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Saturday, November 1, 2008

t r u t h o u t | Bio Lab in Galveston Raises Concerns

i believe that the idea of making lots and lots of money makes republicans stupid.  sometimes i just shake my head in wonder at the stupidity of people. of all the barren places in this country to put a bio lab, why on an island prone to hurricanes? it's insanity! If you like the idea of wiping out the population of Texas with Ebola, or the plague, maybe this doesn't sound too crazy. i remember one guy on tv bragging about his hurricane proof house. able to take winds up to 300 mph. after katrina there was nothing but a foundation where his hurricane proof house used to sit.


Galveston, Texas - Much of the University of Texas medical school on this island suffered flood damage during Hurricane Ike, except for one gleaming new building, a national biological defense laboratory that will soon house some of the most deadly diseases in the world.

    How a laboratory where scientists plan to study viruses like Ebola and Marburg ended up on a barrier island where hurricanes regularly wreak havoc puzzles some environmentalists and community leaders.

    "It's crazy, in my mind," said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in Houston. "I just find an amazing willingness among the people on the Texas coast to accept risks that a lot of people in the country would not accept."

    Officials at the laboratory and at the National Institutes of Health, which along with the university is helping to pay for the $174 million building, say it can withstand any storm the Atlantic hurls at it.

    Built atop concrete pylons driven 120 feet into the ground, the seven-floor laboratory was designed to stand up to 140-mile-an-hour winds. Its backup generators and high-security laboratories are 30 feet above sea level.

    "The entire island can wash away and this is still going to be here," Dr. James W. LeDuc, the deputy director of the laboratory, said. "With Hurricane Ike, we had no damage. The only evidence the hurricane occurred was water that was blown under one of the doors and a puddle in the lobby."

    The project enjoyed the strong support of three influential Texas Republicans: President Bush, a former Texas governor; Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison; and the former House majority leader, Tom DeLay, whose district includes part of Galveston County. Officials at the National Institutes of Health, however, say the decision to put the lab here was based purely on the merits. It is to open Nov. 11.

    Dr. LeDuc acknowledged that hurricanes would disrupt research. Each time a hurricane approaches the island, scientists will have to stop their experiments and exterminate many of the viruses and bacteria they are studying.

    And Hurricane Ike did not provide the worst-case test the laboratory will someday face, some critics say. Ike's 100-m.p.h. winds were on the low side for a hurricane, yet it still flooded most of the island's buildings. The university's teaching hospital, on the same campus as the lab, has been shut down for more than a month.

    "The University of Texas should consider locating its biohazards lab away from Galveston Island and out of harm's way," Ken Kramer, director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said. "As destructive as it was, Hurricane Ike was only a Category 2 storm. A more powerful storm would pose an even greater threat of a biohazards release."

    The laboratory is one of two the Bush administration pushed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The second is being built at Boston University Medical Center, where it met stiff community resistance.

    Not so in Texas, where there was hardly a whimper of protest. For starters, the University of Texas Medical Branch is one of the largest employers on the island of 57,000 people.

    In addition, the leaders of the medical school skillfully sold community leaders and politicians on the high-tech safety measures at the lab and on the economic boon to Galveston, an impoverished town in need of the 300 jobs the laboratory would bring.

    University leaders met twice a month with community leaders for several years to dispel fears of pathogens escaping. Then they created a permanent advisory committee of residents that included some of their critics.

    The campaign to win over residents was effective. In 2004, the university built a small laboratory and won federal approval to study extremely lethal pathogens there. The smaller laboratory - named for Dr. Robert E. Shope, a virus expert - helped persuade federal officials it was feasible to erect the national laboratory next to it.

    Nonetheless, some community members remain skeptical about the safety measures.

    "It is not a geographically good location, and the safety measures are only as good as the people who work there," said Jackie Cole, a former City Council member who now serves on a citizen's advisory board for the laboratory.

    Other environmentalists who might have fought the project were bogged down in a battle against a liquid natural gas plant that was to be built in Texas City, a refinery town across a narrow channel from the island.

    "It kind of went under the radar," said Bob Stokes, who heads the Galveston Bay Foundation, a group dedicated to cleaning up water pollution.

    Dr. LeDuc and other scientists at the laboratory say it is almost impossible for diseases to escape. The air pressure in the laboratories is kept lower than in surrounding hallways. Even if the double doors into the laboratories are opened accidentally, air rushes in, carrying pathogens up and away through vents to special filters, which are periodically sterilized with formaldehyde and then incinerated.

    All the laboratory tables have hoods that suck contaminated air through the vents to the filters, as do the rooms themselves. Liquid waste, feces and urine go to tanks on the first floor, where it is heated to a temperature at which nothing can survive before being put into the sewage system.

    Other waste - carcasses of laboratory animals and disposable lab equipment — is sterilized in autoclaves, giant steam-pressure cookers, before being incinerated off site, Dr. LeDuc said.

    When hurricanes threaten the island, researchers will shut down their experiments at least 24 hours before landfall, decontaminate the labs and then move the stocks of deadly pathogens into freezers on upper floors, where they are kept at 70 below zero, Dr. Joan Nichols, an associate director of research, said.

    Even if the emergency power system were to fail, the freezers can keep the samples of killer diseases dormant for about four days, she said.

    The precautions are necessary. The laboratory will do research into some of the nastiest diseases on the planet, among them Ebola, anthrax, tularemia, West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, bubonic plague, avian influenza and typhus.

    In the top-level secure laboratories, where deadly filoviruses like Ebola are studied, the scientists work in pressurized spacesuits inside rooms with airtight steel doors. Before leaving the secured area, they take a chemical shower for eight minutes in their suits, then a conventional shower, Dr. LeDuc said.

    The university's bid for the laboratory benefited from friends in Washington. Mr. DeLay, who resigned from Congress in 2006, pushed hard to bring the project to his district, as did Mrs. Hutchison, who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

    On a visit to Galveston with Mr. Delay in 2005, Mr. Bush said: "This hospital is going to be the Texas center for bioshield research, to help us make sure that our country is well prepared as we engage in the war on terror. No better place, by the way, to do substantial research than right here at the University of Texas."

    Galveston's medical school has long had a top-notch faculty in infectious diseases; the school's proposal beat out bids from the University of California, Davis, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Wadsworth Center in Albany, among others.

    Dr. Rona Hirschberg, a senior program officer at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, an agency of the National Institutes of Health, said politics played no role in the decision to build the lab here. The threat of hurricanes was outweighed, she said, by the presence of some of the best virologists in the country, she said.

    "You could put it out in the middle of nowhere and it would be a safe, secure facility," Dr. Hirschberg, a molecular biologist, said. "But the research wouldn't get done."



t r u t h o u t | Bio Lab in Galveston Raises Concerns

Pigs with Mouse Genes: How GM Animals May Be Entering the Food Chain without Labeling | Health and Wellness | AlterNet

there are few things that really get me boiling.  Needless wars and messin with my food are two biggies.  you can believe the FDA will be hearing from me about this issue.  They don't have the right to manipulate my natural diet.  I don't give them permission.  I want wholesome natural food that isn't "modified" to grow at twice normal time because of manipulation of hormones or anything else.

On September 18, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released guidance on a regulatory framework for approving the entrance of genetically modified (GM) animals into the nation's food supply. The term "guidance" is agency-speak for the law will look something like this. Put another way, the FDA has offered advice, considerably weaker than legally enforceable regulation. With the announcement, a 60-day period for public comment was opened.  

