and heavily made-up women -- listen to loud pop music of the sort frowned upon by religious authorities, just as they always did, ignoring traffic laws and even the entreaties of the occasional traffic cop. The restaurants and cafes are bustling; weekly, and sometimes nightly, salons at the homes and offices of the elite continue unabated in a city where public entertainment is limited, the conversations usually fearlessly political in nature. Taxi drivers, reliable barometers for the average Iranian as they include everyone from professional working class drivers to the highly educated unemployed, and moonlighting office workers, continue to offer wisdom on everything from the political situation to social ills and the state of the economy. more from Hooman Majd at Foreign Policy
Auditing the Fed Yesterday I received a short email from an apparent Senate staffer. I don't know if the email is legit. It came from a personal account, but contained enough detail for me to judge the substance worthy of at least passing along. The emailer said that his office has been pressured to oppose the Fed audit to a degree that his boss considers unprecedented and highly inappropriate. I'll see if I can get more details and/or permission to repost the email. I know this blog has a good number of congressional staffers as readers, so maybe there are others with similar experiences to report. But the question is unavoidable now: why the frantic desperation about a bit of important but otherwise arcane, innocuous GAO oversight? What must be concealed at all costs? One of the reasons the proposed audit is so interesting is the overt reaction it has prompted from some powerful interests that have always preferred the shadows and depended on secrecy. These interests have long been able to count on proxies in Washington to keep them in those shadows and to perpetuate that secrecy. more from The Cunning Realist
The F Word BILL MOYERS: What did you think of the President's speech late this week? WILLIAM K. BLACK It's a good speech. He's a very good spokesman for his causes. I don't think substantively the measures are going to prevent a future crisis. And I was disappointed that he wasn't willing to be blunt. He used a number of euphemisms, but he was unwilling to use the F word. BILL MOYERS: The F word? WILLIAM K. BLACK The F word's fraud in this. And it's the word that explains why we have these recurrent, intensifying crisis. BILL MOYERS: How is that? What do you mean when you say fraud is at the center of it? WILLIAM K. BLACK Well, first, when you deregulate or never regulate, mortgage bankers were never regulated, you effectively have decriminalized that industry, because only the regulators can serve as the sherpas, that the FBI and the prosecutors need to be able to understand and prosecute these kind of complex frauds. They can do one or two or maybe three on their own, but when an entire industry is beset by wide scale fraud, you have to have the regulators. And the regulators were the problem. They became a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, because they, President Bush appointed people who hated regulation. I call them the anti-regulators. And that's what they were. BILL MOYERS: This hearing that, where you testified this week, looking into the bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, had something on this. TIMOTHY GEITHNER: And tragically, when we saw firms manage themselves to the edge of failure, the government had exceptionally limited authority to step in and to protect the economy from those failures. BEN BERNANKE: In September 2008, no government agency had sufficient authority to compel Lehman to operate in a safe and sound manner and in a way that did not pose dangers to the broader financial system. ANTON VALUKAS: What is clear is that the regulators were not fully engaged and did not direct Lehman to alter the conduct which we now know in retrospect led to Lehman's ruin. BILL MOYERS: The regulators were not fully engaged. I mean, this is an old story. We all know about regulatory capture where the regulated take control of the regulators. WILLIAM K. BLACK Yeah, but this one is far worse. That's not very candid testimony on anybody's part there. The Fed had unique authority. And it had it since 1994 to regulate every single mortgage lender in America. And you might think the Fed would use that authority. And you might especially think that, if you knew that Gramlich, one of the Fed members, went personally to Alan Greenspan and said, there's a housing bubble. And there's a terrible crisis in non-prime. We need to send the examiners in. We need to use our regulatory authority. And Greenspan refused. Lehman was brought down primarily by selling liar's loans. It was the biggest seller of liar's loans in the world. And when we look at these liar's loans, we find 90 percent fraud. 