False Profits

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t - Book Review
Sunday 07 February 2010

False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy

By Dean Baker

PoliPoint Press, 2010

He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble.

- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 6th century BCE

As the nation struggled to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the people who got us here are desperately working to rewrite history. The basic story of this economic collapse is very simple. The Federal Reserve Board, guided by its revered chairman, Alan Greenspan, allowed an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked.

- Dean Baker's "False Profits"

The delicious double-entendre of Dean Baker's most recent title is enhanced by the book's cover photo of a trio of false prophets, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Henry (Hank) Paulson, all of whom are thoroughly excoriated within the book's pages for their responsibility in feeding, prolonging, misdiagnosing and incorrectly responding to the 2007-2009 financial meltdown and the associated economic collapse. However, the book also chronicles the loss of $8 trillion of housing "wealth," $1.4 trillion in annual demand, whatever financial security the vast majority of baby-boomers ever had, "increases" in homeownership rates and any other widespread economic gains associated to the post-2000 period. Truthout has published Dean Baker's columns about net job losses for 2000-2010, a decade that also saw a 26 percent drop in the stock market, the elimination of the $236 billion federal budget surplus President Bush inherited and its transformation into a record deficit and the overall deliquescence of any societal and most people's personal economic "profits."

While most of us find ourselves economically worse off after the last ten years, some have done extremely well and most of those who bear the burden of responsibility for the American economic catastrophe have suffered no consequences whatsoever: financial, social or professional. Writing about Bernanke specifically, Baker's remarks are equally apposite to other titans of finance, central banking and the financial regulatory regimes:

It would difficult to imagine someone with a comparable record of disastrous failures being allowed to remain in most jobs. Would a nurse who routinely administers the wrong medicine and causes his patients to die be allowed to keep his job? Would a bank teller who leaves the cash drawer open remain in her position? How about the school bus driver who comes drunk to work?

In most lines of work, a certain level of competence is expected. Unfortunately, this is not the case for those who set US economic policy. [1]

The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News

Posted on Feb 1, 2010
By Chris Hedges

Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press.

And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits. This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices. They function as “professionals” and see themselves as dispassionate and disinterested social scientists. This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism. 

“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. “There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes.”

Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission—the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’ ”

This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also, with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism, distrust and lack of credibility of the press—and here I speak of the dwindling institutions that attempt to report news—come directly from this steady and willful disintegration of the media’s moral core.

D.A.R.E. generation wants marijuana legalized

Taxing and regulating has worked with cigarettes and alcohol. Why not try it with marijuana?

By Jonathan Perri
February 1, 2010

D.A.R.E. America Chairman Skip Miller writes in his Jan. 28 Times Op-Ed article, "Don’t legalize marijuana," that his organization has been successful in its efforts to reduce illegal drug use in the U.S. by educating schoolchildren. Indeed, protecting young people has long been used to justify marijuana prohibition. But in reality, our drug laws have failed to stop marijuana use among American youth but have succeeded in punishing them with damning criminal records, loss of financial aid for college and removal from after-school activities. As a graduate of D.A.R.E., I know all too well about the shortcomings of this program and of America's war on marijuana.

The simple truth is that prohibition doesn't work, and regulation and education do. Most young people will tell you that marijuana is easy to buy despite nearly a century of prohibition that has cost billions of tax dollars and put thousands of people behind bars.

Anti-drug groups such as D.A.R.E. refuse to acknowledge that today's marijuana prohibition causes the same problems as alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s. It's no wonder, then, that D.A.R.E. has been called ineffective by the National Academy of Sciences and, in 2001, was placed under the category of "ineffective programs" by the U.S. surgeon general. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2003 that there are "no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received D.A.R.E. . . . and students who did not."

The fact is that legalizing, taxing and regulating substances reduces the harm caused by those drugs. A University of Florida study provided statistically overwhelming evidence that raising taxes on alcohol reduces consumption.