The only GM animal currently licensed for sale in the U.S. is the glow-in-the-dark zebra fish, a pet. With the exception of a few drunk frat boys, this fish is not expected to be consumed by humans, and its need for warm water precludes any possibility of it escaping into the wild. But the glowing zebra fish will soon have some GM company in stores near you.  

The new guidance is primarily directed at animals genetically modified for food-production purposes, but it's based on the approval process used for animals that are genetically modified for pharmacological purposes, such as pigs designed to grow human livers, or goats that produce insulin in their milk. Under the guidance, all GM animals, be they of the farm or pharma variety, will be classified as drugs.  

Technically, the drug is the bit of foreign DNA that's spliced into the animal's cells, and the FDA will grant or deny approval to just those bits of DNA, not to the whole organism. This creates a dangerous regulatory gray area, says Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, who calls this arrangement a "fiction."  

"The gene is in every cell of the animal, and regulating the animal is the only tool they have to control these genes, but they say they're only regulating the gene, not the animal," he says. "Drugs don't get loose and breed with each other. Animals do."  

As a case in point he mentions the "AquAdvantage" line of GM salmon created by Aqua Bounty Technologies of Waltham, Mass., in 2001. The regulated "drug" in this case is a gene that makes salmon secrete extra growth hormone, causing the fish to reach maturity in 18 months instead of 30.  

Should any of these fish escape into the wild, they would take their recombinant genes with them, posing unknown -- and therefore, Hanson says, unacceptable -- risk to wild salmon stocks and the ecosystems they inhabit.  

It's rumored that AquAdvantage salmon will be the first GM food animal approved for sale by the FDA. Meanwhile, a growing number of GM animals are being developed for the food market, says Hanson, and given this fact he thinks an approval process is long overdue. But while steps toward the creation of a regulatory framework for GM food animals are steps in the right direction, he says the FDA's guidance as currently written leaves much to be desired.  

"They're not offering good peer review, because the drug-approval process is held in secret," he says. This is ostensibly to protect trade secrets, but it's still a bad idea, says Hanson, who suggests that lack of transparency could compromise the integrity of the approval process.  

"The genetically modified food industry is a small world," he says. "You're going to have someone who used to work for a company who now works for FDA, or serves on its review panel, in the position to approve something from their former company."  

Many other food activists, policy analysts, and interested parties are also taking issue with the FDA's stance, contained in the guidance, against the labeling of foods containing GM animal products. Only foods that can be shown to have dietary properties different from their non-GM counterparts require labeling.  

"They're talking about pigs that are going to have mouse genes in them, and this is not going to be labeled?" says Jean Halloran, director of food policy for Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine. "We are close to speechless on this."  

Another concern is how the proprietary rights associated with modified genes will be enforced. Because genetic modifications are easily traceable, small livestock producers who introduce GM animals into their herds -- or who acquire animals with modified genes unintentionally -- might someday receive an unexpected bill for the use of those genes if they are traced to future generations of animals.  

Producers of GM seeds have already sued farmers on such grounds, including cases in which the defendant's crops were contaminated by someone else's GM pollen from neighboring fields. Hanson says most cattle growers aren't paying enough attention to the prospect.  

"The breeding industry is mostly concerned with tracking animals descended ffrom clones," he says. Clones are genetic copies of other animals, but don't necessarily have foreign DNA inserted. But most GM mammals, Hanson points out, are clones. "Once you get it right," he says, "you clone it."  

On September 19, the day after the FDA's "Draft Guidance on the Regulation of Genetically Modified Animals" was released, the USDA announced a call for public comment on the need to regulate the movement of GM animals to ensure they don't mix with wild animals or other livestock.  

For producers and consumers alike, the onslaught of new biotech developments and the rapidly expanding world of associated potential consequences presents a near-overwhelming amount of information to digest.  

But if ever there was an important time to comment on food and food safety, says Hanson, "this is it."


Pigs with Mouse Genes: How GM Animals May Be Entering the Food Chain without Labeling | Health and Wellness | AlterNet

t r u t h o u t | Who Watches While the US Invades - Again

Has anyone in Washington noticed? The new US raids into Pakistan and Syria are, as was the invasion of Iraq, in blatant violation of international law. But who's keeping track of this sort of thing? Certainly not senior US officials, who apparently have weighed the negative consequences of illegal military operations against their perceived benefits and opted in favor of the latter.

    Washington officials apparently reason that relations with Syria, already damaged over the attacks, may well be mended with the arrival of a new occupant in the Oval Office, given that country's desire for an improved relationship with the United States. Possibly, but not certain. And what may work with Syria may not work with Pakistan; further, what may work with leaders of these countries may not work with their enraged citizens. There is no question that US raids launched from Iraqi soil only add to this latest downward spiral into Middle Eastern mud.

    It is fair to ask if anyone in Washington has noticed of late that Chapter VII of the UN Charter clearly establishes the rules for one country attacking another, rules to which this country is a signatory. International law provides three reasons for use of arms against an enemy - defense against imminent military attack, an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or a UN Security Council resolution.

    (Regime change, now used as justification for having invaded Iraq, is specifically precluded as a reason for war. But again, no one seems to be noticing that toppling Saddam became a flawed justification once Weapons of Mass Destruction proved to be among the missing.)

    Perhaps concern over these new forays across foreign borders is unwarranted. Certainly, selective raids against Syria and Pakistan hardly amount to war. But they are acts of aggression, plain and simple. The fact that this sort of cross-border incident is commonplace around the world is no reason for the United States to continue this sort of operation.

    The announced objective for doing so is killing or capturing al-Qaida terrorists; the downside is the possibility of killing innocent civilians - children in schools, families celebrating a wedding, farmers working their fields. Add to the political calculus the certainty, not the possibility, of further infuriating and alienating other countries, both those considered friendly and those not so friendly. At this moment in history, it's hard to imagine a worsening of America's image abroad, but Washington seems determined to do so before the present administration leaves office.

    Our recent book, "The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War," the story of British secret service officer Katharine Gun's efforts to at least derail the Iraq war, offers two relevant quotes worth thinking about, given these new attacks on Middle Eastern countries.

    Richard Perle, sharing bellicose thoughts before the Iraq war, a war he saw as being insufficient to get the job done, said:

    "No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq ... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

    Most Americans must doubt that Perle's children's choir will perform as he predicted. Instead, they will consider his expectation consistent with a failed political culture, one that finds illegal "total war" preferable to "clever diplomacy."

    Another especially relevant quote coming from the Katharine Gun story is attributed to CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was at the NSA helm in 2003 when Gun revealed that agency's illegal spy operation against members of the UN Security Council. It also has to do with a political culture:

    "I'm not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power ... making secrecy and power the bogeymen of political culture, that's not a bad society."

    But it is. At the moment, Hayden-esque bogeymen seem to be making decisions that are turning much of the world against the United States - decisions paid for in the currency of thousands upon thousands of lives lost and maimed, of millions displaced, of America's shattered image abroad, and of new raids of doubtful legality.

    There is no question that Perle's position on the Middle East was shared by a significant number of his pro-war colleagues, many still in high places in Washington. After more than five years of war, his words cast an ominous shadow over strategic planning sessions in Washington. And they bring to mind dangerous bogeypersons bent on total war, perhaps not just raids on Syria and Pakistan.