90 percent. And we find that most of the frauds are not induced by the borrower, but they're overwhelmingly done by the loan brokers. BILL MOYERS: And liar's loans are? WILLIAM K. BLACK A liar's loan is we don't get any verified information from you about your income, your employment, your job history or your assets. BILL MOYERS: You give me a loan, no questions asked? WILLIAM K. BLACK No real questions asked. Certainly no answers checked. In fact, we just had hearings last week about WaMu, which is also a huge player-- BILL MOYERS: Washington Mutual-- WILLIAM K. BLACK --in these frauds. Washington Mutual, which used to make, run all those ads making fun of bankers who, because they were stuffy and looked at loan quality before they made a loan. Well, WaMu didn't do any of that stuff. And of course, WaMu had just massive failures. And who got in trouble at WaMu? Who got in trouble at Lehman? You got in trouble if you told the truth. They fired the people who found the problems. They promoted the people that caused the problem, and they gave them massive bonuses. BILL MOYERS: I watched the testimony where you were present the other day in the Lehman hearings. And there was a very moving moment with a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers who had gone and tried to blow the whistle, who tried to get people to pay attention to what was going on. Take a look. MATTHEW LEE: I hand-delivered my letter to the four addressees and I'll give a quick timeline of what happened, May 16th was a Friday, on the Monday I sat down with the chief risk officer and discussed the letter, on the Wednesday I sat down with the general counsel and the head of internal audit, discussed the letter. On the Thursday I was on a conference call to Brazil. Somebody came into my office, pulled me out, and fired me on the spot with out any notification. I stayed, sorry. BILL MOYERS: Matthew Lee, vice-president of Lehman Brothers, fired because he tried to blow the whistle. What does that say to you? WILLIAM K. BLACK Well, it tells me that they were covering up the frauds, that they knew about the frauds and that they were desperate to prevent other people from learning. BILL MOYERS: Matthew Lee told the accounting firm Ernst & Young what was going on. Isn't the accounting firm supposed to report this, once they learn from somebody like him that there's fraud going on? WILLIAM K. BLACK Yes, they're supposed to be the most important gatekeeper. They're supposed to be independent. They're supposed to be ultra-professional. But they have an enormous problem, and it's compensation. And that is, the way you rise to power within one of these big four accounting firms is by being a rainmaker, bringing in the big clients. And so, every single one of these major frauds we call control frauds in the financial sphere has been-- their weapon of choice has been accounting. And every single one, for many years, was able to get what we call clean opinions from one of the most prestigious audit firms in the world, while they were massively fraudulent and deeply insolvent. read the rest of the transcript, or watch Bill Moyer's interview of William Black
Israel's Big and Small Apartheids Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state. That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little. I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit. So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently. First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship. A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why? Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel. This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians. That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” more from Jonathan Cook
Crude A disastrous oil spill: The threat of a major oil spill off the coast of Louisiana grew significantly Saturday as a leak was discovered in the oil well that was the site last week of a catastrophic accident that sank a huge drilling rig and likely killed 11 workers. And the White House response? "I would hope it would serve as another wake-up call on this issue that there is no such thing as safe oil drilling," said Sara Wan, a member of the California Coastal Commission, a state regulatory agency. "Once that oil starts leaking in the ocean, that damage is irreversible. You just look at what happened with Exxon-Valdez — they're still feeling the effects of it. There's no real way to clean it up." Obama showed no sign of budging Friday. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president still believes increasing domestic oil production can be done safely, securely and without harming the environment. "I don't honestly think it opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last," Gibbs said. In all honesty, we're all going to die, so why fund biomedical research? In all honesty, the Sun will go red giant in 5 billion years, so why even try to address environmental issues? The worst part about the president's off-shore oil drilling policy isn't the potential oil spills. And it's not something that can be excused as some grand strategic political gambit. It's the message: that continuing to search for and drill for more oil should be part of our long-term energy strategy. It would be nice if we could act as if climate change is a crisis. Because it is. In a time of crisis, you don't continue to promote that which is causing the crisis. You teach people how it is causing the crisis and why we have to stop it. You change the very nature of the conversation. You use the science. You use every political skill and opportunity you have. You teach people that we have to change the nature of our behavior. You teach people that we have to change the nature of our economy. You teach people that we don't have time to waste. This is a time for transformational change. As if we are in a crisis. Because we are. It would be nice if we had someone to carry that message. A leader, or something. In all honesty.
More politics? click here! •••
|
|
books
daily reads
film
favorite posts pinter on politicians' language
music
art
archives
|
| ©2005 Tony. All rights reserved. | Website
designed by JSVisuals.com |
