Observations on current events

Domestic Surveillance:

WIRED Magazine: Inside DCSNet, the FBI's Nationwide Eavesdropping Network
"The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
It's a 'comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems,' says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.
DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network..."


Two Years After Katrina

Douglas Brinkley (WP): Reckless Abandonment
"Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.
They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.
After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.
Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?
And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?..."

Economics:

When one once again hears about average American CEO pay being hundreds of times what workers earn, one has to wonder about the population's colletive memory about why unions even exist...

Dean Baker: The Right to Unionize: Key to Democracy
"For the last quarter century, corporate America has been at war against the labor movement. After a long period in which unions were an accepted part of the economic and political landscape, most corporations adopted a much more hostile attitude toward unions. Where unions already were present, employers sought to weaken or break them. In workplaces without unions, employers were prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent workers from organizing.
This anti-union drive has largely enjoyed the support of the government. For example, it is now a standard practice for employers to fire workers engaged in an organizing drive. A study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found one in five organizers will be fired during an average organizing drive. Such firings are illegal, but enforcement is sufficiently slow, and the penalties sufficiently small, that most employees eagerly embrace this effective anti-union tactic.
Government policies have also supported anti-union practices in other ways. A main purpose of trade agreements like NAFTA was to make it as easy as possible to relocate factories overseas. The high dollar policy Robert Rubin initiated in the Clinton era also put US manufacturing, and its unionized workers, at a huge disadvantage. A 30 percent over-valued dollar effectively imposes a 30 percent tariff on goods exported from the United States, while providing a subsidy of 30 percent on goods imported into the United States.
As a result of these policies, much manufacturing has, in fact, been moved overseas in the last quarter century, giving the country a trade deficit of more than $700 billion annually. And the jobs lost in manufacturing have been disproportionately union jobs. While the unionization rate in manufacturing was more than 40 percent in the sixties, in 2006 it was just 11.6 percent, less than the 12 percent average for all workers, although still somewhat higher than the 7.4 percent average for the private sector as a whole.
The weakening of the labor movement is not just bad news for the workers who lose union jobs. According to polling data, there are tens of millions of workers who would like to be represented by a union at their workplace, but don't currently have the option. The best way to get a guide as to how many workers would be in unions if they could opt to do so, in the absence of employer threats and harassment, is to look at the unionization rate in the public sector.
While public sector managers are not generally friendly to unions, they can't fire union organizers or use the other harsh anti-union tactics that are now standard practice in the private sector. As a result, more than 36 percent of public sector employees are members of unions. Given the freedom to choose, it is likely a comparable share of private sector workers would also be in unions. This would imply an additional 30 million workers in unions..."

Bush Likes To Talk About Freedom, While Stifling Dissent When Interacting With The Public:

NY Times Editorial: Squelching the Citizenry’s Back Talk
"The White House certainly has been guilty of mismanagement and lack of preparation on the big things, like the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. But it turns out that President Bush’s encounters with ordinary Americans have been micromanaged and laboriously controlled for the past five years to weed out the merest whiff of protest. Citizen volunteers are enlisted to vet cranky-looking sorts outside the event, and 'rally squads' of zealots are prompted to pounce on anyone who manages to slip through with an outspoken thought or an unscripted word.
'Do not fall into their trap!' warns the presidential manual in hypothesizing that protesters really want to be physically restrained and attract media notice, not merely exercise their right to complain. Instead, the roaming squads’ task is to use their own 'signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.
Noisy protest? The rally squads’ response must be immediate choruses of 'USA! USA!' to muffle the moment with patriotic chaff. These vigilante squads are out of place in a democracy.
The chamois-tight precautions of the White House’s presidential visit manual surfaced in The Washington Post because of a First Amendment lawsuit involving two people who refused to cover up the message of their T-shirts at a Fourth of July presidential event. 'Regime change begins at home,' was the familiar shirt message of one protestor who was handcuffed and taken to jail.
The manual magnanimously advises local police to tolerate dissenters — providing they are barred from the event through an ultra-loyalist ticketing process and then cordoned well off from earshot and sight of the president and his passing motorcade.
Every White House stage-manages presidential events, but this level of obsession with silencing the vox pop is a symptom of this administration’s broader problem honoring Americans’ constitutional freedoms."

Iraq:

Robert Fisk: The Iraqis Don’t Deserve Us. So We Betray Them…

Robert Scheer: The Real Iraq Progress Report
"The parade of political tourists to Iraq in recent weeks, during which easily impressed pundits and members of Congress came to be dazzled by the wonders of the troop surge, probably ensures that this murderous adventure will continue well into the next presidency-even if the Democrats win. For example, Kenneth Pollack, a top national security adviser in the Clinton administration whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” convinced many Democratic politicians to support the war, now finds renewed optimism after the surge. In a July 30 New York Times Op-Ed article, 'A War We Just Might Win,' which he coauthored after spending eight days in Iraq, Pollack gushed, 'We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi army troops cover the countryside.' So much so that a town 40 miles northeast of Tal Afar was the scene, on Aug. 15, of the deadliest attack of the war-a quadruple bombing left more than 500 dead and 1500 wounded, and most of the buildings in ruin. What about those 'reliable' police officers and Iraqi army troops whose presence in the area Pollack found so reassuring? If Pollack was asked about that on any of the talk shows that routinely feature him as an expert, I have not found the footage..."


