Archive for November, 2009

The Stupid Virus

When a lab-monkey declares that President Obama wasn’t born in America, he becomes Patient Zero for a new brand of fear-based news virus – Fearus Ignoramus. We watch as the virus goes ear-borne, spreading from Rush Limbaugh to CNN to the mainstream-media to the general public. America devolves into panic, convinced its President is an illegal alien anti-Christ.

The Stupid Virus // Current.

OPS:  Something to share with your wingnuts

Rich Buying Again, But Middle Class Still Hurting

American shoppers are splitting again: The affluent are finally starting to buy, picking up designer clothes at places like Nordstrom, while those on the lower economic rungs are still scrimping by, heading to Walmart for the basics.

Recent earnings reports from major retailers suggest that the wealthy, who pulled back their spending the hardest during the financial meltdown last fall, are once again being enticed to open their wallets and going back to higher-end outlets.

“It’s a good sign, but we don’t see the same across the board,” said Richard Hastings, a consumer strategist with Global Hunter Securities LLC.

It’s still a far cry from the era of conspicuous consumption. No matter the tax bracket, people are still focused on value and trying to avoid overspending – whatever that might mean to them.

Luxury chains like Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale’s, owned by Macy’s Inc., say shoppers are spending again on items like shoes and dresses, but still shopping for lower prices and classic pieces that get a lot of use.

Full Story Rich Buying Again, But Middle Class Still Hurting.

Utah becomes a battleground in the GOP’s civil war

Sen. Robert Bennett is under fire from those in the party who find him insufficiently conservative. His battle may be a reflection of an anti-establishment anger that could affect both parties.

Reporting from Salt Lake City – Utah has emerged as an improbable battleground in the fight for the future of the GOP, as the party’s veteran U.S. senator — with nary a whiff of personal or political scandal — has become one of the most threatened lawmakers up for reelection next year.

Robert F. Bennett is no Northeast liberal. Raised in Salt Lake City, he built a business, manufacturing day-planners, that made him wealthy. His grandfather was a president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His father served four Senate terms — meaning that, combined with Bennett’s own three terms, father and son have held the seat for the better part of 60 years.

Full Story Utah becomes a battleground in the GOP’s civil war — latimes.com.

Spitzer: We Are Going Through “A Regulatory Charade”

Eliot Spitzer Talks Financial And Personal Crisis In BBC Interview (AUDIO)

In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC’s Carrie Gracie, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer discusses crashes — both personal and financial.

After eighteen months out of the spotlight, following his resignation amid a sex scandal, Spitzer is once again engaging in public discourse about the origins of the financial collapse. During his tenure as New York State Attorney General, Spitzer gained a reputation as a foil to Wall Street.

“It is very difficult to have watched this story unfold,” Spitzer told Gracie, referring to the economic crisis. “It was during the decade of financial excess that I…played a significant role in trying to highlight the failures that ultimately metastasized to bring down an entire financial system.”

Spitzer also discusses his personal trials and the plight of his wife and family.

Click below to listen to the interview.

Full Story Eliot Spitzer Talks Financial And Personal Crisis In BBC Interview (AUDIO).

Juan Cole: The Only Anchor

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that some top al-Qaeda 9/11 conspirators will be tried by jury in New York not far from the scenes of devastation that they had wrought.

This decision by the Obama administration demonstrates faith in the American way of life, and a conviction that even the worst mass murderers can be dealt justice by democratic institutions.

Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution. In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned. Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago.

Let us listen not to John Boehner of Ohio but to a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson:

‘ “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269 ‘

Or here is John Adams:

Full Story The Only Anchor | CommonDreams.org.

Twenty Years From Now, You Will Lie To Your Children

Take a look at a video of George W. Bush speaking to the nation five or six years ago.

Like a pop single from 1962 (or 2002, for that matter), it didn’t age very well.

It’s astonishing that this transparently frightened man was the leader of the free world for eight years, and was given so much license to commit so much destruction.

But, then, nothing seems to define our era quite so much as license.

We give ourselves license to incur fantastic levels of national debt, and hand the bill to the next generation.

We give ourselves license to invade other countries on the most patently bogus of pretexts, bringing disaster upon them and us.

Or at least some of us, that is, because we also give ourselves license to allow a tiny fraction of the population to carry the entire national security burden for all the rest of us.

Full Story Twenty Years From Now, You Will Lie To Your Children | CommonDreams.org.

Climate Rage

NAOMI KLEIN, Rolling Stone
The only way to stop global warming is for rich nations to pay for the damage they’ve done – or face the consequences

Full Story Climate Rage : Rolling Stone.

Insurance exchange may have loophole

‘A leak in the system’

Insurers could draw healthy people out of new markets

Nobody wants to spend a lot of time, energy — and taxpayer money — and end up back where they started. But that’s what could happen with one of the principal elements of health reform, the so-called exchange or gateway.

Legislators are designing this new insurance marketplace to protect consumers from many of the pitfalls and inequities in the current system. But even as they focus on the details of how the marketplace will work, senators have indicated that they would allow insurers to continue operating outside it, much as the health-insurance lobby has sought.

One of the Senate bills would preserve the possibility that insurers could tailor policies to draw healthy individuals out of the new markets, leaving coverage less affordable for those who stay behind.

“It’s a leak in the system,” said Karen L. Pollitz, a professor at Georgetown’s Health Policy Institute. “It returns you to problems that we have today.”

Full Story Insurance exchange may have loophole – washingtonpost.com.

US commerce secretary: Trade pacts must wait

Trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama won’t be put before Congress until it grapples first with President Barack Obama’s pressing legislative goals, the U.S. commerce secretary said Friday.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said Obama has an ambitious high-priority legislative agenda focusing on health care, financial regulation and alternative energy.

“Trade agreements are going to have to wait,” he said at a luncheon hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore. “Right now, the administration is focused on a very aggressive and very tight legislative agenda.”

The lack of progress on a trade agreement likely will be a sore point during Obama’s stop in Seoul next week during an eight-day trip to Asia that began Thursday in Japan and will also take him to Singapore and China.

Full Story US commerce secretary: Trade pacts must wait: Associated Press Business News – MSN Money.

Boxer: Senate Has Votes To Block Stupak Amendment

One of Congress’s foremost champions of abortion rights said on Monday that the Senate did not have the votes to add a more restrictive anti-abortion amendment to health care reform legislation.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said that 60 votes would be needed to strip the current health care bill of its abortion-related language and replace it with a version resembling that passed by the House of Representatives on Saturday. And, in an interview with the Huffington Post, the California Democrat predicted that pro-choice forces in the Senate would keep that from happening.

“If someone wants to offer this very radical amendment, which would really tear apart [a decades-long] compromise, then I think at that point they would need to have 60 votes to do it,” Boxer said. “And I believe in our Senate we can hold it.”

“It is a much more pro-choice Senate than it has been in a long time,” she added. “And it is much more pro-choice than the House.”

Full Story Boxer: Senate Has Votes To Block Stupak Amendment.

Dick Cheney lied about 9/11

‘The Ground Truth – The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11,’

by John Farmer – NY Times Book Review -

When Sept. 11, 2001, dawned, the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., went on full alert — to prepare for a training exercise that envisioned a sneak attack by Russian planes flying over the North Pole to bomb the United States, a prospect that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had dismissed as outdated in 1966. Later that morning, after American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 had hit the World Trade Center and American Airlines Flight 77 the Pentagon, three F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base to form a combat air patrol over Washington. But degraded radio transmission quality meant that the pilots were left clueless about the nature of their mission. On seeing the Pentagon in flames, the lead fighter pilot later explained, “I reverted to the Russian threat. . . . I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know, you look down and see the Pentagon burning, and I thought the bastards snuck one by us. . . . You couldn’t see any airplanes, and no one told us anything.”

For all the trillions of dollars lavished on it, for all the talk about confronting new security threats, for all the exhortations to reinvent government, America’s defense establishment, as John Farmer reminds us in “The Ground Truth,” continued to fight the cold war more than a decade after it had ended. Preoccupied with building a costly missile defense system to counter a spurious menace from Russia and with maintaining “full spectrum dominance” over the rest of the globe, most Bush administration officials blithely ignored the danger emanating from the caves of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his acolytes plotted against America. Confronted by a small group of mostly Saudi nationals armed with box cutters, the central nervous system of the country’s defense agencies went into a state of cataleptic shock. The only decisive action taken on 9/11 came not from the military, but from the courageous passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, leading the hijackers to crash the plane over Pennsylvania farmland before it could reach its intended target in Washington.

Full Story Book Review – ‘The Ground Truth – The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11,’ by John Farmer – Review – NYTimes.com.

Israeli ‘portable pain ray’ raises fears of non-lethal weapons proliferation | Raw Story

‘Torture at the touch of a button’

Israeli researchers have developed a portable device that causes excruciating sensations of burning and can be built for just $250,000, raising fears that even the world’s poorest, most oppressive governments will now be able to use advanced non-lethal weapons on their civilian populations.

The Man-Portable Active Denial System, developed by researchers at the College of Judea and Samaria, can beam a microwave ray that causes skin surface to heat up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the nerve cells in the skin to think they’re on fire.

In tests of a similar project by the US military, “nobody [was] able to stay in the beam for more than a few seconds,” writes David Hambling at Wired.com.

Reports of the US military developing a burn ray have been around for some time, but the US’s Active Denial System is a nine-ton machine that has not yet come out of testing, for technical and political reasons, Hambling reports.

Full Story Israeli ‘portable pain ray’ raises fears of non-lethal weapons proliferation | Raw Story.

Republicans Are Shocked The Public Is Mad At Them For Voting Against Franken’s Anti-Rape Amendment

Last month, 30 Republican senators voted against Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) amendment that would punish defense contractors “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” His amendment was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad in 2005, and then had to fight her employer for justice.

The GOP senators who sided with defense contractors at the expense of women — such as John Thune (SD) — have been facing an intense backlash. David Vitter (LA) refused to give a rape victim a straight answer when she confronted him about his vote, claiming that he is “absolutely supportive of any [rape] case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.”

Politico reports that Republicans are now scratching their heads at why the public is so incensed about their “no” votes:

Privately, GOP sources acknowledge that they failed to anticipate the political consequences of a “no” vote on the amendment. And several aides said that Republicans are engaged in an internal blame game about why they agreed to a roll-call vote on the measure, rather than a simple voice vote that would have allowed the opposing senators to duck criticism.

Full Story Think Progress » Republicans Are Shocked The Public Is Mad At Them For Voting Against Franken’s Anti-Rape Amendment.

OPS: …proving yet again that Republicans in  Washington are sociopathic  and utterly out of touch with the American People, and reality

Casey Hints He Will Oppose The Stupak Amendment

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is reporting that Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), a pro-life leader in the Senate, will likely oppose the Stupak abortion amendment. Casey’s office issued a press statement clarifying that the Senator supports preserving the status quo on abortion coverage:

Senator Casey has been a vocal supporter of health care reform and voted for the HELP Committee bill in July. He supports the public option to increase competition and reduce costs. And he is offering amendments to improve health care for children. Senator Casey thinks that health care reform should not be used to change longstanding policies regarding federal financing of abortion which has been in place since 1976.

He continues to work with his colleagues in the Senate and with the White House to ensure that the Senate health care reform bill protects existing federal and state conscience protections, existing state abortion laws and contains strong language to prohibit federal funds from being used to fund abortions. He voted for amendments in the HELP Committee that would maintain neutrality on abortion. Until Senate bill language is released it is premature to discuss next steps.

Full Story Think Progress » Casey Hints He Will Oppose The Stupak Amendment.