    Is anyone noticing?


t r u t h o u t | Who Watches While the US Invades - Again

Rove appointee sends an ugly message to would-be Obama assassins | Crooks and Liars

Rove appointee sends an ugly message to would-be Obama assassins

There certainly were a lot of disturbing questions raised by Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid's refusal to prosecute three white-supremacist tweakers caught conspiring to assassinate Barack Obama before this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Brad Jacobson and Nicole also reported on this.)

Now, as Jacobson reports at Raw Story, those questions are taking on a serious cast:

Interviews with numerous legal experts suggest that Colorado US Attorney Troy Eid misled reporters and diverged from state law when declining to prosecute any of the three men arrested in Denver for threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Eid, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006, declined to prosecute the three men on charges of threatening to assassinate Barack Obama during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, saying that the suspects were "just a bunch of meth heads" and their words failed to meet the legal standard for "true threat."

... But multiple legal experts interviewed by RAW STORY -- including criminal and constitutional law scholars, former Assistant US Attorneys and Denver-area defense lawyers also familiar with Colorado state law -- agreed that voluntary intoxication is not exculpatory and that such a claim, especially for a prosecutor, is unorthodox. While it may be presented in an effort to reduce a sentence after a conviction, experts say it is normally the domain of defense counsel.

"It's very unusual," says Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School professor who also writes for Harper's Magazine. "Basically, you have a US Attorney trotting out the sort of arguments that defense counsel makes on a plea for reduced sentencing."

Legal experts say that Eid's definition of true threat directly conflicts with the statue covering threats to presidential candidates, 18 U.S.C. 879, which defines the threat as "whoever knowingly and willfully threatens to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon a major candidate for the office of President or Vice President, or a member of the immediate family of such candidate."

Be sure to read the whole thing.

There should be a congressional investigation of Eid's misfeasance in this case, because it sends a chilling message: If you're a white supremacist who wants to target Obama for assassination -- as a number of them appear to be doing -- Bush's Justice Department will give you a slap on the wrist and look the other way should you get caught.

I doubt that was what they intended, but that has been the end result.


Rove appointee sends an ugly message to would-be Obama assassins | Crooks and Liars

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics | | AlterNet

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter -- stumbling a little, using long words -- carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -- men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton -- were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion -- in particular fundamentalist religion -- makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy -- now known as Social Darwinism -- of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that 1 in 4 of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite -- like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush -- has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the U.S. education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.


The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics | | AlterNet

The Massive Wealth Redistribution that Doesn't Bother John McCain | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Thank you, John McCain, for shoving the issue of "redistributing wealth" back into political primetime. Just two problems. You're only a quarter-century or so late -- and you have everything backwards.

Senator McCain, you're attacking Senator Obama for trying to "redistribute" our nation's wealth with his plan to raise taxes on America's rich. But America's wealth is already being redistributed. Over recent decades, in fact, we've seen here in the United States the most massive redistribution of wealth in world history -- and you haven't said a word to complain.

This redistribution has been taking dollars out of the pockets of average Americans and stuffing them into the pockets of the power-suits and wheeler-dealers who sit in America's corporate executive suites and play money games on Wall Street.

Just how massive has this redistribution -- up the income ladder -- actually been?

In 2006, the most recent year with IRS figures available, 90 percent of American families took home less than $104,000. Families in this bottom 90 percent made, on average, $30,659. That's 2 percent less than the bottom 90 percent of American families averaged, after adjusting for inflation, back in 1973.

Meanwhile, since 1973, the wallets of Americans at the top of the income ladder have been swelling monumentally. The top 1 percent in our country, analyses of IRS data by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez indicate, have seen their incomes more than triple. The incomes of the top tenth of 1 percent -- taxpayers who averaged $6.3 million in income in 2006 -- have more than quintupled.

Let's look at this whopping redistribution from another angle. Let's assume that none of this redistribution had ever taken place. Let's assume that we had the same exact distribution of income in the United States today as we had back in 1973.

If that were the case, where would average Americans be? The simple answer: Much better off than they currently are.

If the redistribution upwards since 1973 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year.

John McCain, so far as we know, has never criticized this colossal redistribution of wealth we have as a nation been experiencing. That may be because this redistribution -- to the rich -- really started revving up when his hero, Ronald Reagan, became President in 1981.

The rich were paying taxes on their income over $400,000 at a 70 percent rate when Reagan entered the White House. Right now, on that income, they pay taxes at no more than 35 percent.

And that's before loopholes. After exploiting loopholes, our richest pay taxes at about half that rate. In 2005, for instance, the top 400 income-earners in the United States took home an average $214 million. They paid only 18.5 percent of that in federal income tax.

Barack Obama wants to hike the top tax rate on income in the highest tax bracket up to 39.6 percent. For proposing this modest increase, he's now getting blasted by the McCain campaign as someone will be "taking your money and giving it to someone else." Obama, McCain charges, wants to "penalize success."

Penalize success? Don't America's workers contribute to the success of the American economy? Just since 2000 alone, the productivity of workers in the United States has increased a hefty 18 percent, notes the Economic Policy Institute. Yet incomes for working Americans aren't now even keeping up with inflation.

That's the real penalty for success in the U.S. economy today. But if you're sitting way at the top of America's economic ladder looking down, this penalty can be awfully hard to see. John McCain, sad to say, just doesn't see it.
The Massive Wealth Redistribution that Doesn't Bother John McCain | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

It Is Now Absolutely Crystal Clear That Republican Rule Is Dangerous and Authoritarian | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.

Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.

Authoritarian conservatives are primarily anti-government, except where they believe the government can be useful to impose moral or social order (for example, with respect to matters like abortion, prayer in schools, or prohibiting sexually-explicit information from public view). Similarly, Republicans' limited-government attitude does not apply regarding national security, where they feel there can never be too much government activity - nor are the rights and liberties of individuals respected when national security is involved. Authoritarian Republicans do oppose the government interfering with markets and the economy, however -- and generally oppose the government's doing anything to help anyone they feel should be able to help themselves.

In my book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches, I set forth the facts regarding the consequences of the Republicans' controlling government for too many years. No Republican -- nor anyone else, for that matter -- has refuted these facts, and for good reason: They are irrefutable.

The McCain/Palin Ticket Perfectly Fits the Authoritarian Conservative Mold

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.

In my book Conservatives Without Conscience, I set forth the traits of authoritarian leaders and followers, which have been distilled from a half-century of empirical research, during which thousands of people have voluntarily been interviewed by social scientists. The touch points in these somewhat-overlapping lists of character traits provide a clear picture of the characters of both John McCain and Sarah Palin.

McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:

* dominating

* opposes equality

* desirous of personal power

* amoral

* intimidating and bullying

* faintly hedonistic

* vengeful

* pitiless

* exploitive

* manipulative

* dishonest

* cheats to win

* highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)

* mean-spirited

* militant

* nationalistic

* tells others what they want to hear

* takes advantage of "suckers"

* specializes in creating false images to sell self

* may or may not be religious

* usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits -- which is why a McCain presidency is so likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.

Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. Specifically, such followers can be described as follows:

* submissive to authority

* aggressive on behalf of authority

* highly conventional in their behavior

* highly religious

* possessing moderate to little education

* trusting of untrustworthy authorities

* prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals and followers of religions other than their own)

* mean-spirited

* narrow-minded

* intolerant

* bullying

* zealous

* dogmatic

* uncritical toward chosen authority

* hypocritical

* inconsistent and contradictory

* prone to panic easily

* highly self-righteous

* moralistic

* strict disciplinarians

* severely punitive

* demanding loyalty and returning it

* possessing little self-awareness

* usually politically and economically conservative/Republican

The leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism, a man who devoted his career to developing hard empirical data about these people and their beliefs, is Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer, a social scientist based in Canada, flushed out these typical character traits in decades of testing.