The Economy:

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smashing Capitalism
"Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution. First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were 'NINJA' loans, for example, awarded to people with 'no income, no job or assets.' Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of 'economic literacy' that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn’t these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don’t they have personal financial advisors anyway?...
...all the evidence suggests that the current crisis is something the high-rollers brought down on themselves.
When, for example, the largest private employer in America, which is Wal-Mart, starts experiencing a shortage of customers, it needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. About a century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, never seemed to figure out that its cruelly low wages would eventually curtail its own growth, even at the company’s famously discounted prices.
The sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart-level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army. Nor do they have much use for Wal-Mart’s other departments, such as Electronics, Lawn and Garden, and Pharmacy.
It gets worse though. While with one hand the high-rollers, H. Lee Scott among them, squeezed the American worker’s wages, the other hand was reaching out with the tempting offer of credit. In fact, easy credit became the American substitute for decent wages. Once you worked for your money, but now you were supposed to pay for it. Once you could count on earning enough to save for a home. Now you’ll never earn that much, but, as the lenders were saying — heh, heh — do we have a mortgage for you!
Pay day loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May 21st cover story on 'The Poverty Business,' BusinessWeek documented the stampede, in the just the last few years, to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Take on a car loan even if your credit rating sucks! Financiamos a Todos! Somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were being offered..."


The Military Industrial Complex:

Norman Solomon: Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us
"The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state. While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes — and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative — such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that 'the people must take back the government,' but how can 'the people' take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for 'returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,' we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed. The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on. Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse..."

...and Bush/Cheney can't wait to use force against Iran, which means they likely won't find the restraint to unleash air strikes with expensive bombs made in Texas:

Ray McGovern: Bush League War Drums Beating Louder on Iran

The So-Called War On Terror:

NY Times Editorial: The C.I.A. Report
"The C.I.A. inspector general’s report on the agency’s failures before Sept. 11 was devastating — but not because it showed that America’s spies missed the rise of Al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the 'war' with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president’s closest advisers to agitate for a strike on a Qaeda base in Afghanistan.
The disturbing thing was that this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job (through such innovative antiterrorism measures as naming the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters for Mr. Bush’s father).
The Bush team was so busy in 2001 trying to upend America’s global relationships according to a neo-conservative agenda that the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, did not see any urgency in reports that Al Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States..."

Rovian Politics:

John Solomon, Alec MacGillis and Sarah Cohen (WP): How Rove Directed Federal Assets for GOP Gains
"Thirteen months before President Bush was reelected, chief strategist Karl Rove summoned political appointees from around the government to the Old Executive Office Building. The subject of the Oct. 1, 2003, meeting was 'asset deployment,' and the message was clear:
The staging of official announcements, high-visibility trips and declarations of federal grants had to be carefully coordinated with the White House political affairs office to ensure the maximum promotion of Bush's reelection agenda and the Republicans in Congress who supported him, according to documents and some of those involved in the effort.
'The White House determines which members need visits,' said an internal e-mail about the previously undisclosed Rove 'deployment' team, 'and where we need to be strategically placing our assets.'
Many administrations have sought to maximize their control of the machinery of government for political gain, dispatching Cabinet secretaries bearing government largess to battleground states in the days before elections. The Clinton White House routinely rewarded big donors with stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and private coffees with senior federal officials, and held some political briefings for top Cabinet officials during the 1996 election.
But Rove, who announced last week that he is resigning from the White House at the end of August, pursued the goal far more systematically than his predecessors, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, enlisting political appointees at every level of government in a permanent campaign that was an integral part of his strategy to establish Republican electoral dominance..."

Frank Rich: He Got Out While the Getting Was Good
"...Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a congressional investigation at last about to draw blood? Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No Republican presidential candidates paid tribute to Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp - not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. - that the White House and Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days. What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring 'the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,' not to mention 'the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.' Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step..."


The Retalliatory Leak:

Logan Murphy: Matt Cooper: Rove Leaked Plame's Identity to Me
"Following Karl Rove's appearance this morning on 'Meet The Press' David Gregory (who is involved in the Plame scandal. More on that later.) held a round table discussion which included former Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper. Cooper, who was dead center in the Valerie Plame scandal, stops just short of calling Karl Rove a liar, insisting that he did, in fact, leak Valerie Plame's name to him in 2003..."


Outsourcing National Security:

Walter Pincus: Defense Agency Proposes Outsourcing More Spying
"The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.
The proposed contracts, outlined in a recent early notice of the DIA's plans, reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private contractors.
Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department, according to a congressional tally in June. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks caught many of them unprepared to meet new demands with their existing workforce..."


On Torture:

Democracy Now! - Dissident Members Challenge American Psychological Association on Role in CIA Interrogation, Torture
"...DR. STEPHEN SOLDZ: OK, well, let me try and tell you in brief, because we could go on for hours on it. But I know you’ve provided great coverage over the years, which we really appreciate. Going back since the days -- was it, three, four years ago -- when we started getting hints in the press that conditions in American detention facilities were not quite ideal, that abuse, that treatment that probably meets the legal definition of torture was occurring in many of them, there started to be increasing numbers of reports that health professionals, psychologists among them, were participating in those abusive interrogations and the other abuse that’s non-interrogation-related abuse at these facilities. As a result, the professional associations -- the American Medical, the American Psychiatric, the American Psychological -- were under pressure to do something. The two medical associations eventually, though somewhat belatedly, adopted policies that said that their members do not belong in interrogations. As health professionals, their obligation is to help and do no harm.
The American Psychological Association has not done that. They appointed a presidential task force on ethics and national security, the so-called PENS Task Force, in 2005. When their report came out, it was not signed by the members of the committee. However, it later was revealed that six of the nine members of this committee, investigating -- forming policy on the ethics of involvement in interrogations, were themselves from the military and intelligence communities, most with direct ties to interrogations. In other words, these were precisely the people whose behavior was potentially being reported upon in the press as being problematic, were those who the APA chose to formulate its policy. And then they had them not sign their report. Since when does one hear a report where you can't read a list of the members? I’ve never seen such a thing..."

The following article make it appear as though the APA did change, but there is more to this story...

Washington Post: Psychologists' Group Rules on Interrogation Abuse
"The American Psychological Association ruled Sunday that psychologists can no longer be associated with several interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism detainees at U.S. facilities because the methods are immoral, psychologically damaging and counterproductive in eliciting useful information.
Psychologists who witness interrogators using mock executions, simulated drowning, sexual and religious humiliation, stress positions or sleep deprivation are required to intervene to stop such abuse, to report the activities to superiors and to report the involvement of any other psychologists in such activities to the association. It could then strip those professionals of their membership.
The move by the APA, the nation's largest association of behavioral experts, is a rebuke of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies. Many of the techniques deemed unacceptable have been widely reported to be used at military facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq and at various CIA detention centers.
But it also has practical effects. Psychologists who have their membership revoked can lose their license, since many state licensing boards require psychologists to be in good standing with the national association.
Also ruled out of bounds are the exploitation of prisoners' phobias, the use of mind-altering drugs, hooding, forced nakedness, the use of dogs to frighten detainees, exposing prisoners to extreme heat and cold, physical assault and threatening the use of such techniques against a prisoner or a prisoner's family..."

Bush's Brain:

Rove being an agnostic makes his use of the Christian Right's electoral power appear very hypocritical. Not out of character with the rest of Team Bush's tactics, but hypocritical nonetheless...

Bill Moyers: 'Greed and God won four elections in a row' for Rove
"Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat -- a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people.
It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.
At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row - twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles - paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.
Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals being investigated as we speak, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the attorney general of the United States into a partisan sockpuppet. Rove is riding out of Dodge city as the posse rides in. At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism; he wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator. On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a hail mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it


Illegal Surveillance of Americans:

One has to wonder what information Team Bush has garnered on members of Congress using illegal wiretaps. Why else would they behave like such timid sheep in the face of an Executive grabbing unprecedented power?

The Raw Story: Secret spy court orders Bush to respond to request for information on secret ruling
"In an unprecedented order, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Bush Administration to respond to a request it received last week by the American Civil Liberties Union for orders and legal papers discussing the scope of the government's authority to engage in the secret wiretapping of Americans, according to an ACLU press release late Friday..."

On the use of U-2 spy planes in the U.S. by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency...

Tim Shorrock:America under surveillance
"Granted new power to spy inside the U.S., the Bush administration may be doing more than eavesdropping on phone calls -- it could be watching suspects' every move..."

The following, by the way, is likely one of the last articles of this type we will see in the WSJ, now that Rupert Murdoch has purchased the paper.

Wall St. Journal: U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites
"The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S. The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.
Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study.
According to officials, one of the department's first objectives will be to use the network to enhance border security, determine how best to secure critical infrastructure and help emergency responders after natural disasters. Sometime next year, officials will examine how the satellites can aid federal and local law-enforcement agencies, covering both criminal and civil law. The department is still working on determining how it will engage law enforcement officials and what kind of support it will give them.
Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons...
...Access to the satellite surveillance will be controlled by a new Homeland Security branch -- the National Applications Office -- which will be up and running in October. Homeland Security officials say the new office will build on the efforts of its predecessor, the Civil Applications Committee. Under the direction of the Geological Survey, the Civil Applications Committee vets requests from civilian agencies wanting spy data for environmental or scientific study. The Geological Survey has been one of the biggest domestic users of spy-satellite information, to make topographic maps.
Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory. Although the courts have permitted warrantless aerial searches of private property by law-enforcement aircraft, there are no cases involving the use of satellite technology.
In recent years, some military experts have questioned whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The act bars the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S., and the satellites were predominantly built for and owned by the Defense Department.
According to Pentagon officials, the government has in the past been able to supply information from spy satellites to federal law-enforcement agencies, but that was done on a case-by-case basis and only with special permission from the president.
Even the architects of the current move are unclear about the legal boundaries. A 2005 study commissioned by the U.S. intelligence community, which recommended granting access to the spy satellites for Homeland Security, noted: 'There is little if any policy, guidance or procedures regarding the collection, exploitation and dissemination of domestic MASINT.' MASINT stands for Measurement and Signatures Intelligence, a particular kind of information collected by spy satellites which would for the first time become available to civilian agencies..."


The Predatory Capitalism of WalMart:

Education-Portal.com Wal-Mart Steals Billions From Public Schools
"Wal-Mart wants you to think you're getting a bargain, but in reality, the store is taking you for the ride of your life and stealing billions from public coffers that should be dedicated to funding our public education system.

The High Cost of Low Prices State and local governments have awarded $1 billion in subsidies to Wal-Mart-money that could have been used to fund our struggling public education system or other public services.
(Source: NEA.org)

Taxpayers are forced to contribute billions to health care and public assistance funds every year to cover Wal-Mart employees who are not eligible for the company's insurance plan. California alone spends $86 million each year.
(Source: UC Berkeley Study)

The Walton Family Foundation has donated more than $100 million to private organizations that buy political influence and undermine public education support.
(Source: MediaTransparency.org)

Our public education system desperately needs more funding. If Wal-Mart ceased stealing from our public coffers and quit donating money to dismantle public schools, perhaps that funding would be available..."


Managing Public Opinion Via Edits of Online Encyclopedia Entries:

WIRED Magazine: See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
"On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits. In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations..."

Trusting The Right Of Franchise To Questionable Technology:

A stunning lack of design & manufacturing standards...

Dan Rather Reports: "The Trouble with Touch Screens"
"Dan Rather Reports presents conclusive evidence of the failure of touch screen voting machines across the country. The episode, 'The Trouble with Touch Screens', is an entire hour devoted to new information on this story. From scientists involved in testing the equipment, to manufacturers in third world countries who shipped these defective voting machines to the United States, Dan Rather Reports presents new information showing that these defective machines may have altered the outcome of multiple elections..."

Iraq:

McClatchy Washington Bureau: At U.S. base, Iraqis must use separate latrine
"FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARHORSE, Iraq — The sign taped to the men's latrine is just five lines:
'US MILITARY CONTRACTORS CIVILIANS ONLY!!!!!'
It needed only one: 'NO IRAQIS.'
Here at this searing, dusty U.S. military base about four miles west of Baqouba, Iraqis — including interpreters who walk the same foot patrols and sleep in the same tents as U.S. troops — must use segregated bathrooms.
Another sign, in a dining hall, warns Iraqis and 'third-country nationals' that they have just one hour for breakfast, lunch or dinner. American troops get three hours. Iraqis say they sometimes wait as long as 45 minutes in hot lines to get inside the chow hall, leaving just 15 minutes to get their food and eat it.
It's been nearly 60 years since President Harry Truman ended racial segregation in the U.S. military. But at Forward Operating Base Warhorse it's alive and well, perhaps the only U.S. military facility with such rules, Iraqi interpreters here say.
It's unclear precisely who ordered the rules. 'The rule separating local national latrines from soldiers was enacted about two to three rotations ago,' Maj. Raul Marquez, a spokesman for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, from Fort Hood, Texas, wrote in an e-mail. That was before his brigade or the 3rd Stryker Combat Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Lewis, Wash., the other major combat force here, was based at Warhorse..."

Coal Mine Safety:

Salt Lake Tribune: Memo shows mine already had roof problems in March
"Operators at the Crandall Canyon mine experienced serious structural problems in the mine in March and entirely abandoned work in an area about 900 feet from where six miners remained trapped Saturday.
A memo obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune shows that mine owners were trying to work around 'poor roof conditions' before halting mining of the northern tunnels in early March after a 'large bump occurred . . . resulting in heavy damage' in those tunnels.
A bump or bounce occurs when the intense pressure on the coal pillars supporting the mine causes the pillars to burst, 'sending coal and rock flying with explosive force,' according to that National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
The memo indicates that mine operators knew the tremendous pressures of a mountain bearing down on the mine were creating problems with the roof, and they were searching for a way to safely keep the mine from falling in as they cut away the coal pillars supporting the structure.
'It's dangerous. Damn dangerous I would say,' Robert Ferriter, now director of the mine safety program at the Colorado School of Mines and a 27-year veteran of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. 'What is MSHA doing in all this? They're the ones who are supposed to catch this sort of thing,'..."


The So-Called War On Terror and The Politics of Fear:

First of all, good riddance to Karl Rove, the criminal charlatan & and manipulator.
Now, he is finally unshielded by the Executive. The only question that remains is what he knowns that the public does not, to be quitting at this time...

Frank Rich: Shuffling Off to
Crawford, 2007 Edition
"The cases of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch were ugly enough. So surely someone in the White House might have the good taste to draw the line at exploiting the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But nothing is out of bounds for a government that puts the darkest arts of politics and public relations above even the exigencies of war.
As Jane Mayer told the story in last week's New Yorker, Mariane Pearl was called by Alberto Gonzales with some good news in March: the Justice Department was releasing a transcript in which the long-incarcerated Qaeda thug Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to the beheading of her husband. But there was something off about Mr. Gonzales's news. It was almost four years old.
Condoleezza Rice had called Ms. Pearl to tell her in confidence about the very same confession back in 2003; it was also reported that year in The Journal and elsewhere. What's more, the confession was suspect; another terrorist had been convicted in the Pearl case in Pakistan in 2002. There is no known corroborating evidence that Mohammed, the 9/11 ringleader who has taken credit for many horrific crimes while in American custody, was responsible for this particular murder. None of his claims, particularly those possibly coerced by torture, can be taken as gospel solely on our truth-challenged attorney general's say-so.
Ms. Pearl recognized a publicity ploy when she saw it. And this one wasn't subtle. Mr. Gonzales released the Mohammed transcript just as the latest Justice Department scandal was catching fire, with newly disclosed e-mail exchanges revealing the extent of White House collaboration in the United States attorney firings. Had the attorney general succeeded in enlisting Daniel Pearl's widow as a player in his stunt, it might have diverted attention from a fracas then engulfing President Bush on his Latin American tour.
Though he failed this time, Mr. Gonzales's P.R. manipulation of the war on terror hasn't always been so fruitless..."


Domestic Surveillance and Our (Fleeting) Civil Liberties:

Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus (WashPost): How the Fight for Vast New Spying Powers Was Won
"For three days, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, had haggled with congressional leaders over amendments to a federal surveillance law, but now he was putting his foot down. 'This is the issue,' said the plain-spoken retired vice admiral and Vietnam veteran, 'that makes my blood pressure rise.'
McConnell viscerally objected to a Democratic proposal to limit warrantless surveillance of foreigners' communications with Americans to instances in which one party was a terrorism suspect. McConnell wanted no such limits. 'All foreign intelligence' targets in touch with Americans on any topic of interest should be fair game for U.S. spying, he said, according to two participants in the Aug. 2 conversation.
McConnell won the fight, extracting a key concession despite the misgivings of Democratic negotiators. Shortly after that exchange, the Bush administration leveraged Democratic acquiescence into a broader victory: congressional approval of a Republican bill that would expand surveillance powers far beyond what Democratic leaders had initially been willing to accept.
Yet both sides acknowledge that the administration's resurrection of virtually unchecked Cold War-era power to surveil foreign targets without warrants may be only temporary. The law expires in 180 days, and Democrats, smarting from their political defeat, have promised to alter it with new legislation to be prepared next month, when Congress returns from its recess.
'The real train wreck happens in September,' said a senior administration official involved in the negotiations with Congress. He was referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's declaration hours after the bill's passage that portions are 'unacceptable' and that the public will not want to wait six months 'before corrective action is taken.'
Until September - and possibly for much longer - the new law will enable the high-tech collection of foreign communications without judicial scrutiny on a vastly larger scale than previously possible, allowing billions of phone calls and e-mails inside as well as outside the United States to be routinely screened for possible links to terrorism and other security threats.
Congressional, administration and intelligence officials last week described the events leading up to the approval of this surveillance, including a remarkable series of confrontations that ended with McConnell and the White House outmaneuvering the Democratic-controlled Congress, partly by capitalizing on fresh reports of a growing terrorism threat..."


Health Care:

NY Times Editorial: World’s Best Medical Care?
"Many Americans are under the delusion that we have 'the best health care system in the world,' as President Bush sees it, or provide the 'best medical care in the world,' as Rudolph Giuliani declared last week. That may be true at many top medical centers. But the disturbing truth is that this country lags well behind other advanced nations in delivering timely and effective care. Michael Moore struck a nerve in his new documentary, 'Sicko,' when he extolled the virtues of the government-run health care systems in France, England, Canada and even Cuba while deploring the failures of the largely private insurance system in this country. There is no question that Mr. Moore overstated his case by making foreign systems look almost flawless. But there is a growing body of evidence that, by an array of pertinent yardsticks, the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care. Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light..."

Our (Fleeting) Constitutional Rights:

John Dean: The So-Called Protect America Act: Why Its Sweeping Amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Pose Not Only a Civil Liberties Threat, But a Greater Danger As Well
"Congressional Democrats are getting a lot of well-earned heat from rank-and-file members of their party, not to mention editorial writers and bloggers, for their lack of spine in refusing to reject the Bush/Cheney Administration’s sweeping amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Just before Congress departed for its August recess, the Administration jammed through in five days - from start to finish — the dubiously titled Protect America Act (PAA) of 2007, over the protest of the Democratic leadership. The only thing good about the PAA is that it is temporary - with a six month expiration date (although surveillance programs authorized under it can operate for up to one year.)...
...The Washington Post, the New York Times, and politically-diverse organizations ranging from the John Birch Society and the Cato Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union all agree that the PAA is a serious mistake, and threat to the civil liberties of Americans. They point out that the law ignores the Fourth Amendment while, at the same time, hiding its actual operations in national security secrecy. Indeed, Congress was not even certain about the full extent of what it has authorized because President Bush and Vice-President Cheney refused to reveal it.
It is not likely that law-abiding Americans will even know that the U.S. Government’s intelligence gathering operations are listening in on their calls to and from foreign countries, or similarly scanning emails. For this reason, it is not to be expected that many Americans will care about what the Democratic Congress has given a Republican president who has proven himself insensitive to anyone’s privacy other than his own.
There is, however, a threat in this new law even greater than its robbing Americans of their communications privacy, which commentators and critics have virtually ignored. This law is another bold and blatant move by Bush to enhance the powers of the Executive branch at the expense of its constitutional co-equals.
Congress was willing to give Bush the amendments to FISA that would make this law effective under current technology. The 1978 law did not account for the fact that modern digital communications between people outside the United States often is routed through the United States, yet the FISA Court said surveillance of such routed communications required a warrant. Nevertheless, Bush rejected the legislation proposed by the Democrats because it also contained checks on the use of surveillance powers..."

Helen Thomas: Yet Again, The Democrats Roll Over
"President Bush has the Democrats’ number on Capitol Hill. All he has to do is play the fear card and invoke the war on terror and they will cave.What’s more, the president has found out that he can break the law and the rubber stamp Democratic Congress will give him a pass every time. The fear of being branded “soft on terrorism” was enough to make the Democrats capitulate once again to the Bush administration’s demands. Or was it simply a looming vacation and beckoning campaign travel that led them to desert the nation’s capital after giving the National Security Agency the power to expand its eavesdropping program without a warrant. The Orwellian measure allows the federal government — without a court order or oversight — to intercept electronic communications between people in the U.S. and people outside the U.S...
...In ordering wiretapping without a warrant, Bush seemed to think that the laws did not apply to him. The compliant FISA court has turned down only one request for a warrant in the past two years. So what’s his problem with obeying the law?
He seems to be giving credence to President Nixon’s famous quote: 'If a president does it, it’s not illegal.'
It boggles the mind to imagine what secret executive orders the next president will uncover after Bush leaves office and what the American people will eventually learn about the secret infringement of their rights."

AP: Secret Call Log at Heart of Wiretap Challenge
"In open court and legal filings it's referred to simply as 'the Document.'
Federal officials claim its contents are so sensitive to national security that it is stored in a bombproof safe in Washington and viewed only by prosecutors with top secret security clearances and a few select federal judges.
The Document, described by those who have seen it as a National Security Administration log of calls intercepted between an Islamic charity and its American lawyers, is at the heart of what legal experts say may be the strongest case against the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. The federal appeals court in San Francisco plans to hear arguments in the case Aug. 15.
The charity's lawyer scoffs at the often surreal lengths the government has taken to keep the Document under wraps.
'Believe me,' Oakland attorney Jon Eisenberg said, 'if this appeared on the front pages of newspapers, national security would not be jeopardized.'
Eisenberg represents the now-defunct U.S. arm of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a prominent Saudi charity that was shut down by authorities in that kingdom after the U.S. Treasury Department declared it a terrorist organization that was allegedly funding al-Qaeda.
He and his colleagues sued the U.S. government in Portland, Ore.'s federal court, alleging the NSA had illegally intercepted telephone calls without warrants between Soliman al-Buthi, the Saudi national who headed Al-Haramain's U.S. branch, and his two American lawyers, Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor.
Unlike dozens of other lawyers who have sued alleging similar violations of civil liberties stemming from the Bush administration's secret terrorism surveillance program, Eisenberg's team had what it claimed to be unequivocal proof: the Document..."


Testing the waters to see how the public would react to police-state tactics?

IndyStar: TSA checks IndyGo bus passengers
"Screeners from the Transportation Security Administration checked passengers at two Downtown city bus stops this morning, looking for weapons and suspicious behavior.
David Kane, federal security director for TSA in Indianapolis, called it a 'VIPR' operation.
'It's called Visual Intermodal Prevention Response. We have plainclothes inspectors, blue-gloved uniformed security officers who are checking baggage, the behavior detection officers, and federal air marshals, which are the law enforcement arm of TSA.'
Security stations were set up at bus stops at Capitol Avenue and Market Street, and Ohio and Meridian streets.
Some passengers were patted down or submitted to having bags checked.
TSA said the searches were 'by-permission,' meaning patrons could decline to be checked. Those who did would not be turned away, an official said, unless they otherwise appeared to be a security threat."


The Economy:

Paul Krugman: Very Scary Things
"What’s been happening in financial markets over the past few days is something that truly scares monetary economists: liquidity has dried up. That is, markets in stuff that is normally traded all the time - in particular, financial instruments backed by home mortgages - have shut down because there are no buyers. This could turn out to be nothing more than a brief scare. At worst, however, it could cause a chain reaction of debt defaults. The origins of the current crunch lie in the financial follies of the last few years, which in retrospect were as irrational as the dot-com mania. The housing bubble was only part of it; across the board, people began acting as if risk had disappeared. Everyone knows now about the explosion in subprime loans, which allowed people without the usual financial qualifications to buy houses, and the eagerness with which investors bought securities backed by these loans. But investors also snapped up high-yield corporate debt, a k a junk bonds, driving the spread between junk bond yields and U.S. Treasuries down to record lows. Then reality hit - not all at once, but in a series of blows. First, the housing bubble popped. Then subprime melted down. Then there was a surge in investor nervousness about junk bonds: two months ago the yield on corporate bonds rated B was only 2.45 percent higher than that on government bonds; now the spread is well over 4 percent. Investors were rattled recently when the subprime meltdown caused the collapse of two hedge funds operated by Bear Stearns, the investment bank..."


Journalism:

John Pilger: The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
Transcript of an excellent talk given in Chicago this June.

"...Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller’s parroting of official sources and vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. 'No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,' was the headline on his report, and it was false.
Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown. In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media giants, and his company will be one of them. This concentration of power is not exclusive of course to the United States. The BBC has announced it is expanding its broadcasts to the United States, because it believes Americans want principled, objective, neutral journalism for which the BBC is famous. They have launched BBC America. You may have seen the advertising...
...If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended-the laws to round of hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are already on the books. I believe that these dangers are understood by the public, who have come along way since 9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. That’s why they voted for the Democrats last November, only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power.
I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Medialens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web-I can’t mention them all here-from Tom Feeley’s International Clearing House, to Mike Albert’s ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web-Dahr Jamail’s courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the city.
In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert’s investigations turned back much of the virulent propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chávez. Make no mistake, it’s the threat of freedom of speech for the majority in Venezuela that lies behind the campaign in the west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people.
We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now."


On Torture & Extraordinary Rendition:

Jane Mayer: The Black Sites
"...The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel..."


Iraq:

Tom Engelhardt: Green Zone, Red Zone
"Under the headline, 'A War We Just Might Win,' The New York Times on Monday published an op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Kenneth Pollack, both referred to as critics of the way the Bush Administration has 'handled' the war in Iraq. (Pollack had, in fact, been a major cheerleader for the Bush administration's invasion in 2003.) After eight days in Iraq 'meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel,' the two claimed 'the debate in Washington was surreal,' and that '[w]e are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.'
The President's surge plan, as carried out by General David Petraeus, was, they added, working. Their carefully cobbled together formula for where it might take American forces went like this: It had 'the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.' They concluded: '[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.' Of course, O'Hanlon's and Pollack's ideas about what 'Iraqis could live with' and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to differ somewhat...
...On the day of the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about eighty other aid agencies, gave the concept of 'sustainable stability' some grim meaning. In fact, the report - which the Administration did not rush to pass out to a single reporter - added up to a functional definition of Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a 'nation' in which an estimated 1 million families are now headed by widows. From child malnutrition to 'absolute poverty,' large-scale unemployment to an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O'Hanlon and Pollack didn't meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is 'in need of emergency aid.'
In fact, while Pollack and O'Hanlon met with the 'known knowns' in the equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat, spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in 'Red Zone' Baghdad. ('Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a reporter.') She even went from Red Zone to Green Zone Iraq once to - like Pollack and O'Hanlon - have a meeting with General Petraeus. ('He met me in full combat gear. Between the first checkpoint and the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy, still based in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, a distance of about a mile, I was checked six times. I had come from the 'red zone.')
From Nivat, you get a very different picture of 'sustainable' Iraq, a place, it turns out, where you're lucky to get one or two hours of electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130 degrees. Those with small generators that can make electricity are 'the most powerful people in every district.' In one of the more upbeat aspects of her tale, Nivat describes the rise of a new job category, a 'new breed of real-estate agents.' They broker house or apartment exchanges between Sunnis and Shiites being ethnically cleansed from their present neighborhoods. The parties agree to exchange abodes 'until the situation improves.' The Shiite man, who took Nivat around for her two weeks in Baghdad, in one of the more devastating quotes to come out of the capital in recent times, told her: 'My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!'
In the meantime, of course, the Bush Administration - with a helping hand from O'Hanlon and Pollack - continues along a path guaranteed not to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq's unsustainable instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come. General Petraeus is now publicly talking about 'a large contingent of [US] troops in Iraq until the middle of 2009' with no end to the American occupation in sight. For all of them, from the President down to the pundits, the thing that must be - and can't be - sustained is what, in the Vietnam period, was known as 'American credibility' and now might be thought of as an American position of dominance in the Iraqi heartland of the energy heartlands of the planet. This is a terrible imperial farce in support of a 'surge' plan that, as sociologist Michael Schwartz explains in 'The Benchmarks That Matter,' has already surged in directions too predictable and horrible for sustenance."

Chris Hedges: Beyond Disaster
"The war in Iraq is about to get worse-much worse. The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests..."

Sydney Blumenthal: Will The Real Colin Powell Stand Up? The White House Fears That The Former Secretary of State Will Finally Tell The Truth About Planning For The Iraq War

WIRED Magazine: First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq
"Robots have been roaming the streets of Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time -- the first time in any warzone -- the machines are carrying guns..."



Energy Politics:

Harvey Wasserman: Radioactive 'Bailout-In-Advance' Opens Fierce New War Over Nuke Reactors
"After fifty years of what Forbes Magazine long ago called 'the largest managerial disaster in business history,' the nuke power industry is demanding untold billions in a federal 'Bailout-in-Advance.' Congress will decide on these proposed loan guarantees for new nukes in its September conferences over the new Energy Bill.Both sides are gearing up for the new war over the irradiation of our energy future. As usual, it’s vital to 'follow the money.' The industry once promised that atomic energy would be 'too cheap to meter.' But after a half-century of proven failure, Wall Street won’t invest in new nukes without federal support. So buried in the Senate version of the new Energy Bill is a single sentence authorizing the Department of Energy to underwrite virtually unlimited loans for still more nukes. The sentence was slipped into the bill by industry backers without open debate. Overall this staggeringly complex bill contains a hodge-podge of benefits for renewable energy and efficiency, along with a pile of contradictions and steps backward. The House version, for example, lacks strict fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. It also drew a veto threat from George W. Bush, who wants the restoration of huge tax breaks for his friends in the fossil fuel business. But the single sentence that could ultimately have the biggest impact on human survival is the one that offers the prospect of an essentially unlimited amount of taxpayer money to guarantee investments in new atomic reactors..."

Corporate Fraud Helped Create Mortgage Market Woes:

Business Week: Bonfire of the homebuilders
"...Rather than send [Elizabeth and Armando Motto] to a bank, the builder, Beazer Homes USA Inc., offered to provide a [$540,000] mortgage itself in an arrangement of the sort that helped fuel the long housing boom across the country.
But when it appeared that the Mottos might not qualify financially for the loan, things took a troubling turn. Beazer, according to the couple, inflated the pair's earnings in loan-application documents by incorrectly stating they were collecting rental income from the house they were leaving...
...The Mottos moved to Clarksburg, but they haven't succeeded in unloading their previous home in Rockville, Md. They have nearly $1 million in mortgage debt on the two dwellings. With $145,000 in family income, Elizabeth says, they are 'on the brink of foreclosure' on both houses..."

Informant Nation?

ABC News: FBI Proposes Building Network of U.S. Informants
"The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.
According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations, in the tradition of law enforcement confidential informants. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.
The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called 'black bag' secret entry operations.
To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from 'more than 15,000' informants, according to the document. While many of the recruited informants will apparently be U.S. residents, some informants may be overseas, recruited by FBI agents in foreign offices, the report indicates.
The total cost of the effort tops $22 million, according to the document."


Energy Policy:

This is quite revealing about the U.S. automakers intentions on fuel economy.
We've seen GM's ads touting E85 fuel. While it is a good thing to be able to burn domestically produced resources, we can see that GM is most heavily pushing these engines in the large vehicles they'd prefer to keep selling: SUVs on full-size truck frames. The smallest E85-capable engine they offer is a 3.5 liter V6, in which a large sedan will achieve only 24 highway MPG vs the 31 it can achieve on gasoline. For their large E85-capable truck V8's they do not even site MPG figures (one has to wonder why).
A true commitment to energy conservation would have them offering newer, smaller, cars that can make the most of E85.

BusinessWeek: The dirty secret about clean cars
"...The policies for flexible-fuel vehicles—those that can run on mixtures of gasoline and more than 10 percent ethanol—are written in such a way that they result in a number of unintended consequences. One result is that automakers gain some leeway in meeting fuel-economy standards if they produce flexible-fuel cars and trucks. So Detroit's automakers have been pumping out hundreds of thousands of the vehicles, even though most consumers have no access to alternative fuels because they're available at only a fraction of U.S. gas stations...
...'It's a total scam,' says Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global warming
program. 'The automakers are trying to shield themselves from having to make more efficient vehicles. They're avoiding the path to cutting oil dependence, curbing global warming, saving consumers money, and ultimately saving Detroit from competitors like Toyota.'
The culprit is a 1988 law called the Alternative Motor Fuels Act, which has been extended through 2008. It gives automakers extra credit toward meeting fuel-economy standards for making cars that can run on alternative fuels. It's cheap for automakers to make cars fuel-flexible; it only costs them about $50 per vehicle, whereas actually meeting fuel-economy standards (making cars travel more miles per gallon) can be much more expensive. So in recent years auto companies have been pouring out flexible-fuel, gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles without worrying too much about fuel economy,'..."

Domestic Surveillance:

NY Times Editorial: Stampeding Congress, Again
"Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not feel bound by the law or the Constitution when it comes to the war on terror. It cannot even be trusted to properly use the enhanced powers it was legally granted after the attacks.
Yet, once again, President Bush has been trying to stampede Congress into a completely unnecessary expansion of his power to spy on Americans. And, hard as it is to believe, