The Five Most Wanted Rip-off Artists from Wall Street and Washington | AlterNet

Jim Hightower

What the hell's happening here? Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us?

Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. Last year, at the first signs of the global financial slide toward the abyss, we were told that it's just a little hiccup caused by something called subprime mortgages. Not to worry, the Powers That Be declared confidently, for we have the damage contained. And rest assured that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Then, this spring, Bear Stearns cratered, requiring an emergency federal subsidy to cover billions in bad loans. Okay, admitted those in charge, that subprime stuff actually is leveraged on up the financial system, and maybe there's been a bit of greed among a few of the big players, but we really do have the problem contained now, and, hey, "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

But in September--Omigosh!--there went Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WaMu, Wachovia, and others. Well, yes, conceded the now-frazzled financial establishment, but gollies, we're throwing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars into sandbags to contain the problem, and remember: "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

In October, the contagion rolled through Britain, Canada, and Europe; it spread to Brazil and across to China and Japan; and--Holy Schmoly--suddenly all of Iceland was melting in bankruptcy! Stay calm, cried an openly panicked chorus of Washington officials, for we're holding some big summit meetings soon and consulting our Ouija boards, and...uh...ah...um...y'all just keep clinging to the thought that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Laissez Fairies

You don't have to be in Who's Who to know What's What, do you? The fundamentals are NOT sound.

Wall Street and Washington (excuse the redundancy there) want us commoners to believe that this viral spread of economic grief was caused by those lower-income homeowners who couldn't pay their subprime loans--merely an unforeseeable glitch in a complex and otherwise healthy financial system. Hogwash. The source of today's pain is the same as it was in America's previous financial collapses: the unbridled greed of economic elites, enabled by their political courtesans in Washington.

This unbridling has been the long-sought goal of a cabal of deregulation ideologues who dwell in laissez-fairyland. During the past two decades, they have relentlessly pushed their economic fantasies into law. Their theory was that (to use Ronald Reagan's simple construct) "the magic of the marketplace" would create an eternal rainbow of prosperity through financial "innovation"--if only the market was unshackled from any pesky public regulations. What the dereg theorists missed, however, is that magicians don't perform magic. They perform illusions.

Let's meet some of the illusionists who are directly responsible for hurling you, me, America, and most of the world into this dark and as-yet unplumbed economic hole.

Phil Gramm

Snide, sour, and sanctimonious, this former senator from Texas is now head lobbyist for the Swiss-based banking giant, UBS, as well as chief economic adviser for his old chum John McCain. A bathed-in-the-blood, footwashing, free-market absolutist, Gramm advocates a virulent brand of antigovernment, market-knows-best, Rambo capitalism.

In 1999, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he had the power to implement some of his cockamamie dogmas. First, he pushed through a bill to dissolve the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal reform that prohibited banks, investment houses, and insurance companies from combining into one corporation. By keeping these components of our financial system separate, Glass-Steagall made sure that the crash of one of them would not bring down the other two. But a number of Wall Street banks, led by what would become Citigroup, saw a profit windfall for themselves if only they could scuttle the old law and merge banking, investment, and insurance into huge financial conglomerates. The senator was their ideological soul mate, and he was delighted to rig the system for them.

On November 12, 1999, a gloating Gramm celebrated having sledgehammered the regulatory walls that separated the three financial functions:

"We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill; it is a deregulatory bill. I believe that's the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been a part of making it a reality."

But repealing Glass-Steagall was only step one for this free-market holy roller. In literally the dead of night, just before Congress's Christmas break in 2000, Chairman Gramm snuck a short provision into an 11,000-page appropriations bill. The item, which only a few lobbyists and lawmakers knew had been inserted, became law when the larger bill was signed by then-President Bill Clinton. Gramm's little legislative sticky note decreed that a relatively new, exotic, and inherently risky form of investments called "derivatives" were not to be regulated--or even monitored--by the government.

It should be noted here that Democrats were also butt-deep in the dereg orthodoxy. Such Wall Street sycophants as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had drunk deeply from the holy cup of derivatives deregulation, and Clinton's top economic advisors Robert Rubin (formerly with Goldman Sachs and now with Citigroup) and Lawrence Summers (also a veteran of Wall Street) were in harness with the Republicans on this effort.

By 2008, the freewheeling derivatives market, including derivatives based on those lowly subprime housing loans, bloated to a stunning $531 trillion. That's 531 followed by 12 zeroes! These little-understood, essentially secret investment schemes came to dominate our entire financial system--and when thousands of regular folks began defaulting on their subprime loans, the derivatives based on them essentially became worthless. Investment houses, which were up to their corporate keisters in these funny-money subprime derivatives, began collapsing, and the now-interlocked banks and insurance companies began tumbling down with them. Gramm's deregulatory "wave of the future" had become a financial tsunami.