The Tax and Regulate initiative on California's November ballot would levy a tax of $50 per ounce on marijuana; the money raised would help fund drug-abuse and prevention programs.

Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet, yet thanks to aggressive taxation in many areas and education efforts, cigarette use in the U.S. has declined sharply over the last few decades. We didn't have to arrest, incarcerate or impose prohibition to achieve those results; we merely had to tell the truth to young people about the very real harms caused by cigarette addiction while imposing taxes and age restrictions. The most recent Monitoring the Future Survey, which asks students about their drug use, shows that more 10th graders now use marijuana than cigarettes.

The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont

By Christopher Ketcham
Montpelier Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010

The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is "strong," but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether. On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. "For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign," said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.

A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as "left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy." The group not only advocates the peaceful secession of Vermont but has minted its own silver "token" — valued at $25 — and, as part of a publishing venture with another secessionist group, runs a monthly newspaper called Vermont Commons, with a circulation of 10,000. According to a 2007 poll, they have support from at least 13% of state voters. The campaign slogan, Naylor told me, is "Imagine Free Vermont." In his fondest imaginings, Naylor said, Vermonters would not be "forced to participate in killing women and children in the Middle East." (See how the Beans of Egypt, Maine sprouted a militia.)

Second Vermont Republic's gubernatorial candidate is Dennis Steele, 42, a hulking Carhartt-clad fifth generation Vermonter and entrepreneur. He owns Radio Free Vermont, an Internet radio station, and honchos an online venture called ChessManiac.com. Steele says that, if elected, his first act in office would be to bring home Vermont's National Guard from overseas deployments. "I see my kids going off to fight in wars for empire 10, 15, 20 years from now," said Steele, who served three years in the U.S. Army. "People in Vermont in general are very antiwar, and all their faith was in Obama to end the wars. I ask people, 'Did you get the change you wanted?' They can't even look you in the eyes. We live in a nation that is asleep at the wheel and where the hearts are growing cold like ice." (See Michael Grunwald's opinion of Vermont and its politics.)

An Ugly Week For The Human Race And Other Living Things

By David Michael Green

January 31, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- You could almost feel bad for Barack Nothingburger, having to deliver the exquisitely badly timed State of the Union address to the world this week. He, his signature legislative initiative, and his presidency itself were already toast, but he still had to walk in the room and pretend otherwise.

There could hardly have been a worse week for it. The days preceding his speech just brought one disaster after another for the president.

But, since he has decided to be part of the problem, while masquerading as its solution, who cares? As long as he continues to adhere to that position, I'd just as soon see his presidency wrecked and his name humiliated anyhow. Considering that treason is a capital offense, I'd say the guy is getting off easy anyhow.

However - and this may be a news flash for the White House - there is a whole other world out there. And for we ordinary folk, all 6.8 billion of us, it was also an especially bad week.

That may sound like another example of Obama-style mega-narcissism, to believe that America's problems are also the world's, but the truth is they are. We're still the big ol' superpower on the block, and we're still perfectly capable, thank you very much, of lashing out in rage toward others when we feel insecure. I'd refer any disbelievers of that notion to about a million Iraqis who could vouch for its veracity. Except for one small problem. They're dead now. So just take my word for it.

The Week From Hell started out with the heretofore unimaginable notion that Massachusetts could elect a Republican to the Senate. That he could be taking Ted Kennedy's seat. And that he could be the final blow putting so-called health care reform in America - Kennedy's long-sought legislative passion - out of its misery.

Don't get me wrong. I laughed out loud at the stupidity of Democrats thinking they could continue to win elections by being Democrats. In a way, it's a damned healthy sign that an angry and frightened public is growing increasingly intolerant of bullshit from its political class nowadays. "Aren't you the same guys who promised us big old change last year? Yeah, well guess what, now it's this year, and you haven't delivered jack. So bye." That's actually precisely the way it should be, and among the political parties in America, the Democrats would be my close second favorite choice for getting their heads handed to them on a platter by an angry public no longer willing to settle for taxpayer-funded solutions for corporations and cheap rhetoric for the rest of us. These punks had it coming and the only silver-lining to the disaster they've brought down on all of us is seeing them become its latest victims.