‘Death Panels’ Hypocrisy: RNC Health Insurance Provider Promotes End-Of-Life Counseling

Over the summer, one of the GOP’s loudest complaints against health care legislation was a provision offering senior citizens Medicare reimbursement for end-of-life counseling. Republicans claimed it would create so-called “death panels” or urge seniors citizens to die. RNC Chairman Michael Steele “endorsed this type of rhetoric, and on July 28, the RNC put out research document claiming that the government would “dictate” Americans’ “end-of-life care.”

But ThinkProgress has noticed that Cigna, the RNC’s health insurance provider, also urges beneficiaries to think about end-of-life services. Cigna’s website has a page called “Care at the End of Life,” which covers topics such as how to talk with “loved ones” about “end-of-life choices” and whether to stop life-prolonging treatment:

It’s unclear whether the RNC’s insurance plan covers these end-of-life consultations, and neither Cigna nor the RNC replied to inquiries from ThinkProgress. But nevertheless, the RNC’s insurance provider has posted information on its website advising beneficiaries about the complicated questions that accompany decisions at the end of someone’s life.

There is nothing objectionable about this planning, which has been endorsed by Democrats, Republicans like Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), and the AARP. But this type of advice is exactly what the GOP fear-mongered about this summer. As FactCheck.org explained:

Full Story Think Progress » ‘Death Panels’ Hypocrisy: RNC Health Insurance Provider Promotes End-Of-Life Counseling.

The Board Of The ‘Voice Of Business’ Is A Republican Money Machine

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which purports to be “the voice of business,” is run by a Republican money machine. As the nation’s largest lobbying shop, the Chamber is spending millions of dollars from its corporate members against President Obama’s progressive agenda of health care, energy, and financial reform. The Chamber claims that the “board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself,” but this is false. A ThinkProgress analysis of federal election contribution data compiled by the LittleSis project has found that the Chamber’s 116-member board of directors has given more than six times as much money to Republican candidates and committees ($4,741,747) as it has to Democrats ($778,282), with $1,074,697 flowing to corporate political action committees:

CoC Board Members Contributions

Source: Center for American Progress Action Fund, from Federal Election Commission data compiled by the LittleSis project of the Public Accountability Initiative.

The top beneficiary of this outpouring of conservative cash is the Republican National Committee, which has received over ten times as much money from the Chamber’s board as the Democratic National Committee — $1,257,201 versus $102,950. Contributions went 4.5 to 1 for John McCain ($373,150) versus Barack Obama ($82,150).

Of the board’s 116 members, 96 have made major political contributions. Sixty-eight directly contributed to the campaigns of George W. Bush or John McCain. In contrast, only 27 gave to the campaigns of Al Gore, John Kerry, or Barack Obama. Forty-seven board members, including Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue, have contributed more than 90 percent to Republicans, averaging $86,478. Only seven members have contributed more than 90 percent to Democrats, averaging $9,120.

Full Story Think Progress » The Board Of The ‘Voice Of Business’ Is A Republican Money Machine.

Authoritative Rejection of Afghanistan War

By David Swanson

The current U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl W. Eikenberry, who was top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, has told President Obama he opposes sending more troops.

The last time I was on Laura Flanders’s GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest — some Washington, D.C., “progressive” — argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn’t know anything about Afghanistan.

When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don’t know any better.

When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.

Let’s set aside for a moment the ludicrous propaganda that maintains that the reason we occupy other people’s countries is to impose democracy on them. Let’s assume we’re imposing the rule of elite experts. Even so, even on those terms, here are some possible responses to this line of thinking.

Full Story OpEdNews – Article: Authoritative Rejection of Afghanistan War.

Ending the Outflow of Cash in the U.S.

The United States cannot be productive and prosperous if it bleeds cash overseas every month on imports.

Wall Street took a downward turn yesterday as each index dropped nearly 1 percent by the 4 p.m. close. The S&P 500 led the way shedding 1.03 percent (11.27 points), followed closely by the Dow which lost 0.91 percent (93.79 points), and the NASDAQ which toppled 0.83 percent (17.88 points).

Analysts with CNNMoney.com expected to see gains in the morning session. The investor worries which caused markets to slump yesterday may be encouraged by productive trading overseas and an overall sense of optimism in the economy led by strong corporate earnings.

Unfortunately, markets could be stymied a bit by news that this nation’s trade deficit grew rapidly during the past month. According to Bloomberg News the monthly trade deficit in September 2009 increased by more than 18 percent – the largest September gap since 1999. This past September the American economy imported a full $36.5 billion more than it exported.

Full Story Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Air Force Urged to Consider WTO Ruling

A wide variety of groups are urging the Pentagon to consider a recent WTO ruling that found Boeing’s top competitors for a lucrative Air Force contract was illegally subsidized by the E.U.

A wide variety of groups, representing an array of interests and ideologies, are urging the Pentagon to consider a recent World Trade Organization ruling that found Boeing’s top competitors for a lucrative Air Force contract was illegally subsidized by the European Union.

The WTO in September reportedly issued a preliminary ruling that found that “launch aid” loans provided to Airbus for the development of a refueling tanker it planned to use to bid on an Air Force contract amount to illegal subsidies. Airbus reportedly received $5.7 billion in loans, which have a cap on royalties.

“The United States has always maintained that the European governments have provided unfair subsidies to Airbus that harm U.S. interests,” Deborah Mesloh, deputy assistant U.S. trade representative in Washington, said at the time, according to the Associated Press.

Full Story Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

OPS: It’s time we walked away from the WTO. Just WALK.

Trade deficit threatens a double-dip recession, economic Armageddon

Left to fester much longer, the trade deficit could cause an economic Armageddon reminiscent of the Great Depression.

Today, the Commerce Department will report September international trade in goods and services. The trade deficit — the amount imports exceed exports — is expected to rise to $32.5 billion from $30.7 billion in August.

The trade deficit was a principal cause of the Great Recession. Now, it threatens to torpedo the economic recovery and keep unemployment above 10 percent for the foreseeable future.

More than anything else, U.S. businesses need customers — more sales of U.S.-made goods and services — to get the economy rolling and hire more Americans.

The deficits on oil and trade with China account for nearly the entire U.S. trade imbalance, and money spent on imported gasoline and Chinese coffeemakers can’t be spent on American-made products, unless offset by exports.

At 2.7 percent of GDP, the trade deficit subtracts more from the demand for U.S.-made goods and services than President Obama’s stimulus package adds.

Obama’s stimulus is temporary, whereas the trade deficit is permanent. Moreover, the trade deficit will increase, because oil prices will rise and imports of Chinese consumer goods will climb as the global and U.S. economies expand in 2010.

When imports substantially exceed exports, Americans must consume much more than the incomes they earn producing goods and services, or the demand for what they make is inadequate, inventories pile up, layoffs result, and the economy goes into recession.

Full Story Trade deficit threatens a double-dip recession, economic Armageddon.

The Right’s textbook “surrender to terrorists”

By Glenn Greenwald,  Salon.com

“We’re too scared to have real trials in our country” is a level of cowardice unmatched in the world.

Understanding and Combatting T

errorism, USMC Major S.M. Grass, 1989:

Terrorism is a psychological weapon and is directed to create a general climate of fear. As one definition cogently notes, “terror is a natural phenomenon, terrorism is the conscious exploitation of it.” Terrorism utilizes violence to coerce governments and their people by inducing fear.

William Josiger, Fear Factor: The Impact of Terrorism on Public Opinion in the United States and Great Britain, 2006:

At its heart terrorism is about fear. While terrorist attacks destroy, maim and kill, the intended audience for these attacks is almost always the whole body politic and the terrorist’s goal is to strike fear into their hearts.

GOP House Leader John Boehner, condemning Obama’s decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial, yesterday:

The Obama Administration’s irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people.

Full Story Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Whose Team Is It, Anyway?

In the wake of the passage by Democrats of a radical anti-abortion measure, Democratic women are asking, “Whose party is this?”

Subject to Debate

You know what I don’t want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it’s the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. “If you want to rebuild the American welfare state,” Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, “there is no alternative” than for Democrats to abandon “cultural” issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice “progressive” Christians, men: why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

President Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination’s tax exemption. The Catholic Church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn’t even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don’t want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women’s abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don’t want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

Full Story Whose Team Is It, Anyway?.

The Relentless War on Drug Users Is Escalating Violence in the US: It’s Time for Harm Reduction

Hundreds gather in Albuquerque to celebrate a new dawn of wider acceptance of drug reform, while still feeling a little nervous about the path ahead.

Ethan Nadelmann is one of a handful of marvelously charismatic and motivating speakers within the liberal and progressive universe. He talks creatively and emphatically about race, class, gender, corruption, power, human rights, immigration and the devastating impact of prison-industrial complex on all aspects of society, all progressive touchstones. Yet relatively few people know who he is, or follow his efforts. Why? Because he has devoted his life to transforming America’s attitudes and laws about drugs, which is no easy task, and often a thankless one.

There exists a complex, almost paradoxical attitude toward drug use and the ramifications of “drug war” repression among many progressives. Even Baby Boomers, many who successfully navigated a journey through their own drug experimentation as they came of age, often overreact to the possibilities of their own childrens’ experimentations with drugs. And in the case of our last three presidents, all who used drugs, the consistent stance is to go out of their way to avoid any acknowledgement of any positive role that drugs play in our society, or even seriously consider a less destructive approach, which would be the legalization and regulation of drugs. President Obama, who has been quite honest about his personal drug use, nevertheless has been somewhat dismissive about even modest reforms concerning pot — a drug far less dangerous than the alcohol and cigarettes, which pervade our society and generate billions of advertising dollars to maintain dependencies and widespread social use.

Full Story The Relentless War on Drug Users Is Escalating Violence in the US: It’s Time for Harm Reduction | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

Don’t You Think It’s Time to Reinstate the Laws That Would Have Prevented the Financial Crash?

By Nomi Prins

It’s been 10 years since Washington repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, the moment we got royally screwed by the banking system — and we’re still paying the price.

This week marks the tenth year anniversary of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley or Financial Services Modernization Act, marking the moment when we were royally screwed by the banking system. Thank you to all those involved.

It’s amazing how downright ebullient, President Bill Clinton was at that signing ceremony on November 12, 1999. an event introduced by then Treasury Secretary (now Obama advisor) Larry Summers, successor to Robert Rubin. Those restricting, anti-competitive Depression era, laws were finally behind us. Awesome.

Fast-forward to now and must of us know how devastatingly expensive that signature was for the American public. Yet, despite our government having deployed or made available over $14.1 trillion worth of federal subsidies to fix Wall Street, the banking landscape is less stable than it was before last year’s crisis. And, despite national unemployment approaching double digits, and another record quarter of foreclosures, we stand farther away from the intent of Glass Steagall than ever.

Full Story Don’t You Think It’s Time to Reinstate the Laws That Would Have Prevented the Financial Crash? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.

Meet Our Afghan Ally: Stealing Money, Selling Heroin and Raping Boys

…one reason Afghan villagers prefer to deal with the Taliban rather than the government security forces is that the latter have a habit of seizing their sons at checkpoints and sodomizing them.

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Just when President Barack Obama looked as if he might be railroaded into sending tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan the American envoy to Kabul has warned him not to do so. In a leaked cable to Washington sent last week, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Gen Karl W. Eikenberry, argues that it would be a mistake to send reinforcements until the government of President Hamid Karzai demonstrates that it will act against corruption and mismanagement. General Eikenberry knows what he is talking about because he has long experience of Afghanistan. A recently retired three star general, he was responsible for training the Afghan security forces from 2002 to 2003 and was top US commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007.

There is a dangerous misunderstanding outside Afghanistan about what ‘corruption and mismanagement’ mean in an Afghan context and a potentially lethal underestimation of how these impact on American and British forces. For example, the shadow British Defense Secretary Liam Fox argued that though ‘corruption and establishing good governance’ are not unimportant, ‘we need to recognize that Afghan governance is likely to look very different from governance as we knows it in the West.’

Leaving aside the patronizing tone of the statement, this shows that Mr Fox fundamentally misunderstands what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan.  Corruption and mismanagement do not just mean that the police are on the take or that no contract is awarded without a bribe. It is much worse than that. For instance, one reason Afghan villagers prefer to deal with the Taliban rather than the government security forces is that the latter have a habit of seizing their sons at checkpoints and sodomizing them.     None of our business, Mr Fox, who may be British Defense Secretary by this time next year, would presumably say. We are not in Afghanistan for the good government of Afghans: ‘Our troops are not fighting and dying in Afghanistan for Karzai’s government nor should they ever be.’ But the fact that male rape is common practice in the Afghan armed forces has, unfortunately, a great deal to do with the fate of British soldiers.

Full Story Patrick Cockburn: Meet Our Afghan Ally.

Time to head home

Eugene Robinson >>

The most dreadful burden of the presidency — the power to send men and women to die for their country — seems to weigh heavily on Barack Obama these days. He went to Dover Air Force Base to salute the coffins of fallen troops. He gave a moving speech at the memorial service for victims of last week’s killings at Fort Hood. On Veterans Day, after the traditional wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery, he took an unscheduled walk among the rows of marble headstones in Section 60, where the dead from our two ongoing wars are buried.

As he decides whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan, Obama should keep these images in mind. Geopolitical calculation has human consequences. Sending more troops will mean more coffins arriving at Dover, more funerals at Arlington, more stress and hardship for military families. It would be wrong to demand such sacrifice in the absence of military goals that are clear, achievable and worthwhile.

And what goals in Afghanistan remotely satisfy those criteria?

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, recently sent two classified cables to officials in Washington expressing what the newspaper described as “deep concerns” about sending more troops now.

Full Story Eugene Robinson – Eugene Robinson on withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan – washingtonpost.com.

Noam Chomsky: Afghanistan – it’s one of the most immoral acts in history!

Noam Chomsky interviewed on the BBC program HARDtalk, during his tour of the United Kingdom in Nov. 2009.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Health Care Costs

Robert Reich

Dear Senator,

I know you’re in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman’s derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor.

But Harry, you really need to take on future health-care costs. The House bill fails to do this. The public option in the House bill is open only to people without employer-provided health insurance. That will be too small a number to have bargaining clout to get good deals from drug companies and medical providers. And it will mainly attract people who have more expensive medical needs, which is why the Congressional Budget Office decided it would cost more than it would save.

You also know a public insurance option that’s open to everyone would cut future health costs dramatically by imposing real competition on private for-profit insurance plans. That’s why the private insurers hate the idea. Even if states were allowed to opt out of this robust public option, the big states would almost certainly opt in, giving it the scale needed to negotiate great deals from drug companies and medical providers. This would put pressure on any state that opted out because their citizens would soon discover they’re paying far more.

In addition to the House’s weak public option, the deals the White House and Max Baucus made with the drug companies and the AMA will force Americans to pay even more. If, on the other hand, Medicare were allowed to negotiate lower drug prices, biotech drugs weren’t granted a twelve-years monopoly, and doctors had to accept Medicare reimbursements in line with legislation enacted years ago, Americans would save billions.

You know all this but you’re also trying to get 60 votes in order get any bill to the floor. You have my sympathies, but unless you get these reforms into the final Senate bill you’re not really helping most Americans afford future health care.

So what do you do?

First, try for the “reconciliation” process, which requires only 51 votes. Every one of the reforms I mention above would fit under the Byrd rule.

If that doesn’t work, wrap these reforms together — a public option open to everyone (allow states to opt out of this if they dare), Medicare-negotiated drug benefits, no 12-year monopoly for new drugs, and a major squeeze on Medicare reimbursements for doctors — and have CBO score the savings. I guarantee you, the number will be large. Then you should dare anyone, Democrat or Republican, to vote against saving Americans so much money in years ahead. How is Ben Nelson going to face voters in Nebraska who would have to pay, say, 20 percent more for health care in the future if Nelson refuses to go along?

If neither of these tactics work, then take whatever bill you must to the Senate floor. But then introduce this reform package as the very first amendment to the bill. Call it the “Ted Kennedy Amendment for Helping Middle Class Families Afford Health Care,” and whip the hell out of the Democrats. Get the President to help you. Surely Joe Biden will. If you can’t get 51 votes out of Dems for this, publish the list of Dems who vote against it, strip them of their committee chairs or sub-chairs, and make sure the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee gives them zilch when they’re up for re-election.

Nobody promised you this would be easy, Harry. But, hell, why are you there, anyway? Your responsibility isn’t just to pass whatever will muster 60 votes and that the President and Dems can later call “health care reform.” It’s to do the right thing by the American people and bring down future health-care costs. Don’t cave in to Lieberman or Nelson or the drug companies or the private insurers or the AMA or anyone else. Lead the charge.

All best.

Full Story Robert Reich’s Blog: An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Health Care Costs.

First U.S. marijuana cafe opens in Portland

The United States’ first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration’s move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it — as long as they are out of public view — despite a federal ban.

“This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members,” said Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization.

“Our plans go beyond serving food and marijuana,” said Martinez. “We hope to have classes, seminars, even a Cannabis Community College, based here to help people learn about growing and other uses for cannabis.”

Full Story First U.S. marijuana cafe opens in Portland | U.S. | Reuters.

Respect for Rape Victims

Editorial - - NYTimes

A promising bipartisan bill introduced this week in the Senate addresses a stubborn scandal: the enormous backlog of untested rape kits, which contain the physical evidence obtained from sexual assault victims.

In 2004, Congress provided grant money for prompt DNA analysis of this evidence, but the problem persists.

There is no firm national count of the number of untested rape kits. But last March, Human Rights Watch found more than 12,500 untested rape kits in the Los Angeles area alone. The Houston Police Department recently found at least 4,000 untested rape kits in storage. Detroit’s backlog may be as high as 10,000 untested kits.

This week, the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, released the results of a survey of more than 2,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, including troubling confirmation of languishing rape case evidence. In 18 percent of open, unsolved rape cases, forensic evidence had not been submitted to a crime lab.

Full Story Editorial – Respect for Rape Victims – NYTimes.com.

A real green deal

35 years ago, workers at the Lucas Aerospace company formulated an ‘alternative corporate plan’ to convert military production to socially useful and environmentally desirable purposes. Hilary Wainwright and Andy Bowman consider what lessons it holds for the greening of the world economy today

There are moments when a radical idea quickly goes mainstream. A cause for optimism but also caution; an opportunity for a practical challenge. The ‘green new deal’, a proposal for a green way out of recession, is such an idea (see interview with Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, Red Pepper, June/July 2009). It has now been adopted in some form, in theory if not in corresponding action, by governments across the world.

In Britain, the workers’ occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight – supported by green, trade union and socialist campaigners across the country – has provided a practical challenge to the government. The Vestas workers’ argument, committed as ministers say they are to green investment, is that here is an exemplary case: so intervene and save green jobs, creating a base and a beacon for further action in the same direction.

Before the Vestas occupation, Ed Miliband, the minister responsible for action on climate change, made a welcome call for public pressure to achieve tougher action. But when faced with a request from the Vestas workers to talk, the government showed no interest in practical collaboration with real-life pressure – particular and complex as it invariably is. Why didn’t the government pick up on this opportunity to support a strategically-placed group of citizens who were responding to the need for everyone to take responsibility for climate change?

Full Story A real green deal – Red Pepper.

Ford Mixes Wheat Waste With Plastic in 2010 Flex

The 2010 Ford Flex will include the auto industry’s first use of wheat straw, a waste byproduct of wheat production.

Wheat straw will make up 20 percent of the vehicle’s two third-row storage bins, lowering the bins’ weight by 10 percent, reducing Ford Motor Company’s petroleum use by 20,000 pounds a year and lowering its carbon dioxide emissions by 30,000 pounds a year.

Ford is already looking at expanding its use of wheat straw to other car parts like center console bins and trays, armrest liners, interior air registers and door trim panels.

The use of wheat straw in the plastic bins also represents the first production-ready application to come out of the Ontario BioCar Initiative, a collaboration among Canadian universities and the auto industry to advance the use of plant-based materials.

Full Story Ford Mixes Wheat Waste With Plastic in 2010 Flex | GreenBiz.com.

Fish consumption linked to lower cognition

GRANADA, Spain, Nov. 13 (UPI) — Children who eat fish more than three times per week show decreased performance in cognition, researchers in Spain found.

Researcher Carmen Freire Warden, led by Professors Nicolas Olea and Marieta Fernandez Serrano Cabrera of the University of Granada, analyzed the exposure to environmental contaminants through water, air and diet in a sample of 220 children in the geographic healthcare area of San Cecilio University Hospital in Granada, Spain.

Concentrations were higher than those found in other pediatric populations with a lower consumption of fish, but lower than levels found in high-consuming areas.

Important exposure factors were: place of residence, maternal age, passive exposure to tobacco smoke and consumption of oily fish.

Full Story Fish consumption linked to lower cognition – UPI.com.

Hunting for Tuna: The Environmental Peril Grows

Nearly every day at dawn, John Heitz falls a little bit in love. Leaning over a 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin tuna, the 55-year-old American, whose business is exporting fish, circles his forefinger around its deep eye socket. “Look how clear these eyes are.” He traces the puncture where the fish was hooked, and the markings under its pectoral fin where it struggled on the line. “Sometimes,” Heitz says, “I see a good tuna, and it looks better to me than a woman.”

Heitz, a blond Illinoisan who sports a fading Maui & Sons T-shirt and a tuna tattoo on his bicep, is an out-and-out tuna man. That’s why he lives and works in General Santos City in the southern Philippines, one of the planet’s great tuna-fishing ports. By 6 a.m. on an August morning, the heat at the docks — a raucous, clanging, blood-and-guts tangle of 10,000 buyers, sellers, porters and men whacking rusty knives into silver skin — is unforgiving. Boat crews crouch in patches of shade on deck, smoking and waiting for their wages. The boats’ hulls, sloshing with bloody ice water, are almost empty, only a few shiny bellies lolling in the slush. Porters have already hoisted thousands of tuna onto their shoulders and carried them to the exporters; they swarm around the fat, fresh ones whose slick layer of slime still smells like the ocean, and whose scales gleam with a hint of the yellow flush they had when blood was pumping inside them.

Full Story Hunting for Tuna: The Environmental Peril Grows – TIME.

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

A 50,000-strong army vanished in the Egyptian desert in 525 BC and was never heard of again … until now

Bones, jewelry and weapons found in Egyptian desert may be the remains of Cambyses’ army that vanished 2,500 years ago.

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

Full Story Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert : Discovery News.

Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger

By next week, cable giant Comcast is expected to announce a deal to buy NBC-Universal, the biggest proposed media merger in recent memory. Comcast, the largest cable company and the No. 1 Internet service provider in the nation, would take over the NBC empire: a television network, Universal Studios, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Telemundo, the Weather Channel, Hulu.com, 27 television stations and a host of other properties. The merger could be announced as early as Sunday.

This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity. On average, nearly one quarter of all channels offered to cable subscribers will be owned by the bloated Comcast.

News reports about the deal are citing the “conventional wisdom” echoed by industry analysts from Wall Street and Washington: Judicial and agency precedent indicates that the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission will not be able to stop the merger — even if they know that the cost to the public interest will be grave. This is the same kind of regulatory precedent that permitted the renegade banking industry to run amok, until the system came crashing down. Our lawmakers should have been reining in these out-of-control corporations long ago. But therein lies the problem: Corporate-friendly judges, appointed by corporate-friendly politicians, elected with contributions from their corporate patrons, have created a body of legal precedent that makes even the most common sense antitrust rulings difficult to impossible.

Full Story Josh Silver: Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger.

Army Says Morale Has Fallen Among Troops In Afghanistan

Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday. Soldier suicides in Iraq did not increase for the first time since 2004, according to a new study.

Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to come up with a new war strategy and planned troop buildup. There is also perhaps equal new attention focused on the mental health of the force since a shooting rampage at Fort Hood last week in which an Army psychiatrist is charged.

Both surveys showed that soldiers on their third or fourth tours of duty had lower morale and more mental health problems than those with fewer deployments and an ever-increasing number of troops are having problems with their marriages.

Full Story Army Says Morale Has Fallen Among Troops In Afghanistan.

US Catholic Church now playing political hardball, critics say

In its efforts to influence health care reform and oppose same-sex marriage, the Catholic Church is wading more deeply into politics than it has in recent memory, observers say.

The church’s role in politics came into sharp relief this week when the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the Washington, DC, diocese threatened to cease its charitable activities if the DC city council went ahead with a plan to allow same-sex marriage.

The church’s social services arm provides support to 68,000 people in DC, among them the homeless and those in need of health care. It has received $8.2 million in funding from the DC government in the past three years, according to the city council.

Peter Rosenstein of the Campaign for All DC Families described the church’s move as an attempt to “blackmail the city.”

Full Story US Catholic Church now playing political hardball, critics say | Raw Story.

OPS:  It’s past time to revoke their Tax exempt status.  This is a political organization

Equine Therapy Helps Withdrawn Vets Re-Connect

Instructor: Horses Don’t Judge Like People

- When war follows soldiers home, they can suddenly find themselves struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.

“They become isolated socially and financially,” said therapist Robert Froug, of the Aurora Mental Health Center.Froug and Sarah Avrin, the center’s director for the developmentally disabled program, are working with some vets who have ended up homeless.

They’re trying to help the men, who have withdrawn from society, reconnect using equine transitional therapy.

“We use horses as a tool because they are such majestic creatures,” said Paula Quillen, an instructor at Coventry Farms.In order to understand how horses can help vets, you have to understand what the vets are going through.

Full Story Equine Therapy Helps Withdrawn Vets Re-Connect – Denver News Story – KMGH Denver.

Turley: Fort Hood shooter is a murderer, not a terrorist

Major Nidal Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the Fort Hood shootings and will be tried in a military court. The Army apparently sees no reason to treat the case as one of terrorism or turn it over to federal prosecutors, and the FBI has released a statement saying it has no information that “Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot.”

However, this has not stopped Sen. John McCain, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Oliver North, and any number of Fox News commentators from demanding that the shootings be regarded as an act of Muslim terrorism.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sees these assertions as stemming from an eagerness to charge President Obama with allowing “a terrorist attack on his watch,” even if it means ignoring the legal definition of terrorism. She turned to constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley to explain the legal issues involved.

“I think that the Army is going about this in the right way,” Turley began. “Criminal investigators and lawyers and judges don’t have the luxury that some people have on television to just simply say this must be terrorism.”

Full Story Turley: Fort Hood shooter is a murderer, not a terrorist | Raw Story.

Invest in Nature Now, Save Trillions Later: Study

PARIS – Investing billions today to protect threatened ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity would reap trillions in savings over the long haul, according to a UN-backed report issued Friday.

More than a billion of Earth’s poorest denizens depend directly on coral reefs, forests, mangroves, aquifers and other forms of “natural capital” to eke out a living.

Unless world leaders take swift action to halt the accelerating depletion of these resources, the result could be hunger, conflict and environment refugees, the study warned.

“Recognising and rewarding the value delivered to society by the natural environment must become a policy priority,” said Pavan Sukhdev, who headed The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) paper released in Brussels.

Full Story Invest in Nature Now, Save Trillions Later: Study | CommonDreams.org.

Nuclear scars: Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert

The state faces a water crisis and population boom, but radioactive waste from the Nevada Test Site has polluted aquifers.

Reporting from Yucca Flat, Nev. – A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.

When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.

During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage.

Full Story Nuclear scars: Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert — latimes.com.

Evidence that 911 was an Inside Job

by Len Hart,

If 911 had not been an inside job, it would have been investigated! The cover up that followed has only one purpose: the protection of the guilty! It is not only the absurd, alleged conspiracy of 19 Arab hijackers, a cover story for which there is absolutely no convincing or admissible evidence, it is the fact that the events that day were deliberately covered up and access to evidence denied investigators.

It was odd to me that I was dispatched to go to New York even before the second plane hit the South Tower, while the media was still reporting only that a “small plane” had collided with the North Tower — far too small of a catastrophe at that point to involve FEMA . FEMA was mobilized within minutes, whereas it took ten days for it to deploy to New Orleans to respond to Hurricane Katrina, even with abundant advance warning! It was odd to me that all cameras were so fiercely prohibited within the secured perimeter of Ground Zero, that the entire area was declared a crime scene and yet the “evidence” within that crime scene was so rapidly removed and destroyed. And then it was very odd to me when I learned that FEMA and several other federal agencies had already moved into position at their command center at Pier 92 on September 10th, one day before the attacks!

…

We are asked to believe that all four of the “indestructible” black boxes of the two jets that struck the twin towers were never found because they were completely vaporized, yet I have footage of the rubber wheels of the landing gear nearly undamaged, as well as the seats, parts of the fuselage and a jet turbine that were absolutely not vaporized. This being said, I do find it rather odd that such objects could have survived fairly intact the type of destruction that turned most of the Twin Towers into thin dust. And I definitely harbor some doubts about the authenticity of the “jet” turbine, far too small to have come from one of the Boeings!

–Kurt Sonnenfeld, 9/11 FEMA videographer at Ground Zero goes public

Among the many lies about 911, the most egregious are the ‘official ones’ put forward by the Bush administration and Bush personally. And make no mistake about it: the story of 19 Arab hijackers co-ordinated from a cave in Afghanistan by a man who was most certainly already dead of kidney failure, is the most absurd lie among them. There is not a shred of convincing or admissible evidence in support of it.

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: Evidence that 911 was an Inside Job.

Suspected Hemorrhagic Pneumonia Outbreak Hits Ukraine

Suspected Hemorrhagic Pneumonia Outbreak Hits Ukraine – by Stephen Lendman

On October 29, the Ukraine web site zik.com.ua reported that:

“Western Ukraine was hit by a severe epidemic of unidentified influenza, tentatively diagnosed by doctors as viral pneumonia. The number of dead has climbed dramatically. Doctors advise Western Ukrainians to stay home and use preventive medicine.”

On October 30, Jane Burgermeister’s theflucase.com reported that:

“More than 30 people have died in the Ukraine as a result of a mysterious new virus that has an affinity for the lungs,” according to Swiss reports. Ukraine’s Health Ministry said the virus’ origin is unknown and showed “no signs of mutating to become more virulent.” So far, 40,000 people were reported sick and 951 hospitalized.

On October 30, healthfreedomalliance.org reported that Ukraine’s Health Minister, Vasyl Knyazevych, said two laboratories diagnosed 11 of 33 samples tested as “highly influenza A/H1N1.” As a result, he considered declaring a nationwide quarantine, even though western areas alone were affected.

Full Story SteveLendmanBlog: Suspected Hemorrhagic Pneumonia Outbreak Hits Ukraine.

Swiss take Google to court over Street View

Country seeks greater protection of privacy

The Swiss data protection watchdog is taking Google to the country’s Federal Administrative Court over an alleged failure to protect people’s privacy on its Street View website, two months after launching the service in Switzerland.

Hanspeter Thür, the federal data protection and information commissioner, said Google had not done enough to make faces and vehicle number plates unrecognisable on the service, which provides panoramic, street-level photos.

Full Story FT.com / Technology – Swiss take Google to court over Street View.

White House hits out at plan to strip Fed powers

Administration abandons laisser-faire approach to reform debate

Plans to strip the Federal Reserve of its bank supervision powers were rebuffed on Friday in two separate speeches by senior Obama administration officials.

Chris Dodd, the Senate banking committee chairman, this week published draft legislation to merge four US banking regulators into one, with the Fed the most high-profile loser.

However, Austan Goolsbee, a White House economist, and Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, both pushed back against the plan on Friday as the administration abandoned its laisser-faire approach to the versions of regulatory reform circulating in Congress.

Full Story FT.com / US / Economy & Fed – White House hits out at plan to strip Fed powers.

NASA finds ‘significant’ water on moon

NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening “a new chapter” that could allow for the development of a lunar space station.

The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. “Indeed, yes, we found water,” he said.

The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, intentionally crashed October 9 into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole.

After the satellite struck, a rocket flew through the debris cloud, measuring the amount of water and providing a host of other data, Colaprete said.

The project team concentrated on data from the satellite’s spectrometers, which provide the best information about the presence of water, Colaprete said. A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining light they emit or absorb.

Full Story NASA finds ‘significant’ water on moon – CNN.com.

Tancredo says he ‘fully intends to run’ for governor of Colorado.

The Denver Post reports that, “while he has yet to formally declare his candidacy or fill out paperwork with the secretary of state’s office,” Tom Tancredo told a reporter that he “fully intends to run” for governor. When asked if he is running for Governor, Tom Tancredo told another local news station, “That is exactly what I anticipate doing.” After a brief run for President in 2008, Tancredo has been polishing his credentials over the past year by doing his part to coarsen the political discourse on television:

– Said he “didn’t know” if Obama “hates white people.”

– Argued Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a member of the “Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses” and that she “appears to be a racist.”

Full Story Think Progress » Tancredo says he ‘fully intends to run’ for governor of Colorado..

Goldman Sachs report concludes insurers would profit from watered-down Senate health bill.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that Goldman Sachs (in the course of performing “God’s work“) did a report analyzing the impact of health reform on Cigna, Aetna, WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Humana. While Stein concludes that insurers would profit from undermining health care reform, the report also points out that a more “centrist” version of the Senate Finance Committee (SFC) legislation would lead to the highest “aggregate revenue growth” for the insurance industry:

Should lawmakers further water-down the SFC bill, the industry will stand to profit, the report implies, suggesting that the “bull” case scenario is a reform package that brings in millions of new government-subsidized customers without requiring the industry to pay any new taxes. Industry revenue would grow 6.9% from “more moderation of provisions in the current SFC plan or as a result of changes prior to the major implementation in 2013,” the report states. The report therefore suggests that the insurance industry may actually prefer watered-down reform over nothing. The Wonk Room has more. (Chart courtesy of FDL)

Full Story Think Progress » Goldman Sachs report concludes insurers would profit from watered-down Senate health bill..

Ted Haggard Mounts A Comeback By Lying: I Was Never ‘An Anti-Gay Guy’

Before resigning in disgrace after a three-year relationship with a male prostitute, Ted Haggard was one of the Christian Right’s most powerful figures — president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a close confidante of the Bush White House. Haggard, now purportedly “completely heterosexual,” hosted a prayer meeting at his Colorado home last night in an attempt to mount a comeback, attracting 110 people. Saying “America loves a scandal, but they love a comeback even more,” Haggard argued he can redeem himself in part because he was never a “hateful, anti-gay guy”:

“I was always well aware of my own personal struggles, but my desire was to be more Godly,” said Haggard. “I was never a religious right, hateful, anti-gay guy — secretly running off, except right at the end. I’d say right at the end, before the crisis. That did develop a little bit stronger.” [...]

“It was good for me to go through the Christian hatred of people believing that I was a gay man — and hating me so strongly because of it. And so because of it, my compassion for the homosexual community has gone up incredibly,” said Haggard.

Haggard has experienced what it’s like to be on the receiving end of “Christian hatred,” and it’s reassuring to know that he now has more “compassion” for gay men and women. But despite his claims, he was responsible for dishing out this hatred for many years.

Full Story Think Progress » Ted Haggard Mounts A Comeback By Lying: I Was Never ‘An Anti-Gay Guy’.

OPS:  ‘Mounts a Comeback”

AMA to FEDS: stop calling marijuana ‘dangerous’.

Another brick in the wall, removed.

AMA Urges the FEDS to Stop Calling Marijuana Dangerous

the powerful prestigious doctor’s group, the American Medical Association has now changed its weed policy saying it would like to promote clinical research on it, and perhaps develop cannabis-based medicines.

I always discourage people from trying to relate “why marijuana was originally made illegal” with how and why it remains illegal after 40-some yers of efforts to correct the very bad law.

It matters not why it was made illegal almost 80 years ago.

It matters most why it would remain so illegal and so demonized in this modern, more scientific time, replete with better communication and such.

It remains illegal partly due to reefer madness – the frothing-at-the-mouth propaganda constantly regurgitated by the GOP and the ONDCP (on your tax dollar) – and a huge foundation of this propaganda is the LIE that marijuana is “dangerous”.

There is no end to the awfulizing some people continue to do about marijuana – most of them republicans, the rest just ignorant. Yes, there is a HUGE overlap, but I digress.

The AMA, way back in 1937, was NOT part of the illegalization but got on board later.

The salient point from this is that the AM, which became hugely supportive of reefer madness has all of a sudden begun to recant.

Mostly because they are educated in science.

Full Story Daily Kos: AMA to FEDS: stop calling marijuana ‘dangerous’..

Dave Lindorff: Health Care Reform, DOA

I never thought I’d find myself thanking the women-loathing, Christian fundamentalist-pandering Democrats in Congress for anything, but here it is: Thank you, Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI), for your outrageous amendment to the House version of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress, which bars any insurance company in the proposed health insurance exchange from offering a health insurance plan that includes abortion coverage.

This amendment, which would actually bar women or families from buying even with their own money and no government subsidy health insurance that includes funding for a medically recommended abortion, was supported by 64 Democrats along with all but one Republican in Congress.

Because it passed and was attached to the House health reform bill, it gives hope to the notion that the disastrous so-called health reform legislation in Congress will die.

And so it should.

Full Story Dave Lindorff: Health Care Reform, DOA | BuzzFlash.org.

Clinton: No binding climate deal at Denmark talks

Clinton says next month’s Copenhagen talks unlikely to produce binding climate treaty

Next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen is not likely to produce a legally binding treaty to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that are widely blamed for global warming, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday.

Speaking to a town hall meeting of students at a university in the Philippine capital, Clinton said the Obama administration would push instead for a strong “framework agreement” that could become a template for an eventual enforceable pact.

“We are going to go to Copenhagen 100-percent committed to creating a framework agreement,” she said. “We doubt that we can get to the legally binding agreement that everyone wants because too many countries have too many questions.”

“But we do think that we can come up with a very strong framework agreement,” Clinton told an audience at Manila’s University of Santo Tomas.

Full Story Clinton: No binding climate deal at Denmark talks | TPM News Pages.

UN food summit ‘fails before it begins’

A UN food summit aimed at helping the one billion people worldwide suffering from hunger has been declared a failure a week before it has even begun.

The leaked World Food Summit draft declaration falls short of a UN goal of eradicating hunger by 2025. Instead, leaders are expected to to sign a watered down declaration in Rome next week that calls for vague increases in aid for farmers in poor countries but sets no targets or deadlines for action.

Leaders are expected to reaffirm their commitment to the UN’s Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of hungry people by 2015 – a target that is unlikely to be reached.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which is organising the three day conference, had hoped to win a clear promise from rich countries to increase the amount they give each year in agricultural aid from $7.9 billion (£4.8 billion) to $44 billion.

But a final draft declaration instead made only a commitment to “substantially increase the share of official development assistance devoted to agriculture and food security based on country-led requests”.

Full Story UN food summit ‘fails before it begins’ – Telegraph.

Will South Carolina become the nation’s new Yucca Mountain?

Earlier this year President Obama canceled the federal government’s plans to store high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and weapons facilities at the controversial Yucca Mountain site in Nevada — but now there are concerns that South Carolina could become a permanent dumping ground for the dangerous waste.

That state is home to the Savannah River Site, a nuclear materials processing center along the Savannah River 25 miles southeast of Augusta, Ga. Built during the 1950s to refine nuclear material for weapons, the site no longer has any operating nuclear reactors and is engaged in cleanup activities.

Given the demise of Yucca Mountain, business leaders in South Carolina and Georgia are expressing worries that high-level waste at the Savannah River Site may now be left there permanently. Scientists have warned about potential environmental contamination from long-term storage of such highly radioactive waste in the Savannah River watershed.

This week the SRS Community Reuse Organization — a nonprofit group working to diversify the region’s economy and a supporter of the Yucca Mountain site — released a report [pdf] calling for a special blue-ribbon panel to study options for disposing of the waste.

As the preface states:

Full Story ISS – Will South Carolina become the nation’s new Yucca Mountain?.

A Nun speaks out on the H1N1 Pandemic: “The WHO changed the official definition of a pandemic”

Interview with Sister Dr. Teresa Forcades . An articulate and authoritative statement

Sister Teresa Forcades i Vila has taken off her theologian’s hat and gone back to her doctor in public health role to address the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in a new video  that calls for a calm approach to the disease and emphasizes the right of citizens to refuse to be vaccinated against it.

Sr. Theresa also has a new blog space on catalunyareligió.cat in which she is sharing her writings on the flu and other issues

What’s a nun doing talking on the Internet about the dangers of the Influenza A vaccine?

Our rule prescribes five hours of prayer and six of work. Ora et labora.

…

I devote part of the working hours to medical research. I’m a doctor of medicine and in 2006 I published the study Crimes and Abuses of the Pharmaceutical Industry.

When did you decide you had to speak out on influenza A?

In May this year I was asked to give a speech on the papillomavirus vaccine and I was very struck by the lack of scientific basis for the official recommendations. After a few days I spoke on TV-3 about this vaccine and since then I have been receiving requests to comment on the influenza A vaccine.

Doesn’t the World Health Organization deserve to be trusted?

I don’t understand the motives that have led WHO to act in the absurd way it is acting.

Absurd?

Full Story A Nun speaks out on the H1N1 Pandemic: “The WHO changed the official definition of a pandemic”.

Judge Orders Phoenix Church To Stop Feeding Homeless

The homeless in Phoenix, Ariz. will have to find a new place for a pancake breakfast after a court ruling forced a neighborhood church to shut down its charity dining hall.

The ruling sets a precedent for all churches zoned in residential areas of Phoenix, which will force church volunteers to relocate their homeless food services to commercial parts of the city or end their meal services entirely, reports Change.org.

The controversy surrounding the Crossroads United Methodist Church’s weekly pancake breakfast began last spring when neighbors complained about an increase in the number of homeless people in the neighborhood. With the increase in homeless individuals in the area came an uptick in their undesirable behaviors, including “panhandling, burglary, public intoxication and vandalism, among other things,” according to AZ Family.

Here’s more on the story from KTVK 3TV:

Full Story Judge Orders Phoenix Church To Stop Feeding Homeless.

Hong Kong Is New Target of U.S. Crackdown on Taxes

Hong Kong is a new target of U.S. prosecutors pursuing a global campaign against evaders of federal taxes, spurred by data acquired in their crackdown on Swiss banks.

Prosecutors are trying to determine what role financial professionals in Hong Kong play in tax evasion, according to people familiar with the matter. They are examining how much taxable money was moved to the former British colony that returned to China in 1997, whether accounts were based there in name only and what banks were involved, the people said.

The push follows the government’s success in penetrating Swiss bank secrecy and learning from insiders how UBS AG helped Americans evade taxes. UBS, the largest Swiss bank by assets, avoided prosecution by agreeing in February to pay $780 million and disclose account data on 250 clients. In August, it agreed to supply information on another 4,450.

Full Story Hong Kong Is New Target of U.S. Crackdown on Taxes (Update1) – Bloomberg.com.

Goldman To Private Insurers: No Health Care Reform At All Is Best

A Goldman Sachs analysis of health care legislation has concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing. A close second would be passing a watered-down version of the Senate Finance Committee’s bill.

A study put together by Goldman in mid-October looks at the estimated stock performance of the private insurance industry under four variations of reform legislation. The study focused on the five biggest insurers whose shares are traded on Wall Street: Aetna, UnitedHealth, WellPoint, CIGNA and Humana.

The Senate Finance Committee bill, which Goldman’s analysts conclude is the version most likely to survive the legislative process, is described as the “base” scenario. Under that legislation (which did not include a public plan) the earnings per share for the top five insurers would grow an estimated five percent from 2010 through 2019. And yet, the “variance with current valuation” — essentially, what the value of the stock is on the market — is projected to drop four percent.

Full Story Goldman To Private Insurers: No Health Care Reform At All Is Best.

FHA Reserve Ratio Falls to 0.53%, Lowest in History

The Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance reserves fell to the lowest level in history and the government said more steps are needed to shore up the agency that guarantees one of every five single-family loans.

The net capital ratio, or reserves after accounting for projected losses, fell to 0.53 percent in the year ended in September, from 3 percent in fiscal 2008 and 6.4 percent in 2007, according to an annual review sent today. While FHA said the fund “has good prospects,” it is changing its risk models to account for the possibility of the ratio falling below zero.

“Additional actions” will be needed to shore up the agency, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said at a news conference in Washington today. The insurance fund tripled in size last year and has taken on more risk as private industry sources for lenders to finance and insure home loans dried up and mortgage default rates rose to record highs.

“I don’t want to leave the impression that the reserves are adequate, that we have plenty of money,” said Donovan, whose department includes FHA. “FHA is not in the long-run self supporting, it isn’t returning money to the taxpayer.”

Donovan said the economy is worse than housing officials expected and projected claims against the insurance fund are higher than forecast. The fund is already below the 2 percent reserve threshold FHA is required to maintain by Congress and Donovan said it’s “critical” to build that cushion back up.

No Bailout

Full Story Bloomberg Printer-Friendly Page.

Warren Buffett: The financial panic is over

Warren Buffett, perhaps the world’s most admired investor, said on Thursday the financial panic that gripped the globe last year is a thing of the past, even as the U.S. economy’s struggles persist.

“The financial panic is behind us,” the world’s second-richest person said at Columbia University’s business school. “Our economy was sputtering, still is sputtering some.”

Buffett, 79, nevertheless said there is greater opportunity for investments inside the United States than outside, noting that the U.S. economy is far larger than any other.

Full Story Warren Buffett: The financial panic is over | U.S. | Reuters.

OPS: Damned glad it’s over for him and his billionaire friends and trans national corporations

ACORN Sues Congress

The much-maligned and video-taped ACORN is suing over Congress’ recent defunding of their group, charging it was unconstitutional on many fronts.

The suit, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights charges Congress “with violating the Bill of Attainder provision in the U.S. Constitution, violating the Fifth Amendment right to due process, and infringing on the First Amendment right to freedom of association by targeting affiliated and allied organizations,” says a release by ACORN and the CCR.

In case you’ve forgotten, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now landed in hot water after conservative activists videotaped ACORN workers giving really bad advice to a fake pimp and hooker.

That sparked a firestorm, and very few legislators (New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand being an exception) were willing to vote to save ACORN’s federal contracts.

To CCR, that just was downright un-American. “It’s not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury, and executioner,” said CCR lawyer Jules Lobel. “We have due process in this country, and our Constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial. Congress, as well as individuals and organizations must abide by the rule of law.”

Full Story Mouth Of The Potomac – NY Daily News.

Fed Slaps Curbs on Overdraft Fees

The Federal Reserve imposed rules Thursday making it harder for banks to hit customers with fees for overdrawing their accounts, in the latest crackdown from the government that could curtail a major revenue stream for financial institutions.

The Fed’s policy requires customers to opt in to “overdraft protection” programs, meaning they would have to agree to pay a fee any time they overdraw their accounts at automated-teller machines or using a debit card. If they don’t agree, any effort to withdraw money would likely be rejected if it overdrew the account. Currently, banks can honor a withdrawal and levy a fee on the customer for becoming overdrawn.

Full Story Fed Slaps Curbs on Overdraft Fees – WSJ.com.

Obama top lawyer expected to quit: sources

President Barack Obama’s top lawyer Greg Craig is expected to officially resign Friday, with the White House admitting it may miss its one-year deadline to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

White House counsel Craig, a veteran Washington hand who led the effort to shutter the controversial camp for terror suspects in Cuba, has faced repeated reports in recent months that he was on the way out.

Officials travelling with Obama in Japan would not confirm that Craig would go on Friday, as an official announcement had not yet been made.

But sources said there were increasing signs that the announcement would come on Friday, and the Washington Post reported that Obama’s personal attorney Bob Bauer would replace Craig in the key White House post.

Full Story Obama top lawyer expected to quit: sources – Yahoo! News.

Lawyer seeks class action for credit card rates lawsuit

A Rhode Island woman is suing Citibank, claiming the financial giant is trying to squeeze money out of its credit-card customers in advance of changes in federal law due to take place in February 2010.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court earlier this week by Providence lawyer Peter N. Wasylyk on behalf of Portsmouth resident Michol K. Murphy states that Citibank has violated the terms of her credit-card agreement by jacking up the annual percentage rate on her account without cause. Wasylyk is asking the court to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit.

The lawsuit follows in the wake of an August case Wasylyk filed against Citizens Financial Group on behalf of a Woonsocket man who claims that ATM withdrawals and debit transactions are a trap into which unwary customers fall. That lawsuit, which also seeks certification as a class action, is still pending.

Consumers such as Murphy and Hunt have been complaining loudly about the alleged abusive practices of financial institutions, leading to the passage in May 2009 of the federal Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act.

Full Story Lawyer seeks class action for credit card rates lawsuit – Projo 7 to 7 News Blog | Rhode Island news | The Providence Journal.

Dozens of Architects, Building Professionals See and Hear the Explosive Evidence

AE911Truth hosts third convention booth at Virginia convention

The 2009 AIA “Architecture Exchange” (ArchEX) East convention held in Richmond, VA, November 5-6 had more than 110 exhibitors, most representing building products and services. AE911Truth’s 950 A/E petition signers were quite well represented in our booth by the volunteer team I assembled for the event. We were doing what we do best: disseminating scientific information and facts about the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.

The booth’s volunteers came from all over the East Coast to make possible this critical outreach/educational opportunity, graciously donating their valuable time and money. In addition to the banners and handouts, we had two video loops playing continuously with the destruction of the Twin Towers on one screen and the free-fall of WTC 7 on the other. The large screen showing the demolition of WTC 7 grabbed the attention of most all convention participants passing by — making our booth one of the most popular ones.

As at past conventions, most of the people we spoke with had no idea about the amazing “collapse” of WTC 7, and were perplexed as to why they had not heard of it. After watching the fall of WTC 7, most understood that there is something very wrong with the “official story” put forth by the official 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Full Story Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | AE911Truth.org.

Feds to seize 36-story NYC skyscraper, 4 mosques belonging to Iran-linked group

US federal prosecutors said Thursday they were moving to seize four mosques and a 36-story New York skyscraper from a non-profit Muslim group suspected of having ties to the Iranian government.

The Alavi Foundation has been providing “numerous services” and illegally funneling funds to the Iranian government through money laundering, according to the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.

Bharara filed a forfeiture action with a New York federal court to seize bank accounts owned by the group and a suspected front company, as well as the office tower and Islamic centers in the states of Maryland, Virginia, Texas and California.

“As today’s complaint alleges in great detail, the Alavi Foundation has effectively been a front for the government of Iran,” Bharara said in a statement.

Full Story Feds to seize 36-story NYC skyscraper, 4 mosques belonging to Iran-linked group | Raw Story.

Alleged 9/11 plotters to be tried in New York: report

Five men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks, including the self-proclaimed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be tried in a civilian court in New York, The Washington Post reported Friday.

President Barack Obama had pledged to inform a Guantanamo military judge by Monday whether to try the men before US federal courts or military tribunals — a decision central to his plans to close the controversial facility.

Asked about it in Tokyo, Obama said the Justice Department would make an announcement later in the day, calling it a “prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision.”

“I am absolutely convinced Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice,” Obama said.

The decision would not affect the vast majority of the 215 detainees who remain at Guantanamo Bay, the controversial off-shore prison which Obama had pledged to close by January 22, the Post said, citing a federal official and other sources.

Senior officials have already acknowledged the Obama administration is unlikely to meet the deadline that the president set just two days after taking office. Profiles of alleged 9/11 plotters

Full Story Alleged 9/11 plotters to be tried in New York: report – Yahoo! News.

Blair set to face Iraq war probe

Tony Blair is to be called to give evidence to the Iraq War inquiry early next year, it has been announced.

The former prime minister will be among a series of senior Labour figures to be publicly grilled just months ahead of the general election expected next spring.

Sir John Chilcot, who is chairing the probe, indicated that Mr Blair and other Government ministers would be asked to appear before his committee early in the new year.

Some may be called to give evidence again, in more detailed sessions, but they will not take place until after the election, which must be held in June at the latest. The report will not be published until the end of 2010, or even 2011.

However, the appearance of Mr Blair and other ministers early next year could prove damaging for Labour ahead of the election. There is also an outside chance that Mr Blair might be the new President of the European Union by then, although his prospects for the job are currently slim.

The parents of soldiers killed in Iraq have already warned that they intend to confront the ex-PM at the hearings. In a statement, Sir John said the first five weeks of public evidence sessions, which will begin on November 24, would hear from senior officials and military officers.

Full Story The Press Association: Blair set to face Iraq war probe.

What Chinese Currency Manipulation Looks Like

The dollar exchange with China “defies the laws of monetary physics.”

As President Obama packs for China, I thought I’d draw him a picture of how China is manipulating its currency.

The dollar stays flat against the Chinese Yuan, even as it loses value against other major currencies. The dollar is down to $1.50 per Euro, compared to $1.27 at this time last year (sorry to folks daydreaming about summer in Italy). But the dollar is unchanged against the Yuan (unless one considers 6.836 to 6.827 a drop).

Everyone knows this is happening. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner even used the word “manipulating” with the Senate Finance Committee mere hours before it voted to recommend his confirmation.

The dollar exchange with China “defies the laws of monetary physics.” During this U.S.-led global recession, dollars aren’t worth as much as they once were. The natural physics of exchange makes U.S. goods relatively less expensive for others to buy, but makes foreign goods more expensive for Americans to buy. In a free market for currency, that would help bring accounts back into balance.

Full Story OpEdNews – Article: What Chinese Currency Manipulation Looks Like.

WTO Chief: Rising Unemployment Threatening Trade

The head of the World Trade Organization said in an interview Thursday that the biggest threat to trade worldwide was rapidly rising unemployment rates.

The head of the World Trade Organization said in an interview Thursday that the biggest threat to trade worldwide was rapidly rising unemployment rates and the growing protectionist sentiments that oftentimes accompany very high levels of unemployment.

At meetings of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Singapore, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy told CNBC that he was very concerned about the proliferation of protectionist policies he has seen implemented around the world since the start of the recession, although he acknowledged that it was likely the inevitable response.

“I think the biggest threat is in the deterioration of the jobs market where unemployment is rising hard, then inevitably protectionist functions appear,” Lamy said.

Full Story Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

OPS:  The WTO is a threat to employment

Stocks Down, Double Dip Recession Looming

Despite a solid finish, markets are expected to pull back in the morning session.

Wall Street finished the day Wednesday moving in the right direction yet again. The NASDAQ led the way with a 0.74 percent gain (15.82 points). Following a bit further behind were the S&P and Dow Jones; which gained 0.50 percent (5.50 points) and 0.43 percent (44.29 points) respectively. The Dow now stands at a fresh 13-month high.

Despite a solid finish, markets are expected to pull back in the morning session. According to Bloomberg News stock futures movement showed a distinct downward trend for the opening bell. However, we will likely see a charge in the early afternoon as investors try to continue their rally.

One thing which is likely to boost morale on Wall Street is an initial jobless report which shows week-to-week U.S. unemployment claims falling to a 10-month low. For the week ended November 7 the number of people filing new claims fell, as did the number of people requesting extensions and the number of total individuals collecting unemployment benefits.

Full Story Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Trade Enforcement Priorities Act of 2009

U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Debbie Stabenow introduced the Trade Enforcement Priorities Act of 2009, which would give the federal govt more authority to address trade barriers that undermine American workers and domestic manufacturing.

New Bill Would Give Feds More Authority to Crack Down on Trade Practices that Undermine American Workers, Businesses

Bill Would Reinstate “Super 301″ Authority, Allowing U.S. Trade Rep. to Enforce Trade Laws that Promote Domestic Manufacturing, Jobs

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) today announced the introduction of the Trade Enforcement Priorities Act of 2009, legislation that would give the federal government more authority to address trade barriers that undermine American workers and domestic manufacturing. Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Arlen Specter (D-PA) are original cosponsors of the bill. This announcement comes as Secretary of Commerce Gray Locke, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk address key U.S. trade and economic priorities at the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade in China this week.

“This bill is about requiring our trading partners to live up to their obligations so that trade agreements benefit American workers and businesses instead of shortchanging them,” Brown said. “For too long, our government has shirked its responsibility of enforcing the rules written to prevent lopsided trade agreements, at the expense of American businesses and workers. When U.S. companies abide by the rules and foreign companies don’t, that’s not trade – it’s a foreign jobs program. Reviving Super 301, with an emphasis on fixing unfair trade practices that cost American jobs, will promote exports and economic growth. The U.S. Trade Representative must be an advocate for American workers and businesses, not an apologist for trading partners who aren’t playing by the rules.”

Full Story Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Why Are Hawkish Lawmakers Willing To Pay For An Escalation Of The War But Not For Health Care?

In recent days, heated policy discussions in Washington have largely focused on two topics: a possible escalation of the war in Afghanistan and health care legislation. Both a troop escalation and health care legislation carry significant price tags: roughly $100 billion and $80-$100 billion a year respectively. (It should be noted that health care reform, unlike a troop surge, would cut the deficit.)

In his New York Times column today, columnist Nicholas Kristof asks why hawks claim health reform is “fiscally irresponsible” while enthusiastically supporting a troop surge in Afghanistan, given the fact that fixing our broken health care system is, unlike a troop surge, essential to the health and well-being of Americans:

The health care legislation pays for itself, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the deployment in Afghanistan is unfinanced and will raise our budget deficits and undermine our long-term economic security.

So doesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?

Full Story Think Progress » Why Are Hawkish Lawmakers Willing To Pay For An Escalation Of The War But Not For Health Care?.

Fifteen very bad things Republicans would do if they got their selfish way

Always the political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negatively impactful than ever. Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic. Here’s what an unfettered Republican Party would do “for” America:

1) Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the rich, thereby forcing hard-pressed working families to painfully make up resulting revenue shortfalls.

2) Bust labor unions, cruelly preventing the collective bargaining that’s the key reason why US workers ever won decent wages and benefits.

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

Full Story Fifteen very bad things Republicans would do if they got their selfish way | The Smirking Chimp.

Lab-Grown Meat: The Answer to Animal Cruelty and Environmental

If and when lab-grown meat begins filling the processed-food troughs of the masses, will the Oscar Mayer wiener-eaters of the world even notice?

A philosophy paper recently published in Neuroethics presents the current state of biotech research on the use of genetic engineering to eliminate pain in animals.

Author Adam Shriver, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that it’s our moral obligation to use such technology to reduce the suffering of animals on factory farms.

“If we can’t do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimize the amount of suffering that is caused,” he told New Scientist recently.

Shriver, a vegetarian, says his personal preference would be that nobody eat meat and that factory farms had no reason to exist. But given the demand for meat, he assumes factory farms are here to stay and sees pain-free meat (meat from animals genetically engineered to not feel pain) as a compromise that would at least reduce the amount of suffering in the world.

Full Story Lab-Grown Meat: The Answer to Animal Cruelty and Environmental Ruin From Feedlots? | Health and Wellness | AlterNet.

The Money Man’s Best Friend

William Greider, The Nation

The Obama administration promised to reform the financial system and make it safe for the rest of us, but recent Congressional action is more likely to reset the fuse for another explosive calamity. The time bomb in this case is that arcane financial instrument known as derivatives–the hedging devices that the big banks sell to investors, corporations and other banks to reduce risk or evade the requirements to hold adequate capital on their books.

As the financial meltdown demonstrated, derivatives do not reduce risk. They amplify it and spread it around interlocking networks of unwitting investors. That house of cards collapsed worldwide a year ago. It would be tragic to let the bankers build a new one. Some reformers think all but the simplest, most visible forms of derivatives should be prohibited by law. The president prefers instead to regulate them. Derivatives, his advisers explained, would be less dangerous if they were traded openly in financial markets, just like stocks and bonds. Regulators could then put the brakes on dangerous excess if they saw it developing. Anyway, that was the theory.

But the “reform” legislation approved by the House Financial Services Committee on October 15 is a fiesta of exemptions, exceptions and twisted legalese that effectively defeat the original purpose. Only experts can divine the actual meaning of the bill’s densely worded provisions, and many of them have reacted with disgust. The “entanglements of derivatives exposures” among oversize banks “is the equivalent of the San Andreas Fault of our financial system,” veteran financier Robert Johnson testified at an October 7 hearing on the draft bill. If Congress does not disarm derivatives, he warned, it could lead to another cascade of failure that would give regulators no choice but once again to rush to the rescue of the banks dubbed “too big to fail.”

Full Story The Money Man’s Best Friend.

Watchdog: Big Health Insurer Pushing Its Workers To Lobby Against Public Option

The largest U.S. private health insurer is urging its employees to lobby the Senate against comprehensive healthcare reform that includes a public option, according to an advocacy organization that has unearthed the effort.

United Healthcare, launched a new push this week to get employees to directly lobby senators for weaker health reform. The new campaign, in an e-mail sent to all employees Nov. 10, offers employees template letters to send from company computers on company time and urges them to write grassroots-style letters to the editor to local newspapers.

Consumer Watchdog, an organization that supports healthcare reform that includes a federally run public insurance option, says it obtained the letters and calls on the Senate and newspapers to reject the corporate-directed campaign.

Full Story On The Hill: Watchdog: Big Health Insurer Pushing Its Workers To Lobby Against Public Option.

Financial expert Gerald Celente: American public losing everything to fascist oligarchs

Gerald Celente is one of the world’s best trend forecasters. In the following 4-part radio interview, Celente blasts current political and economic “leadership” as beholden to large corporate and financial interests. As I’ve documented, professionals who work with economics are using unprecedented harsh language in attempt to get Americans’ attention to the loss of trillions of our collective dollars. His comments include (paraphrased):

* “Too big to fail” banks are anathema to real capitalism.

* US economy is like a ruthless mafia ripping-off the American public. The US is being looted.

* US economy is no longer capitalism, it’s oligarchies and fascism.

* We are witnessing the greatest heist in American history, and the banks are doing it.

* “I don’t like getting raped. I don’t like my money going to Goldman Sachs.”

* “Do you have eyes to see and a mind to understand? These crimes are an affront to my intelligence.”

* Bankers are money junkies lying to get their money fix. We have a criminal gang of money junkies dealing scams to get money from us. They never have enough. And for what? For gambling.

* This is no different from the French Revolution.

* The money junkies are in for a shock. The second American Revolution has begun.

* They are not my political leaders; they are political hacks. We are going back to royalty and serfs.

* This country doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, their minds have been deadened looking at presidential reality shows and bowing to political demagogues. What people have to do more than ever is think for themselves.

Full Story Financial expert Gerald Celente: American public losing everything to fascist oligarchs.

Troops sue KBR over toxic waste in Iraq, Afghanistan

Dozens of US military personnel have filed 34 lawsuits against US defense contractor KBR for allegedly incinerating toxic waste and releasing it into the atmosphere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Susan Burke, one of the lawyers bringing the suits, said they have been filed over the past year, 18 of them in recent days.

“All the cases are being put together before a federal judge in Greenbelt, Maryland,” she told AFP Tuesday.

Each of the lawsuits represent several soldiers but were filed on behalf of at least 100,000 others who are alleged to suffer from health problems resulting from exposure to emissions released by the incineration of waste at military bases.

Kellogg Brown and Root and its former parent company Halliburton, which at one time was led by former vice president Dick Cheney, had a government contract to destroy waste at US bases and camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One lawsuit filed in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee charged that they “ignored their contractual obligations and burned vast quantities of unsorted waste in enormous open air burn pits with no safety controls.”

“This misconduct began in 2003 and continues unabated to date,” it alleges.

Full Story AFP: Troops sue KBR over toxic waste in Iraq, Afghanistan.

Advocates Challenge Water Pollution From TVA’s Kingston Plant

Move aimed at protecting Clinch River, already polluted by one billion gallons of coal ash

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – November 12 – Ann Harris, 70, remembers growing up near the Clinch River in Tennessee, frequently swimming and fishing its waters with her family. For the past few decades, the river has changed drastically. Its once clear waters now look and smell like sewage, which led Harris to sell her ancestral home and move away eight years ago.

Now, the Clinch River could be the dumping ground for even more toxic pollution. The Tennessee Valley Authority was granted permission to discharge mercury, selenium, and other chemicals from its Kingston Fossil Plant into the Clinch River — the same river that was devastated on December 22, 2008 when a dam broke, spilling one billion gallons of coal ash into its waters.

Earthjustice, Environmental Integrity Project, and the Sierra Club joined together to appeal this Clean Water Act permit that was granted by the Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation (TDEC) on October 16. The appeal filed today before the Tennessee Water Quality Control Board challenges TDEC’s failure to limit the discharge of toxic pollutants from the Kingston plant.

Full Story Advocates Challenge Water Pollution From TVA’s Kingston Plant | CommonDreams.org.

Free to Lose

Paul Krugman

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, employment has fallen more than 5 percent, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In Country B, employment has fallen only half a percent, and unemployment is only slightly higher than it was before the crisis.

Don’t you think Country A might have something to learn from Country B?

This story isn’t hypothetical. Country A is the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse. Country B is Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses. Germany’s jobs miracle hasn’t received much attention in this country — but it’s real, it’s striking, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. government is doing the right things to fight unemployment.

Here in America, the philosophy behind jobs policy can be summarized as “if you grow it, they will come.” That is, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy. The theory is that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring.

Full Story Op-Ed Columnist – Free to Lose – NYTimes.com.

End Of Japanese Whaling May Be In Sight

Auckland, 13 November, 2009 – A major review of Japanese government spending could spell the end to whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, according to Greenpeace, after the review committee proposed massive cuts in subsidies to a body which funds the so-called scientific research programme.

The Spending Review Committee recommended that the Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Fund (OFCF), which gives loans to the Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) to run the discredited science programme, have all of its funding revoked, except monies needed for loans in 2010.

The OFCF claims it needs 70.4 billion yen (nearly US$80 million) for various programmes, most likely including whaling, in 2010. The Review Committee and Cabinet Office will have the final decision if the proposed operations for 2010 are actually “necessary” or should also be cut.

If the loans for whaling are revoked it is unlikely the ICR can continue to operate (1).

Bunny McDiarmid, Greenpeace New Zealand Executive Director said the potential end to whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary was encouraging news but there would be no celebrations until it was confirmed by the Japanese Government.

Full Story Scoop: End Of Japanese Whaling May Be In Sight.

Origins of ‘Islamophobia’ in US Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism

Len Hart

‘Islamophobia’ in the U.S. is a top down phenomenon encouraged and exploited by the right wing. It is easier to whip up war fever if the populace is irrational, mindless, or unduly fearful of an entire class, religion or even race. A crooked, corrupt or illegitimate state is ‘motivated’ to encourage irrational fears among its populace. This was true of Rome, the Third Reich and it is true of the US. It is, perhaps, one of several harbingers of the fall of empire.

That ‘Islamophobia’ is a needless waste is proven by recent events.

Rev Michael Sinnott was freed in the early hours of Thursday morning. He said he was not harmed by his captors but was now “extremely exhausted”.

“For long periods of time we had nothing at all to do, so we sat around in the hammocks and talked at length about religion,” said Rev Sinnott, who was abducted on October 11 while taking a walk in his garden.

“We discussed ideology and they explained to me what they believed and I then explained what I believed. There were no problems and they treated me very well despite the difficult conditions.

– Freed Irish priest ‘treated well by Muslim kidnappers’

As appears to be the case with most of the US’s most ill-considered ‘adventures’ and propaganda campaigns, Islamaphobia is all about ‘oil’ and how the US may justify its theft! Clearly, US adventures in the middle east are all about oil –a resource desperately needed by the US which had been, at one time, a leading producer.

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: Origins of ‘Islamophobia’ in US Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism.

Justice Dept. Asked For News Site’s Visitor Lists

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”)

Full Story Justice Dept. Asked For News Site’s Visitor Lists – Taking Liberties – CBS News.

Americans are overpaid

For the global economy to rebalance, the pay gap between Americans and the rest of the world must shrink.

U.S. workers are overpaid, relative to equally productive foreigners doing the same work. If the global economy is ever to get back into balance, that gap needs to be closed.

Of course, U.S. workers should earn more than their peers in China, Moldova, or Vietnam. The Americans take advantage of the higher productivity that makes their country rich: better education and infrastructure, abundant capital and a more developed work ethic. But how much higher should U.S. wages be?

The answer depends in large part on two measures: the difference in productivity in making goods that can be traded across borders, and the quantity of such tradable goods. Both measures point to a narrowing wage gap.

There are so many factors working to push up productivity in poor countries. Fast development, cheap capital, and more efficient shipping all help make foreign factories more competitive. Cheap global communication through the Internet reduces all sorts of costs and makes it easy to trade many more goods and especially services.

Full Story breakingviews: Americans are overpaid – Nov. 11, 2009.

OPS: Here it is boys and girls! All out in the open now.

The Conservatives, the Libertarians and Republicans and Traitorous Blue Dog Democrats are making no bones about the “Race to the Bottom” project they have been working on for 30 years.  This is the logical end-game of 30 years of Reaganomics and Reich wing ideology.  They are so close now they can taste it. They are so close they don’t think they can be stopped now. Are YOU still  willing to sacrifice yourself and your Children on the alter of Rightwing ideology or….?

Business Aims to Relax Bans on Products Made with Child & Slave Labor

David Sirota –  From the I Shit You Not File

We’ve seen corporations use “free trade” agreements to quietly camouflage their push for exploitable labor in broader arguments about globalization. What we haven’t seen is corporate special interests openly push for U.S. regulators to openly allow companies to sell goods made with child and slave labor…until now.

Check out this report from Inside U.S. Trade (no link- subscription required) – it’s straight from the I Shit You Not File:

Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA)…

These groups are examining the ramifications of the bill’s provisions, especially in light of the bill’s requirements that a newly created office in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) annually report to Congress on the volume and value of goods made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor that have been stopped at the border.

Business sources say this reporting requirement could cause DHS to more actively seek out imported products made with child labor, forced labor or convict labor…

One source did expect a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee markup of the bill, and speculated that U.S. industry groups and foreign governments could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message.

Full Story Open Left:: From the I Shit You Not File: Business Aims to Relax Bans on Products Made with Child & Slave Labor.

Failing the People on Health Care

By RALPH NADER

Increasing the Corporate Grip

The House of Representatives debate on the health insurance “reform” is over with the Democrats failing the people and the Republicans disgracing themselves as having left their minds back in the third grade (with apologies to third graders).

House Democrats were determined to pass any bill with a nice sounding name, such as “The Affordable Health Care for America Act”. Single payer, full Medicare for all was never on the table even though a majority of citizens, physicians and nurses support that far more efficient, free choice of health care professionals, system.

There are no effective cost containment or prevention measures in the bill. The public option is so weak it will be a receptacle for the sickest of patients among the meager number of people who qualify for its coverage. There are no provisions to reduce the number of people (100,000) who die annually from medical malpractice in hospitals.

Nor is there a major program to reduce the tens of billions of dollars that is stolen yearly out of Medicare from criminals inside and outside the medical profession.

Full Story Ralph Nader: Failing the People on Health Care.

New Fed rules require customer consent on many overdraft fees

Financial institutions soon will be banned from charging many overdraft fees without first getting customers’ consent, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday, the latest in sweeping reforms aimed at protecting consumers who have been hit hard by the recession.

The new regulations cover overdrafts from ATM withdrawals and debit card purchases, officials said. The rules are intended to address widespread complaints that banks allowed consumers to use their cards despite having insufficient funds and then hit them with large fees afterward, even for incidental purchases such as a cup of coffee. Banks will be required to send customers a notice explaining their overdraft protection services and fees before they decide whether to sign up. The regulations take effect July 1, 2010.

The rules represent an ongoing regulatory shift toward increasing protections for the most vulnerable consumers while limiting the reach of financial institutions. The American Bankers Association said the move could result in financial institutions eliminating free checking or requiring customers to carry minimum balances as banks seek to recoup revenue lost from overdraft charges

Full Story New Fed rules require customer consent on many overdraft fees – washingtonpost.com.

Financial firms fight giving government breakup powers

The nation’s biggest financial firms are racing to Capitol Hill to sway lawmakers against legislation that could give the government broad new powers to break up large firms.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, HSBC, Prudential and MetLife are among the big banks and insurers that have had more than half a dozen meetings to lobby lawmakers in just the last 10 days.

The firms are trying to get out ahead of amendments that Reps. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) and Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) are drafting to sweeping financial overhaul legislation under debate in the House Financial Services Committee.

The amendments have not been introduced yet, but their authors aim to give the government greater powers than the Obama administration had originally proposed to limit the size and scope of the country’s biggest financial companies. The government might be able to step in even if the firms are not on the verge of failing.

Full Story Financial firms fight giving government breakup powers – TheHill.com.

The Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar

by Len Hart,

Americans live beyond their means, Asia finances it and China props up the buck so that the US can buy Chinese made stuff at Wal-Mart. Eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA, China will pull the plug on the buck and the bubble will burst.

The CIA’s World Fact Book lists the US at the very bottom of a list with the world’s largest negative Current Account Balance. China, which pegs the Yuan to the dollar, is at the top with the world’s largest positive Current Account Balance.

If the GOP had been correct, US exports should have risen! The ‘balance of trade deficit’ i.e, the NEGATIVE Current Account Balance would have been reduced! If the GOP had been correct, the US could have paid off huge amounts of national debt run up in incompetent and dishonest GOP regimes. The US might have survived decades of conservative budgets which forced the US to borrow from other countries. But –not surprisingly –things have not worked out as the GOP would have you believe.

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: The Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar.

How the US Funds the Taliban

The Nation >>

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Full Story How the US Funds the Taliban.

The Crafting of a Loophole

Of Bailouts and Swaps

Those who respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.
–Mark Twain.

AMENDMENT TO THE PETERSON SUBSTITUTE FOR H.R. 3795 (a) OFFERED BY MR. PETERSON OF MINNESOTA (b) Page 21, after line 25, insert the following:

(19) by adding at the end the following:

‘‘(50) ALTERNATIVESWAP EXECUTIONFACILITY. (c).—The term ‘alternative swap execution facility’ means a service that facilitates (d) the execution ortrading of swaps between two persons through any means of interstate commerce, but which is not a designated contract market (e), including any electronic trade execution or confirmation facility (f) or any voice brokerage facility (g).’’

Now let’s see what went into this legislative sausage.

(a) Everyone agrees that the unregulated “dark markets” of Wall Street’s trading in over-the-counter derivatives such as credit default swaps moved the financial crisis from major problem to total disaster. Currently, most trades in these “products” are privately negotiated on the phone, dealer to dealer. It’s appallingly risky – that’s why we have a multi-trillion dollar bailout. But because the dealers at major banks can quote different prices to different customers, with huge spreads between buy and sell quotes, the banks are making huge profits and want to keep it that way.

So while congress is busy working on reform legislation, Wall Street’s lawyer-lobbyists in Washington are working hard to neutralize such efforts.

Full Story Andrew Cockburn: The Crafting of a Loophole.

Dick Durbin U.S. Senator Illinois – Take Action

Public Option Poll

Virtually every poll now shows most people support a robust public option to expand health insurance choice and offer coverage to more Americans. But there are several interpretations of what a public option should look like, and the American people should not settle for a “public option” in name only.

Please rank your preferences for each form of the public option currently under consideration.

Full Story Dick Durbin U.S. Senator Illinois – Take Action – DickDurbin.com :: Public Option Poll.

Breaking: NY-23 Might Still Be in Play

Ken Rudin is reporting a bizarre situation in the recent New York 23rd Congressional District race. It began as a three-way race between Republican Dede Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens, and Conservative Doug Hoffman, for whom Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson campaigned. Scozzafava dropped out after taking a drumming from fellow Republicans over her reasonable stands on choice and same-sex marriage. Then Owens won. Maybe.

On election night, NY 23 went for Owens over Hoffman by just 5,335 votes…With 93 percent of the vote counted, Hoffman conceded, and Owens was quickly sworn in, on Friday — just in time to cast a what-turned-out-to-be-a-much-needed-vote for the Democrats’ health-care bill on Saturday night.

Now we learn that the vote count in NY 23 is not over. And not only that, the state has yet to certify the election.

The Syracuse Post-Standard’s Mark Weiner reports that a recanvassing of the votes in the 11-county district shows Owens’ lead down to 3,026 votes — 66,698 to 63,672.

And that’s not all. There are still absentee ballots to be counted. John Conklin, the communications director for the New York State Board of Elections says that 10,200 were distributed prior to the election, which includes military and overseas ballots.

Conklin sent a letter to the House Clerk last week, stating that there was no certified winner. But because Owens still had a lead and Hoffman was not challenging the results, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went ahead and had Owens sworn in.

Full Story Pensito Review » Breaking: NY-23 Might Still Be in Play.

UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless

UN special rapporteur says wealthy US ignoring deepening homeless crisis while pumping billions into bank rescues

• Investigator meets homeless victims of American dream

A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as “invisible” a deepening homeless crisis.

Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.

“The housing crisis is invisible for many in the US,” she said. “I learned through this visit that real affordable housing and poverty is something that hasn’t been dealt with as an issue. Even if we talk about the financial crisis and government stepping in in order to promote economic recovery, there is no such help for the homeless.”

Full Story UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless | World news | guardian.co.uk.

Bart Stupak: ‘There Will Be Hell To Pay’ If My Amendment Is Removed

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is warning fellow Democrats not to mess with his restrictive anti-abortion amendment.

Pro-choice outrage was sparked by the inclusion of a provision in the House health care bill making it harder for private insurers to cover abortion. President Obama himself suggested that the language disrupted the status quo and should be taken out of the final legislation. Abortion rights supporters in Congress requested a meeting with the president next week to discuss the issue.

Now Stupak is saying he won’t go easily.

“We won because [the Democrats] need us,” Stupak said. “If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don’t say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won’t vote with them the next time they need us — and that could be the final version of this bill.”

Full Story Bart Stupak: ‘There Will Be Hell To Pay’ If My Amendment Is Removed.

OPS: Stupak is one of the brain-dead fascists members of “The Family”  on C-Street. He needs to be made to pay hell for his actions

Veterans to Obama: Do Not Escalate in Afghanistan

News reports indicate that in the next few weeks, President Obama plans to announce his decision to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

If he does so, he will be making the biggest mistake of his presidency.

Sign our petition to send a clear message to President Obama: Do not send more soldiers into this quagmire:

Full Story YouTube – Veterans to Obama: Do Not Escalate in Afghanistan.

Rep. Steve King calls Obama administration the ‘gangster government.’

Rep. Steve King calls Obama administration the ‘gangster government.’

Rep. Steve King (R-IA), one of the right wing’s most shameless hate-mongers, has propagated all sorts of baseless attacks on Obama. For example, he has said Obama will make America a “totalitarian dictatorship,” that Obama was raised by polygamists, and that “radical Islamists” would be “dancing in the streets” if Obama was elected. In an interview with the Washington News Observer, King offered his latest diatribe, calling Obama’s team of advisers the “gangster government”:

Valerie Jarrett is a product of Chicago politics. This is power politics through Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, son and daughter of Saul Alinsky, linked up with Mayor Daley, the one that actually hired Michelle Obama and put her into that link, which may have well been the link that put Barack Obama into that machine. The Chicago Machine, we know what it is. Someone called it gangster government. In Chicago, you have gangester government and Valerie Jarrett’s been in the middle of that. She’s been brokering power for a long time.

Watch it:

Full Story Think Progress » Rep. Steve King calls Obama administration the ‘gangster government.’.

Rick Perry Caters To The Far Right: Obama Is ‘Interested In Punishing Texas’ And ‘Hellbent’ On Socialism

Yesterday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) spoke to a meeting of the Midland County Republican Women. He used his speech to portray himself as a stalwart right-wing candidate and endear himself to the Tea Party activists, since he’s locked in a tough fight with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX) for the GOP gubernatorial nomination for 2010. In his remarks, Perry accused the Obama administration of trying to single out Texas for special punishment and urged activists to stage even bigger Tea Parties:

PERRY: This is an administration that I see punishing this state. I say it’s time for us to stand up. I say it’s time to make Tea Parties twice as big as what they were. [...]

If you don’t think those Tea Parties really worked, let me tell you something: When they all came home in August and were going to different places and town hall meetings, they got an earful. Then they went back to Washington, DC, and the Senate voted that public option down in Senate committee, with a majority Democrats in the Senate and that committee. You better believe they’re listening.

This is an administration hellbent on taking America toward a socialist country, and we ought not to be afraid to say that.

Watch it:

Full Story Think Progress » Rick Perry Caters To The Far Right: Obama Is ‘Interested In Punishing Texas’ And ‘Hellbent’ On Socialism.