Alan Greenspan

This guy's mug should be on wanted posters in every post office in America. As Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, he held the regulatory power to prevent the irrational inflation of the huge derivatives bubble that has now burst-- yet he fought fiercely through four presidencies to prevent even the meekest oversight by the Fed or any other agency. Nicknamed "The Oracle," Chairman Greenspan was inscrutable and arrogant, but he also possessed a detailed knowledge of financial minutiae and an air of superiority that simultaneously bedazzled and intimidated presidents, lawmakers, and other public officials.

However, not everyone was sanguine about the chairman's reliance on derivatives as the pillar of Wall Street's financial strength. Many wise heads viewed these financial "products" as speculative mumbo-jumbo. Billionaire financier George Soros says his firm never invested in them "because we don't really understand how they work." Investment banker Felix Rohatyn described them as "hydrogen bombs." Back in 2003, investment guru Warren Buffett called them "financial weapons of mass destruction" that were "potentially lethal" for our economy.

But Greenspan's voice was the most powerful, and he was both a determined bureaucratic protector and an exuberant cheerleader for derivatives. Meanwhile, wealthy investors worldwide were making a killing from their investments in these bizarre pieces of paper, and few in Washington were willing even to question The Oracle.

"I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn't want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth," said Arthur Levitt, a well-regarded Wall Street regulator under Clinton. "I don't recall anyone ever saying, 'What do you mean by that, Alan?'"

So the bubble kept expanding.

Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the "free market" that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.

Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan's. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation's economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut.

Chris Cox

A GOP member of Congress for 17 years, Cox was another deregulation diehard and a reliable advocate for Wall Street's pampered CEO class--a role he continued to play after Bush chose him in 2005 to succeed Donaldson as SEC chair. At the commission, he weakened the ability of the enforcement staff even to investigate securities violations by Wall Street firms, much less prosecute them. Also, in an act of pure ideological folly, he eliminated an office that had been set up specifically to watch out for future problems with such high-risk investments as derivatives.

In essence, he took the cops off the beat at the very time more cops were needed. In October, when the stuff was hitting the fan, a chagrined Cox offered this brilliant insight: "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work." Thanks, Chris.

William Donaldson

The Securities and Exchange Commission supposedly regulates investment banks, and in 2004 it was headed by--guess who?--a Wall Street investment banker, Bill Donaldson. On April 28 of that year, he presided over a little-noticed SEC meeting held in the commission's basement to consider an obscure rule change urgently requested by the Big Five investment banks (including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Henry Paulson--yes, the same treasury secretary who just designed George W's Wall Street bailout). The bankers wanted an exemption from a sensible requirement that they keep a sizeable pool of money on hand to cover potential losses. Turn these reserve funds loose, pleaded the bankers, so we can put more of our investors' money into this opaque but lucrative area known as derivatives.

After less than an hour of discussion, Donaldson and his four SEC colleagues voted unanimously to do this favor for the bankers. As a bonus, the generous commissioners also decided to let the banks themselves monitor the level of risk they were putting on investors--and ultimately on the backs of taxpayers.

In this one meeting, which was not covered by the media, the dereg geniuses had struck another major blow for banker recklessness, and the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and others were sent further down the giddy path to their--and our--ruin. "The problem with such voluntary [regulations]," said Roderick Hills, Gerald Ford's former SEC chairman, "is that, as we've seen throughout history, they often don't work." Duh!

Henry Paulson

As honcho of Goldman Sachs, Hank drew a $37 million paycheck the year before Bush waved him into the Treasury Department to oversee the whole U.S. economy. At Goldman, he was considered one of Wall Street's "smart guys" who had figured out how to make billions in brokerage fees by packaging and selling these wondrous pieces of wizardry called derivatives, and he came into government as an unquestioning believer in deregulatory doctrine. Now that deregulated derivatives have turned out to be so much hokum, Hank's in charge of the bailout--and his former firm is in line to get at least $10 billion from it.

The Paulson bailout plan is flawed in many awful ways, but start with this basic one: the money (some estimates now put the total taxpayer cost above $2 trillion) is being handed to the same schemers and finaglers who caused the crash. The public gets to contribute the funds, but it gets no seat at the table to decide how the system (and who in it) will be "rescued."

With typical antigovernment extremism, Paulson's plan makes the public passive investors in the banks we're saving, leaving all the say-so to the banks' current executives and directors. Our money is being given away by the Bush ideologues with no strings attached--not even a requirement that it go into new loans so credit can quickly flow into the American economy again! Excuse me? Unclogging that credit flow was Paulson's rationale for giving $125 billion to nine giant banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, and State Street). He now says he "hopes" the banks will use the money to make loans, but he refuses to require them to do so.

Meanwhile, bankers themselves say they are more likely simply to sit on the money for awhile or--get this--use it to buy up smaller competitors! Yes, that means that our tax dollars will go toward eliminating competition in America's banking market. Not only will this leave consumers and businesses with fewer choices, but this will also increase the size of poorly managed megabanks that have already been designated by the Bush-Paulson regime as "too big to fail."

Laissez-faire follies

One positive to come from this collapse is that it exposes the bankruptcy of several core ideas that have been pushed by free-market illusionists. For example, market infallibility--the notion that Wall Street investors, analysts, and bankers know more than anyone else, and the government (aka the public) should just get the hell out of the way and behold unfettered genius at work. So, behold. (And, by the way, these are the exact same people who only months ago were insisting that Americans would be so much better off if they would move their Social Security money from government hands to the more adventuresome wizards of Wall Street.)

Yet, those bankers and politicos who pushed this antigovernment ethos to today's disastrous conclusion remain delusional. They cry for trillions of our tax dollars, but they insist that the profiteers must control the bailout and remain free of public supervision. George W himself still sticks with fantasy over reality, claiming that the fundamentals of the system are sound and that it is "essential" that any reforms not interfere with the "free market."

It's been a scream to hear these devout market ideologues explain how they've just become Wall Street socialists. Having big, bad government buy up the failed investments, then partially nationalize America's financial system, is an unwelcome choice for Bush. "I frankly don't want the government involved," he said. "It was necessary." Bailout chief Paulson (dubbed "King Henry" by Newsweek) said, "We regret having to take these actions"--but they're necessary.

Why necessary? Because laissez-faire ideology is a crock. It failed. Americans are not being told the blunt truth, which is that the financial mess we're in today is a direct result of the laissez-faire fraud that Wall Street and Washington willfully imposed on our nation. CEOs and banking lobbyists, presidents and treasury secretaries, regulators and lawmakers (of both parties) failed to protect America from money-grubbing bankers, hedge-fund speculators, and other big players.

As we've learned in the past few weeks, there is no "free" market. Indeed, it's quite pricey when it trips and falls over the inevitable outcroppings of greed. That's why strong, vigilant, and aggressive public regulation is essential. Don't be fooled by claims that just throwing money at the hucksters will fix the problem. The only way to make America's financial system trustworthy is to return to the sound fundamentals of public oversight--starting with the bailout itself.

The Five Most Wanted Rip-off Artists from Wall Street and Washington | AlterNet

Can Obama Stop the Bush Administration's Final Economic Heist? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

To understand the meaning of the U.S. election results, it is worth looking back to the moment when everything changed for the Obama campaign. It was, without question, the moment when the economic crisis hit Wall Street.

Up to that point, things weren't looking all that good for Barack Obama. The Democratic National Convention barely delivered a bump, while the appointment of Sarah Palin seemed to have shifted the momentum decisively over to John McCain.

Then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, followed by insurance giant AIG, then Lehman Brothers. It was in this moment of economic vertigo that Obama found a new language. With tremendous clarity, he turned his campaign into a referendum into the deregulation and trickle down policies that have dominated mainstream economic discourse since Ronald Reagan. He said his opponent represented more of the same while he stood for a new direction, one that would rebuild the economy from the ground up, rather than the top down. Obama stayed on this message for the rest of the campaign and, as we just saw, it worked.

The question now is whether Obama will have the courage to take the ideas that won him this election and turn them into policy. Or, alternately, whether he will use the financial crisis to rationalize a move to what pundits call "the middle" (if there is one thing this election has proved, it is that the real middle is far to the left of its previously advertised address). Predictably, Obama is already coming under enormous pressure to break his election promises, particularly those relating to raising taxes on the wealthy and imposing real environmental regulations on polluters. All day on the business networks, we hear that, in light of the economic crisis, corporations need lower taxes, and fewer regulations -- in other words, more of the same.

The new president's only hope of resisting this campaign being waged by the elites is if the remarkable grassroots movement that carried him to victory can somehow stay energized, networked, mobilized -- and most of all, critical. Now that the election has been won, this movement's new missions should be clear: loudly holding Obama to his campaign promises, and letting the Democrats know that there will be consequences for betrayal.

The first order of business -- and one that cannot wait until inauguration -- must be halting the robbery-in-progress known as the "economic bailout." I have spent the past month examining the loopholes and conflicts of interest embedded in the U.S. Treasury Department's plans. The results of that research can be found in a just published feature article in Rolling Stone, The Bailout Profiteers, as well as my most recent Nation column, Bush's Final Pillage.

Both these pieces argue that the $700-billion "rescue plan" should be regarded as the Bush Administration's final heist. Not only does it transfer billions of dollars of public wealth into the hands of politically connected corporations (a Bush specialty), but it passes on such an enormous debt burden to the next administration that it will make real investments in green infrastructure and universal health care close to impossible. If this final looting is not stopped (and yes, there is still time), we can forget about Obama making good on the more progressive aspects of his campaign platform, let alone the hope that he will offer the country some kind of grand Green New Deal.

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that terrible thefts have a habit of taking place during periods of dramatic political transition. When societies are changing quickly, the media and the people are naturally focused on big "P" politics -- who gets the top appointments, what was said in the most recent speech. Meanwhile, safe from public scrutiny, far reaching pro-corporate policies are locked into place, dramatically restricting future possibilities for real change.

It's not too late to halt the robbery in progress, but it cannot wait until inauguration. Several great initiatives to shift the nature of the bailout are already underway, including http://bailoutmainstreet.com. I added my name to the "Call to Action: Time for a 21st Century Green America" and invite you to do the same.

Stopping the bailout profiteers is about more than money. It is about democracy. Specifically, it is about whether Americans will be able to afford the change they have just voted for so conclusively.

Can Obama Stop the Bush Administration's Final Economic Heist? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Joe The Welfare King

Joe The Welfare King

Single Payer Minute 5

YouTube - Single Payer Minute 5

Obama: Obama And McCain In Race-Switch Surprise!

Here, you see, an ad agency employee named Tor Myhren has designed a poster that asks the question: What if Barack Obama was a white dude named Chet who probably calls his girlfriend "Lovie," and John McCain was an elderly black man? I'll tell you what: McCain rallies would be much more interesting. It's a neat poster, but don't let it fall into the wrong hands (the hands of South Carolina).

Obama: Obama And McCain In Race-Switch Surprise!

t r u t h o u t | Paulson's Swindle Revealed

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride - a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

    These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet we do not know whether these financiers have fully divested their own Wall Street holdings. Were they perhaps enriching themselves as they engineered this generous distribution of public wealth to embattled private banks and their shareholders?

    Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, raised these explosive questions in a stinging letter sent to Paulson this week. The union did what any private investor would do. Its finance experts vetted the terms of the bailout investment and calculated the real value of what Treasury bought with the public's money. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the analysis could conveniently rely on a comparable sale twenty days earlier. Billionaire Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and bought the same types of securities - preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock in the future. Only Buffett's preferred shares pay a 10 percent dividend, while the public gets only 5 percent. Dollar for dollar, Buffett "received at least seven and perhaps up to 14 times more warrants than Treasury did and his warrants have more favorable terms," Gerard pointed out.

    "I am sure that someone at Treasury saw the terms of Buffett's investment," the union president wrote. "In fact, my suspicion is that you studied it pretty closely and knew exactly what you were doing. The 50-50 deal - 50 percent invested and 50 percent as a gift - is quite consistent with the Republican version of spread-the-wealth-around philosophy."

    The Steelworkers' close analysis was done by Ron W. Bloom, director of the union's corporate research and a Wall Street veteran himself who worked at Larzard Freres, the investment house. Bloom applied standard valuation techniques to establish the market price Buffett paid per share compared to Treasury's price. "The analysis is based on the assumption that Warren Buffett is an intelligent third party investor who paid no more for his investment than he had to," Bloom's report explained. "It also assumes that Gold Sachs' job is to protect its existing shareholders so that it extracted from Mr. Buffett the most that it could.... Further, it is assumed that Henry Paulson is likewise an intelligent man and that if he paid any more than Mr. Buffett - if he paid $1 for something for which Mr. Buffett would have paid 50 cents - that the difference is a gift from the taxpayers of the United States to the shareholders of Goldman Sachs."

    The implications are staggering. Leo Gerard told Paulson: "If the result of our analysis is applied to the deals that you made at the other eight institutions - which on average most would view as being less well positioned than Goldman and therefore requiring an even greater rate of return - you paid a$125 billion for securities for which a disinterested party would have paid $62.5 billion. That means you gifted the other $62.5 billion to the shareholders of these nine institutions."

    If the same rule of thumb is applied to Paulson's grand $700 billion bailout fund, Gerard said this will constitute a gift of $350 billion from the American taxpayers "to reward the institutions that have driven our nation and it now appears the whole world into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years."

    Is anyone angry? Will anyone look into these very serious accusations? Congress is off campaigning. The financiers at Treasury probably assume any public outrage will be lost in the election returns. I hope they are mistaken.

t r u t h o u t | Paulson's Swindle Revealed

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

By David Neiwert Saturday Nov 01, 2008 6:00pm

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%".

THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND:
HOW THE PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM
KILLED THE FREE MARKET

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.

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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.
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Les Enragés.org: Corporate Welfare

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