Don't get me wrong about healthcare, either. Everything about that legislation was wrong, and I'm delighted to see it die. It was poorly handled in every imaginable way, by what is without doubt the most inept president at least since Herbert Hoover, and by a Congress full of whores, thieves and congenital liars, and I'm happy that the whole thing exploded in their faces. Damn shame, of course, about all those millions of Americans without adequate health care. But since any assistance this bill might have provided them was going to be scant and inadvertent, anyhow, I refuse to feel bad about its demise.

EAGLE EYE

Mon July 20, 2009 (re-posted to MCSP from FSHOD) January 31, 2010
By rhw007 Administrator

I recently saw a movie called “Eagle Eye” and found in it’s premise something that may be happening even as we speak. The signs are everywhere, if one knows what to look for and understand what they see. We are more monitored electronically to a global electromagnetic sucking machine whose SOLE purpose is to gather as much electromagnet spectrum data as possible and store it, sort it, absorb it’s meaning, correlate it with other bits of information which may be tied together, and eventually produce a probability of some outcome from that piece of data.

The earliest name I recall in web ‘history’ is ECHELON. Which with self-autonomous “awareness” being doing in virtual 3-D Method and apparatus for total situational awareness and monitoring along with total Space Domination that such a thing as “Eagle Eye” may not be so “far-out” as to be possible under an ETI environment.

As an Earthling I feel like flying a distress American flag upside down because the “haves” are not taking care of our species very well. The Military who was supposed to “Preserve and Protect from ALL Enemies Foreign and Domestic” have become the world’s most hated super-power. And it also comes when a realization that America is broke from “Empire Building” and currently doing so under the False Flag Event of 9-11’s War on Terror. I wish I could do more to make someone, anyone, anything, any intelligence to help us in these trying times…and the worse to come.

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

That was the lesson of “Eagle Eye”. That an Artificially Intelligent piece of software made a judgment call that the current “haves” were NOT treating the American Citizens fairly and planned a ‘Coup d’état’. Command and control of remote objects and monitoring any video anywhere that was electronic, on web or not.

The sanctity of military spending

By Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Jan 26, 2010

Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow's State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs.  This is an "initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit," officials told The New York Times.  

But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes.  For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs:  Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  And all "security-related programs" are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid.  As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos.  What possible rationale is there for that?

The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known.  The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China.  Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously.  That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's.  As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it:  "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion."  To get a sense for how thoroughly military spending dominates our national budget, consider this chart showing where Americans' tax revenue goes:

Since much of that overall spending is mandatory, military spending -- all of which is discretionary -- accounts for over 50% of discretionary government spending. Yet it's absolutely forbidden to even contemplate reducing it as a means of reducing our debt or deficit.  To the contrary, Obama ran on a platform of increasing military spending, and that is one of the few pledges he is faithfully and enthusiastically filling (while violating his pledge not to use deceitful budgetary tricks to fund our wars):

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.

Obama's Tiny Jobs Ideas for Main Street, a Big Spending Freeze for Wall Street

 (Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Hammer51012, Bömmel, Eddi 07)

Monday 25 January 2010
by: Robert Reich  RobertReich.org

President Obama today offered a set of proposals for helping America’s troubled middle class. All are sensible and worthwhile. But none will bring jobs back. And Americans could be forgiven for wondering how the President plans to enact any of these ideas anyway, when he can no longer muster 60 votes in the Senate.

The bigger news is Obama is planning a three-year budget freeze on a big chunk of discretionary spending. Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever.

A pending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won’t do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule.

In December 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a so-called “middle class bill of rights” including more tax credits for families with children, expanded retirement accounts, and tax-deductible college tuition. Clinton had lost his battle for health care reform. Even worse, by that time the Dems had lost the House and Senate. Washington was riding a huge anti-incumbent wave. Right-wing populists were the ascendancy, with Newt Gingrich and Fox News leading the charge. Bill Clinton thought it desperately important to assure Americans he was on their side.