Altemeyer believes about 25 percent of the adult population in the United States is solidly authoritarian (with that group mostly composed of followers, and a small percentage of potential leaders). It is in these ranks of some 70 million that we find the core of the McCain/Palin supporters. They are people who are, in Altemeyer's words, are "so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds."

The Problem with Electing Authoritarian Conservatives

What is wrong with being an authoritarian conservative? Well, if you want to take the country where they do, nothing. "They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result," Altemeyer told me. "The problem is that these authoritarian followers are much more active than the rest of the country. They have the mentality of 'old-time religion' on a crusade, and they generously give money, time and effort to the cause. They proselytize; they lick stamps; they put pressure on loved ones; and they revel in being loyal to a cohesive group of like thinkers. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going to go away."

I would nominate McCain's "Joe the Plumber" as a new poster-boy of the authoritarian followers. He is a believer, and he has signed on. On November 4, 2008, we will learn how many more Americans will join the ranks of the authoritarians.

Frankly, the fact that the pre-election polls are close - after eight years of authoritarian leadership from Bush and Cheney, and given its disastrous results -- shows that many Americans either do not realize where a McCain/Palin presidency might take us, or they are happy to go there. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, for there is only one way to deal with these conservative zealots: Keep them out of power.

This election should be a slam dunk for Barack Obama, who has run a masterful campaign. It was no small undertaking winning the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and in doing so, he has shown without any doubt (in my mind anyway) that he is not only qualified to be president, but that he might be a once-in-a-lifetime leader who can forever change the nation and the world for the better.

If Obama is rejected on November 4th for another authoritarian conservative like McCain, I must ask if Americans are sufficiently intelligent to competently govern themselves. I can understand authoritarian conservatives voting for McCain, for they know no better. It is well-understood that most everyone votes with his or her heart, not his or her head. Polls show that 81 percent of Americans "feel" (in their hearts and their heads) that our country is going the wrong way. How could anyone with such thoughts and feelings vote for more authoritarian conservatism, which has done so much to take the nation in the wrong direction?

We will all find out on (or about) November 5th.


It Is Now Absolutely Crystal Clear That Republican Rule Is Dangerous and Authoritarian | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

Les Enragés.org: Corporate Welfare

Corporate Welfare

...Worse Than You Could Have Imagined

Was anybody wondering how the DJIA miraculously rose by nearly 900 points yesterday on the news of the lowest consumer confidence results since that benchmark has been measured? It just doesn't make any sense unless there's some serious market manipulation going on. I asked myself what was happening and ran into something called the PPT, an entity whose very existence confirms some of my worst fears about how the world works.

Have you ever heard of the Plunge Protection Team? That's OK, until today neither had I. Officially it's called the Working Group on Financial Markets, and is a mechanism for manipulating the markets that is shockingly apposite to anything resembling free market principles - all the more so because it was set up under the Reagan administration. Wikipedia tells you what it is:
The Working Group on Financial Markets (also, President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the Working Group, and colloquially the Plunge Protection Team) was created by Executive Order 12631, signed on March 18, 1988 by United States President Ronald Reagan.

The Group was established explicitly in response to events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987 ("Black Monday") to give recommendations for legislative and private sector solutions for "enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of [United States] financial markets and maintaining investor confidence".[1]

As established by Executive Order 12631, the Working Group consists of:
  • The Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee (as Chairman of the Working Group)
  • The Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or his designee
  • The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or his designee; and
  • The Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or his designee.
The current holders of the listed offices are respectively Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Chris Cox and Walter Lukken. I'm sure you've heard about the first three. I have a theory about why you haven't heard of Lukken, the CFTC's acting chairman, which I'll tell you later.

Wiki's explanation of what the Working Group is is straightforward and uncontroversial. What it does is another thing entirely. Indeed the reasoning behind the PPT epithet brings out conspiracy theory accusations:
"Plunge Protection Team" was originally the headline for an article in The Washington Post on February 23, 1997, and has since become a colloquial term used by some mainstream publications to refer to the Working Group. Initially, the term was used to express the opinion that the Working Group was being used to prop up the markets during downturns. Financial writers for British newspapers The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, along with U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and writers Kevin Phillips (who claims “no personal firsthand knowledge” and is “not interested in becoming a conspiracy investigator”) and John Crudele, have charged the Working Group with going beyond their legal mandate. Claims about the Working Group generally include that it is an orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures—acts which are forbidden by law. However, these articles usually refer to the Working Group using moral suasion to attempt to convince banks to buy stock index futures.
Let's first address this idea that the characterization of the PPT as market manipulators using tax dollars is a conspiracy theory. The pertinent question to ask is "if the group cannot buy or sell stocks, how can it intervene to prop up the market?" And unless you can come up with a believable answer to that, the whole conspiracy theory idea evaporates. Which, by the way, puts you by the fire in the conspiracy camp. And me, I'm not buying the moral suasion argument, so pass the coffee please.

Anyway, the recent $700 BILLION government intervention in the banks renders the question moot. Having a direct interest in the banks through the TARP program, the government can directly intervene in the markets through something rather less moral than mere suasion. And all apparently with nothing approaching meaningful oversight.

Unlike Wikipedia, this extremely persuasive article from WebofDebt.com makes no bones about what is really going on in the markets. Note that it was published last Saturday, before the inexplicable Dow Jones Miracle occurred. The author, Ellen Brown, was responding to the fact that Wall Street somehow managed to weather the storm relatively speaking on Friday after "Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell nearly 10% during the [previous] night, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 8%, and Germany’s and Britain’s fell 5%".

Traders prepared for the worst, but remarkably, disaster was averted. The U.S. market fell only 3.5%, just another “ordinary” bearish day.

Why the more modest drop in the U.S., where the financial debacle originated and should have hit hardest? Suspicious observers saw the covert hand of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), the group set up under President Reagan to maintain market “stability” by manipulating markets behind the scenes. Bill Murphy commented in LeMetropoleCafe.com:
“Today the Muppets on CNBC were remarking how well our market acted, not falling apart as expected. All day long they spoke of how our market was acting differently today than every other stock market in the world. Well hello, the other countries don’t have a PPT, which is WHY our market is so different.

“There are those who might think what the PPT is doing is right. What they don’t realize is their making ‘Everything is fine’ for so long, and not allowing the market to trade freely . . . like allowing the stock market to fall the way it should, has kept the individual in the market . . . when they might have been SCARED out some time ago.”
In response to Bill Saporito’s comment in Time it might be countered that Henry Paulson’s Plunge Protection Team is quite adept at rigging an economy. The difference between an acknowledged socialist state and the stealth socialism we have in the U.S. today is that in a socialist state, everyone expects the market to be rigged and operates accordingly. In a rigged pseudo-capitalist economy, investors are easily separated from their money because they expect the market to follow “free market principles” based on “supply and demand.” They are seduced into “pump and dump” schemes – artificial manipulations that allow insiders to unload stock at a high price or buy it at a low price – because they trust in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is supposed to automatically set things right in a market left to its own devices. The market today is indeed controlled by an invisible hand, but it is not necessarily serving the interests of small investors.
To quote more of this article might go beyond fair use, and I would anyway be tempted to quote the entire thing, so instead I will urge everyone to read the whole thing, maybe twice or more, because it does get pretty technical. Most important is that you understand what a 'pump and dump' scheme is, and that it always favors the big player and milks everyone else. The idea that the government is using your tax dollars to help transfer wealth out of small player's (such as retirement investment accounts) hands into the pockets of the already obscenely rich should eventually sink in.

As Ms. Brown lays it out, it's a case of "Plunge Protection for Some, Plunge Creation for Others." Her home-page (promoting her book Web of Debt) contains some excerpts from the book, which must have been published about a year ago - there are reviews from November of 2007. There is little doubt that she saw then what is happening now. And it don't look good.
To keep up appearances, the "Plunge Protection Team" has been authorized by presidential order to use U.S. taxpayer money to manipulate markets to make them appear healthier than they are, and lately it has been working overtime. But official assurances of a "soft landing" are mere window dressing, aimed at preventing another worldwide depression as home buyers and stock market investors stampede for the exits.
It's particularly galling that this brand of corporate welfare is going on while the McCain campaign rails on about Barack Obama's socialism. Apparently it's not the idea of the government redistributing wealth that bothers them, just the fact that it's going to someone who actually needs it. Anyway, it's all business as usual under the crony capitalist operating principles of the Republican Corporate Feudal State. Socializing the losses while privatizing the profits.

This whole story should give you the right to call BULL-SHIT!! to any Republican who ever opens their pie-hole and lets the words 'free market' emit from it, in perpetuity. It's worth a read if for no other reason than that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, and I said I'd tell you why you've never heard of Walter Lukken, didn't I? It's simple. He's the head of the CFTC, whose mandate under the Commodity Exchange Act is to prohibit fraudulent conduct in the trading of futures contracts. A regulatory agency. If you had heard of Walter Lukken it would have meant that he was doing his job. Which might have meant that this economic meltdown would never have occurred. Like the OSM that purportedly regulates the mining industry, or the EPA that supposedly protects the environment, the CFTC has been reduced to an office with one guy doing crossword puzzles and playing paddle-ball all day - regulators are the Maytag repairmen of the Bush administration. Business. As. Frickin'. Usual.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Les Enragés.org: Corporate Welfare

Thursday, October 30, 2008

t r u t h o u t | Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents

The Colombian government has special secret military forces that go around the country killing union and labor leaders because he wants to keep his people oppressed so that when the U.S. finally gets its free trade agreement they will have a docile population to enslave.  The FARC are the protectors of the peasantry and labor and are therefore labeled "terrorists", not only by the Colombian government but by the U.S. who want the leftest group destroyed so that there won't be any popular labor uprising against our American corporations that are sucking the country dry.   by the way, the man accused at the bottom of this article is uribe's brother.
an article.
http://www.truthout.org/103008L
 Soachaa, Colombia - Julian Oviedo, a 19-year-old construction worker in this gritty patchwork of slums, told his mother on March 2 that he was going to talk to a man about a job offer. A day later, Mr. Oviedo was shot dead by army troops some 350 miles to the north. He was classified as a subversive and registered as a combat kill.

   Colombia's government, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the killings of Mr. Oviedo and dozens of other young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light in recent weeks. Some were vagrants, others street vendors and manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: being catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces.

   Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia's security forces are increasingly murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing them in guerrilla fatigues.

   With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a grisly facet of Colombia's long internal war against leftist insurgencies.

   The deaths have called into question the depth of Colombia's recent strides against the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and have begun to haunt the nation's military hierarchy.

   On Wednesday, President Alvaro Uribe's government announced that it had fired more than two dozen officers and soldiers - including three generals - in connection with the deaths of Mr. Oviedo and 10 other young men from Soacha, whose bodies were recently discovered in unmarked graves in a distant combat zone. The purge came after an initial shake-up last Friday, when the army command relieved three colonels from their duties.

   At a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Uribe said an internal military investigation appeared to have uncovered "crimes that in some regions had the goal of killing innocents, to make it seem as if criminals were being confronted."

   "The armed forces of Colombia have well-earned prestige," Mr. Uribe said. "When there are violations of human rights, that prestige is muddled."

   The wave of recent killings has also heightened focus on the American Embassy here, which is responsible for vetting Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive aid. A study of civilian killings by Amnesty International and Fellowship of Reconciliation, human rights groups, found that 47 percent of the reported cases in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States.

   "If the responsibility of the army is to protect us from harm, how could they have killed my son this way?" asked Blanca Monroy, 49, Mr. Oviedo's mother, in an interview in her cinder-block hovel in Soacha. "The official explanation is absurd, if he was here just a day earlier living a normal life. The irony of it all is that my son dreamed of being a soldier" for the government.

   Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in American security aid.

   But more than 100 claims of civilian deaths at the hands of security forces have emerged in recent weeks, from nine areas of Colombia. Cases have included the killings of a homeless man, a young man with epilepsy and a veteran who had left the army after his left arm was amputated.

   In some cases, victims' families spoke of middlemen who recruited their loved ones and other poor men and women with vague promises of jobs elsewhere, only to deliver them hours or days later to war zones where they were shot dead by soldiers.

   "We are witnessing a method of social cleansing in which rogue military units operate beyond the law," said Monica Sanchez, a lawyer at the Judicial Freedom Corporation, a human rights group in Medellin. It says it has documented more than 60 "false positives" - the term for cases of civilians who are killed and then presented as guerrillas, with weapons or fatigues - in Antioquia Department, or province.

   Researchers have also obtained thorough descriptions of some killings in the small number of cases - fewer than 50 - that have resulted in convictions this decade.

   One April morning in 2004, for instance, soldiers approached the home of Juan de Jesus Rendon, 33, a peasant farmer in Antioquia, and shot him in front of his son, Juan Esteban, then 10. The soldiers placed a two-way radio and a gun near Mr. Rendon's body, court records show, and told his son that his siblings would suffer the same fate unless he said his father had fired at the soldiers.

   Vilma Garcia, 35, Mr. Rendon's wife, said, "I still fear this can happen again." The five soldiers involved were recently convicted of homicide, and of torture in connection with the threats to her son. "The soldiers think we are poor and worthless," she said in an interview in Medellin, where she and her children fled, "so nobody will care how we are killed."

   The civilian killings have increasingly opened the United States to criticism because it is required to make sure Colombian military units have not violated human rights before supplying them with aid.

   "If we are receiving aid and vetting from a government in Washington that validates torture, then what kind of results can one expect?" asked Liliana Uribe, a human rights lawyer in Medellin who represents victims' families.

   A senior official at the American Embassy in Bogota said the reports of civilian killings, both in past years and in recent months, were a matter of concern. "If the facts in some cases do show that parts of the armed forces were taking part in murder, that's wrong, and there should be mechanisms to prevent this from happening and mechanisms to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

   The official said the units involved in the most recent killings, of the 11 men from Soacha, did not get aid because they had previously been deemed not credible to receive it.

   But the official neither confirmed nor denied the contention that almost half of the reports of civilian killings in 2007 involved units that received American aid. The official said a case-by-case review of the episodes had not been carried out by two American contractors hired by the State Department to help vet Colombian military units for abuses.

   Reports of civilian killings rose to 287 from mid-2006 to mid-2007, up from 267 in the same period a year earlier and 218 the year before that, said the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogota human rights group.

   Altogether, the attorney general's office in Bogota said it was investigating the killings of 1,015 civilians by security forces in 558 episodes unrelated to combat. Prosecutors said the number of new cases under investigation climbed to 245 in 2007 from 122 a year earlier.

   The increase in reports of civilian killings spurred the Defense Ministry to issue a directive last year explicitly making it a priority to capture rebels rather than kill them. In an interview, Gen. Freddy Padilla de Leon, the top commander of Colombia's armed forces, said the policy shift, while largely intended to prevent human rights abuses, also had strategic objectives.

   "A terrorist captured alive is a treasure, while a dead terrorist is just one-day news," General Padilla said, citing the example of Nelly Avila Moreno, a FARC commander who surrendered this year and began collaborating with her captors. "A terrorist converted into an informant is useful as long as he or she lives."

   Until the latest wave of killings, it appeared that the new policy was starting to work. The Center for Research and Popular Education, a Jesuit-led group in Bogota that maintains a database on human rights violations, documented 87 reports of so-called false positives in the second half of 2007, a 34 percent drop from the first six months of that year.

   But the emergence of cases in Soacha and elsewhere suggests that the problem may be more systemic than once thought.

   Some human rights researchers contend that the killings are tolerated by some senior officers in the Colombian Army who chafe at greater scrutiny at a time when security forces have made significant gains against guerrillas, including the killing or capture of several top FARC commanders this year.

   One case involves the commander of Colombia's Army, Gen. Mario Montoya. In March 2002, the army's Fourth Brigade, then under his command, killed five people in their vehicle and presented them as guerrillas, their bodies dressed in fatigues.

   But the driver, Parmenio de Jesus Usme, testified this year that none were guerrillas. According to a report by Cambio, a news magazine, Mr. Usme, a former member of a paramilitary group that opposed the guerrillas, said that two of the victims were teenagers, Erika Castaneda, 13, and Johana Carmona, 14, and that he had been driving them to a party when they picked up three other people.

   Mr. Usme said that they were fired upon and that everyone in the vehicle was killed but him. According to the report, General Montoya called the hospital where the bodies were taken and said that they should be turned over only to someone in his confidence, after which the bodies were presented to the media in fatigues at a nearby building.

   When asked specifically about the case, General Padilla, the armed forces commander, said, "There are preliminary investigations in which the different declarations are being verified."


t r u t h o u t | Colombia Killings Cast Doubt on War Against Insurgents

t r u t h o u t | Banks to Continue Paying Dividends

 Bailout money is for lending, critics say.

    U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.

    The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to shareholders don't serve that purpose, but Treasury officials say that suspending quarterly dividend payments would have deterred banks from participating in the voluntary program.

    Critics, including economists and members of Congress, question why banks should get government money if they already have enough money to pay dividends -- or conversely, why banks that need government money are still spending so much on dividends.

    "The whole purpose of the program is to increase lending and inject capital into Main Street. If the money is used for dividends, it defeats the purpose of the program," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for the government to require a suspension of dividend payments.

    The Treasury plans to invest up to $250 billion in a wide swath of U.S. banks in return for ownership stakes, which the government will relinquish when it is repaid.

    Among other restrictions, participating institutions cannot increase dividend payments without government permission. They also are barred from repurchasing stock, which increases the value of outstanding shares.

    The 33 banks signed up so far plan to pay shareholders about $7 billion this quarter. Companies generally try to pay consistent dividends and, at the present pace, those dividends will consume 52 percent of the Treasury's investment over the initial three-year term.

    "The terms of our capital purchase program were set to encourage participation by a broad array of financial institutions so they strengthen their financial positions," Treasury spokeswoman Michele Davis said.

    The Treasury's approach contrasts with decisions by foreign governments, including Britain and Germany, to require banks that accept public investments to suspend dividend payments until the government is repaid. The U.S. government similarly required Chrysler to suspend its dividend payments as a condition of the government's 1979 bailout.

    The legislation passed by Congress authorizing the Treasury's current bailout program is silent on the issue.

    The first nine participants were major banks, some running short on capital, that were told by Treasury officials earlier this month to sign on to the program for the good of the country. Their major shareholders are primarily institutional investors, such as pension funds and mutual funds, although a few wealthy individuals hold large stakes, such as Warren Buffett in Wells Fargo and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in Citigroup.

    Several banks are on pace to pay more in dividends than they get from the government. The Bank of New York Mellon got $3 billion from the government on Tuesday. It will pay out $275 million to shareholders this quarter, and a projected $3.3 billion over the next three years. A spokesman declined to comment.

    At least a few banks have committed to reduce dividend payments at the same time they accepted government investments. SunTrust of Atlanta, which accepted $3.5 billion from the government, cut its quarterly dividend payments to about $188 million each quarter from about $272 million. The company described the cut in a statement as "the responsible thing to do."

    Zions Bancorp, which accepted $1.4 billion from the government, reduced its dividends by about 26 percent to $34 million.

    "This modification to our dividend will allow us to further strengthen our capital base," said chief executive Harris Simmons.

    Other banks participating in the government program said that they will not use the Treasury's money to pay dividends. They said dividends will be paid from other capital, primarily from their new profits in each quarter.

    Washington Federal, a Seattle thrift, accepted $200 million from the government. The company will pay its shareholders about $18 million in dividends this quarter, which puts it on pace for $216 million over the next three years.

    Chief executive Roy Whitehead said the company pays dividends from its quarterly profits, rather than its capital reserves. He said there was only one exception in the past three decades. Last quarter, he said, the company used $11 million in capital to maintain a consistent dividend payment.

    Still, Whitehead said "categorically" that the company would not use the government's investment to make dividend payments.

    Some experts questioned the distinction drawn by Whitehead between profits and capital.

    "Thinking of them as separate things is kind of a spurious argument. It's all capital," said David Scharfstein, a finance professor at the Harvard Business School who has called for the government to require banks to suspend dividend payments. "Money that goes out the door is money that isn't available to shore up the banks' balance sheet."

    Scharfstein and others said that many banks clearly need to buttress their balance sheets. Large losses on mortgage-related investments have drained capital, and investors no longer have much interest in giving more money to banks. But several of the institutions accepting government money have continued to pay dividends in recent quarters even as they post large losses.

    Scharfstein said many banks should suspend dividend payments voluntarily. Some industry analysts, however, say that cutting dividends will make it even harder for banks to find new investors.

    Capital is basically the money a company keeps in its vaults. A dividend is a distribution of some of that money to shareholders. Companies typically pay dividends four times each year.

    The stability of dividend payments is important to investors. Some treat dividends as a source of regular income, others as a barometer of corporate health. As a result, companies generally try to match or raise their dividends each quarter. Some banks entered the current crisis with unblemished dividend histories dating back 30 years and more.

    The resistance to dividend cuts in part reflects the reality that the Treasury program is serving at least two purposes. In some cases, the money is going to companies that need help to survive. In other cases, the government is helping healthy companies to expand.

    Ed Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Association, said he was increasingly hearing from banking executives who feel they should not be forced to accept money with so many strings attached. He said these banks don't need the money, but they are willing to use it to increase lending, so long as they are not punished for doing so.

    "The government really needs to make up its mind what this program is," Yingling said.


t r u t h o u t | Banks to Continue Paying Dividends

The BRAD BLOG : Vote-Flipping Diebold Machine Removed, Quarantined in CO

Chalk one up for the people with brains and a conscience who don't want to see democracy destroyed even if their candidate is losing.

Karen Long, Adams County Clerk Takes Action After Voter Sees Vote Flip Repeatedly to Republican Candidate in State With Long History of E-Voting Failures
Watchdog Group Issues Press Release Calling for No 'Recalibration', Immediate Removal, Impounding of Such Machines...

A county clerk in Colorado has finally done the right thing for the voters by removing a touch-screen voting machine from service, and quarantining it, after it was discovered to be flipping votes from one candidate to another. The failed machine in this case was a Diebold Accu-Vote, a frequent flipper.

As reported by the Colorado Independent (Hat-tip VoterAction.org)...

An electronic voting machine in Adams County repeatedly failed to accept a vote for a Democratic state Senate candidate — instead registering the vote for her Republican opponent — at an early voting site last week and has been removed from service, the Aurora Sentinel reports Wednesday. Adams County Clerk and Recorder Karen Long told the newspaper the error doesn’t reflect wider problems in the county’s voting systems, but the candidate said the incident could lead to a lawsuit.

“I always just trusted the machines, and it opened my eyes,” said state Rep. Mary Hodge. “The way it works now, I’m told … is that those votes throw it to Mr. Hadfield that we’ll probably have a lawsuit and a court decision. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Hodge, the Democratic nominee, faces Republican Robert John Hadfield in the race to represent state Senate District 25.
...
“I have quarantined the machine,” Long told the newspaper. “It’s removed and it’s sealed up and it’s in a bag.” She said she is awaiting instructions from the secretary of state’s office.

Long is to be lauded for being the first election official in the country so far during the general election (that we're aware of) to have taken the correct action in such a vote-flipping case. And now that Hodge's eyes are "opened" we hope that both she and her Republican opponent, Hadfield will stand up for their voters by signing the StandingForVoters.org "no concessions" pledge immediately!

Late last night VelvetRevolution.us (a non-partisan, non-profit election watchdog co-founded by The BRAD BLOG) issued a press release calling on election officials to not recalibrate systems mid-election, but rather remove and impound them, and offer voters paper ballots as needed instead. The complete press release is posted at the end of this article.

Colorado has a troubling history with electronic voting, even as the Secretary of State found all of the state's machines to be faulty and easily hackable in late 2007, but has capitulated to pressure from election officials to allow them to be used by voters again this year anyway...

Problems Not New to Colorado...

In another story on the removal of Adams County's Diebold machine, it was noted that the system was quarantined "as per the Secretary of State's instructions". We're not sure if those were instructions given only to Long, or if SoS Mike Coffman had issued a directive somewhere on this. We'll try to find out. In any case, we hope other CO officials (as well as officials in other states where this occurs) will follow Long's lead and take the same action she did.

SoS Coffman --- who is overseeing his own election this year in his bid for the U.S. House --- previously decertified all but the Diebold voting systems in his state after an exhaustive court-ordered certification test (and after it was found that his Congressional campaign shared the same PR outfit with Diebold). Following his decertification last December, which discovered all of the machines used by his state were easily hacked and prone to serious errors, he recertified all of them after receiving pressure from CO county election clerks.

One of those officials, the state's Election Director Holly Lowder, resigned in disgrace just last month after it was discovered she shared her residence with one of the state's top election vendors.

Following Similar Failures in Other States, Watchdog Calls for Impounding...

Previously, after votes were noticed to have flipped during early voting this year on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) systems in WV, in TN, in TX and other states, election officials have often first (and completely inappropriately) blamed the voters, and then instructed poll workers to "recalibrate" the machines.

Calibrating an electronic voting machine mid-election, however, as we've pointed out repeatedly, is irresponsible and dangerous, and --- as demonstrated by this West Virginia County clerk on video tape --- ineffective, as it often fails to correct the problem at all.

Whether a vote is seen flipping or not on a DRE, it must be noted, there is no way to verify that any vote ever cast on such a system in any election for any candidate or initiative on the ballot has ever been recorded accurately. That's a fact whether or not such a system offers a so-called "paper trail" print-out, as even the DREs with such print-outs can be easily and quickly hacked in a way that would be next to impossible to discover as shown in this video demonstration from the state-sponsored computer scientists at the UCSB Computer Security Group.

While we have asked repeatedly for any such evidence to show that any such vote has ever been recorded as per a voter's intent during an election, no election official, or voting machine company representative has ever been able to offer any. That's because none exists.

DRE machines require 100% faith-based voting, with faith applied solely in the private company who created and programmed the machine, and the election officials who force voters to use them in our public elections.

Moreover, Diebold was forced to admit in August that their GEMS central tabulator system, used with both DRE and paper-based optical-systems in 34 states this year, routinely drops thousands of votes without notifying system administrators.

Our complete special coverage page on DRE Failures 2008 (General Election Version), including what you can do about it, if it happens to you, is right here...

VR's press release, issued today, calling for the immediate removal from service and impounding of such machines, is both posted here, and follows in full below...

Voting Machines Flipping Votes At Many Early Voting Sites:
Where Are The Election Protection Attorneys?
Non-Profit Election Watchdog Demands Failed Machines
Be Removed from Service, Impounded

Velvet Revolution ("VR"), a non-profit dedicated to fair, honest, accurate and transparent elections, today called for elections officials in all states to immediately impound any voting machine that has flipped votes from one candidate to another. It has been widely reported in the media over the past week of early voting that Direct Recording Election (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines made by ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic have been flipping votes, predominantly from Democratic candidates to Republican candidates, but in some reported cases, just the opposite. (See: http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=6577).

These vote flips were first reported in West Virginia and the elections official there quickly ordered the recalibration of some machines, but video has shown that recalibration does not correct the problem and the flips continue. (See: http://www.velvetrevolut...vote_captures_video.html)
Vote flipping has also now reported to have occurred in Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia and elsewhere.

"Machines that flip votes should never be recalibrated," said Brad Friedman, co-founder of Velvet Revolution. "Accessing these election-ready machines in this way, when they are most vulnerable to malicious software and manipulation, is wholly inappropriate. It is outrageous that election officials have ordered such action. Instead, failing machines must be immediately removed from service, impounded for later inspection, and voters should be given paper ballots to assure their vote may be counted accurately."

VR also demands that the legal teams associated with the candidates step up and take immediate legal action to quarantine these faulty voting machines. The Obama campaign has made much of the fact that it has thousands of lawyers on the ground to ensure that this election is fair and everyone's vote is counted. "Unfortunately, these lawyers, the lawyers for McCain and the lawyers for the DNC and RNC are AWOL and asleep at the wheel," continued Friedman. "We insist that they keep their promise to the voters by demanding that these machines be taken out of service immediately. We should not have to wait until after the election for a candidate to sue because voters were not allowed to properly register their votes."


The BRAD BLOG : Vote-Flipping Diebold Machine Removed, Quarantined in CO

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

McCain phone bankers quit after refusing to peddle low-brow Obama smears | Crooks and Liars

It's nice to see at least some people in the McCain campaign still have standards.

TPM:

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.


McCain phone bankers quit after refusing to peddle low-brow Obama smears | Crooks and Liars

Feds disrupt skinhead plot to assassinate Obama - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – Two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, federal authorities said Monday.

In all, the two men whom officials described as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people — 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The spree, which initially targeted an unidentified predominantly African-American school, was to end with the two men driving toward Obama, "shooting at him from the windows," the documents show.

"Both individuals stated they would dress in all-white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt," the court complaint states. "Both individuals further stated they knew they would and were willing to die during this attempt."

An Obama spokeswoman traveling with the senator in Pennsylvania had no immediate comment.

Sheriffs' deputies in Crockett County, Tenn., arrested the two suspects — Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark. — Oct. 22 on unspecified charges. "Once we arrested the defendants and suspected they had violated federal law, we immediately contacted federal authorities," said Crockett County Sheriff Troy Klyce.

The two were charged by federal authorities Monday with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms from a federally licensed gun dealer, and threatening a candidate for president.

Cowart and Schlesselman were being held without bond. Agents seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men when they were arrested. Authorities alleged the two men were preparing to break into a gun shop to steal more.

Jasper Taylor, city attorney in Bells, said Cowart was arrested Wednesday. He was held for a few days in Bells, then moved over the weekend to another facility.

Until his arrest, Cowart lived with his grandparents in a southern, rural part of the county, Taylor said, adding that Cowart apparently never graduated from high school. He moved away, possibly to Arkansas or Texas, then returned over the summer, Taylor said.

Attorney Joe Byrd, who has been hired to represent Cowart, said in a written statement that he was was investigating the charges against his client and would have no further comment. Messages left on two telephone numbers listed under Cowart's name were not immediately returned.

No telephone number for Schlesselman in Helena-West Helena could be found immediately.

The court documents say the two men met about a month ago on the Internet and found common ground in their shared "white power" and "skinhead" philosophy.

The numbers 14 and 88 are symbols in skinhead culture, referring to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two "8"s or "H"s stand for "Heil Hitler."

Court records say Cowart and Schlesselman also bought nylon rope and ski masks to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund their spree, during which they allegedly planned to go from state to state and kill people. Agents said the skinheads did not name the African-American school they were targeting.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville, Tenn., field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, said authorities took the threats very seriously.

"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

He added: "They seemed determined to do it. Even if they were just to try it, it would be a trail of tears around the South."

An ATF affidavit filed in the case says Cowart and Schlesselman told investigators the day they were arrested they had shot at a glass window at Beech Grove Church of Christ, a congregation of about 60 black members in Brownsville, Tenn.

Nelson Bond, the church secretary and treasurer, said no one was at the church when the shot was fired. Members found the bullet had shattered the glass in the church's front door when they arrived for evening Bible study.

"We have been on this site for about 120 years, and we have never had a problem like this before," said Bond, 53 and a church member for 45 years.

The investigation is continuing, and more charges are possible, Cavanaugh said. He said there's no evidence — so far — that others were willing to assist Cowart and Schlesselman with the plot.

At this point, there does not appear to be any formal assassination plan, Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said.

"Whether or not they had the capability or the wherewithal to carry out an attack remains to be seen," he said.

Zahren said the statements about the assassination came out in interviews after the men were arrested last week.

The Secret Service became involved in the investigation once it was clear that an Obama assassination attempt was part of the plot. Obama received a Secret Service detail in May 2007, the earliest a candidate has ever been assigned protection, in part because of his status as a prominent black candidate.

"We don't discount anything," Zahren said, adding that it's one thing for the defendants to make statements, but it's not the same as having an organized assassination plan.

Helena-West Helena, on the Mississippi River in east Arkansas' Delta, is in one of the nation's poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living. Police Chief Fred Fielder said he had never heard of Schlesselman.

However, the reported threat of attacking a school filled with black students worried Fielder. Helena-West Helena, with a population of 12,200, is 66 percent black. "Predominantly black school, take your pick," he said.


Feds disrupt skinhead plot to assassinate Obama - Yahoo! News

Feds disrupt skinhead plot to assassinate Obama - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – Two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, federal authorities said Monday.

In all, the two men whom officials described as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people — 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The spree, which initially targeted an unidentified predominantly African-American school, was to end with the two men driving toward Obama, "shooting at him from the windows," the documents show.

"Both individuals stated they would dress in all-white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt," the court complaint states. "Both individuals further stated they knew they would and were willing to die during this attempt."

An Obama spokeswoman traveling with the senator in Pennsylvania had no immediate comment.

Sheriffs' deputies in Crockett County, Tenn., arrested the two suspects — Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark. — Oct. 22 on unspecified charges. "Once we arrested the defendants and suspected they had violated federal law, we immediately contacted federal authorities," said Crockett County Sheriff Troy Klyce.

The two were charged by federal authorities Monday with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms from a federally licensed gun dealer, and threatening a candidate for president.

Cowart and Schlesselman were being held without bond. Agents seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men when they were arrested. Authorities alleged the two men were preparing to break into a gun shop to steal more.

Jasper Taylor, city attorney in Bells, said Cowart was arrested Wednesday. He was held for a few days in Bells, then moved over the weekend to another facility.

Until his arrest, Cowart lived with his grandparents in a southern, rural part of the county, Taylor said, adding that Cowart apparently never graduated from high school. He moved away, possibly to Arkansas or Texas, then returned over the summer, Taylor said.

Attorney Joe Byrd, who has been hired to represent Cowart, said in a written statement that he was was investigating the charges against his client and would have no further comment. Messages left on two telephone numbers listed under Cowart's name were not immediately returned.

No telephone number for Schlesselman in Helena-West Helena could be found immediately.

The court documents say the two men met about a month ago on the Internet and found common ground in their shared "white power" and "skinhead" philosophy.

The numbers 14 and 88 are symbols in skinhead culture, referring to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two "8"s or "H"s stand for "Heil Hitler."

Court records say Cowart and Schlesselman also bought nylon rope and ski masks to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund their spree, during which they allegedly planned to go from state to state and kill people. Agents said the skinheads did not name the African-American school they were targeting.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville, Tenn., field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, said authorities took the threats very seriously.

"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

He added: "They seemed determined to do it. Even if they were just to try it, it would be a trail of tears around the South."

An ATF affidavit filed in the case says Cowart and Schlesselman told investigators the day they were arrested they had shot at a glass window at Beech Grove Church of Christ, a congregation of about 60 black members in Brownsville, Tenn.

Nelson Bond, the church secretary and treasurer, said no one was at the church when the shot was fired. Members found the bullet had shattered the glass in the church's front door when they arrived for evening Bible study.

"We have been on this site for about 120 years, and we have never had a problem like this before," said Bond, 53 and a church member for 45 years.

The investigation is continuing, and more charges are possible, Cavanaugh said. He said there's no evidence — so far — that others were willing to assist Cowart and Schlesselman with the plot.

At this point, there does not appear to be any formal assassination plan, Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said.

"Whether or not they had the capability or the wherewithal to carry out an attack remains to be seen," he said.

Zahren said the statements about the assassination came out in interviews after the men were arrested last week.

The Secret Service became involved in the investigation once it was clear that an Obama assassination attempt was part of the plot. Obama received a Secret Service detail in May 2007, the earliest a candidate has ever been assigned protection, in part because of his status as a prominent black candidate.

"We don't discount anything," Zahren said, adding that it's one thing for the defendants to make statements, but it's not the same as having an organized assassination plan.

Helena-West Helena, on the Mississippi River in east Arkansas' Delta, is in one of the nation's poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living. Police Chief Fred Fielder said he had never heard of Schlesselman.

However, the reported threat of attacking a school filled with black students worried Fielder. Helena-West Helena, with a population of 12,200, is 66 percent black. "Predominantly black school, take your pick," he said.


Feds disrupt skinhead plot to assassinate Obama - Yahoo! News