Two months later, Clinton summoned Dick Morris to the White House to figure out how Clinton could move to the right and better position himself for reelection. The answer: Balance the budget.

But in 1994, Clinton’s inconsistencies didn’t much matter. The U.S. economy was coming out of a recession. It was of no consequence that Clinton’s jobs proposals were small or that he moved to the right and whacked the budget, because within a year the great American jobs machine was blasting away and the middle class felt a lot better. Dick Morris was not responsible for Clinton’s reelection. Nor was Clinton’s move to the right. What reelected Bill Clinton in 1996 was a vigorous jobs recovery that was on the way to happening anyway.

Today, though, there’s no sign on the horizon of a vigorous recovery. Jobs may be coming back a bit in the next months but the country has lost so many (not to mention all those who have entered the workforce over the last two years and still can’t land a job) that it will be many years before the middle class can relax. Furthermore, this recession isn’t like other recessions in recent memory. It has more to do with problems deep in the structure of the American economy than with the ups and downs of the business cycle.

When Scholars Join the Slaughter

 (Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: The U.S. Army, Hayley Austin)

Tuesday 26 January 2010
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t  Report

A core tenant of the Obama administration's plans for "victory" in Iraq and Afghanistan is an increased reliance on counterinsurgency.

As previously reported on this web site, the US military has sent shock troops - anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists - with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, who also donned helmets and flak jackets. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. The program is currently comprised of approximately 400 employees, and is actively seeking new recruits.

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to throughout history as the "handmaiden of colonialism," thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and a leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become "just another weapon ... not a tool for building bridges between peoples." Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Dutch inquiry finds Iraq war illegal

by Ann Talbot
22 January 2010

A Dutch commission of inquiry has concluded that the US-led 2003 Iraq war was illegal under international law.  The conclusion has far-reaching implications. Potentially, it could open up leading politicians and military figures in the US and Britain to prosecution for war crimes.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands set up the Davids Commission in order to avoid a full parliamentary inquiry into the Dutch role in the invasion of Iraq. He headed the caretaker government at the time of the invasion and has rejected the report’s findings. The fact that a commission which was set up with the intention of producing a whitewash has had to come to such damning conclusions points to the weight of evidence that exists for the illegality of the war.

The attempt to maintain the lie that the war was legal is becoming increasingly difficult. The Dutch report entirely rejects the central argument used to justify the actions of the British government and claim that there was a legal basis for the invasion.

“The [UN] Security Council Resolutions on Iraq passed during the 1990s did not constitute a mandate for the US-British military intervention in 2003,” the report concludes. “Despite the existence of certain ambiguities, the wording of Resolution 1441 cannot reasonably be interpreted (as the government did) as authorizing individual Member States to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council’s resolutions, without authorization from the Security Council.”

The report goes on: “The Dutch government’s often repeated view that a second resolution was ‘politically desirable, but not legally indispensable’ is not easy to uphold. The wording and scope of Resolution 1441 cannot be interpreted as such a second resolution. Hence, the military action had no sound mandate under international law.”

Unlike the ongoing Chilcot inquiry in Britain on the war, the Dutch team included legal experts. As Professor Philippe Sands QC, an expert on international law, has pointed out, their conclusion is significant for that reason:

“There has been no other independent assessment on the legality of the war in Iraq and the findings of this inquiry are unambiguous. It concludes that the case argued by the Dutch and British governments, including the then-attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, could not reasonably be argued.

“This is the authoritative view of seven commissioners, including the former president of the Dutch Supreme Court, a former judge of the European Court of justice, and two legal academics.”

The Dutch report will inevitably raise once again the question of the advice that Lord Goldsmith gave to the British government. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, resigned in March 2003, claiming that Goldsmith had told lawyers at the Foreign Office that war against Iraq would be illegal. According to leaked documents, Goldsmith told Blair in July 2002 that regime-change was “not a legal basis for military action.”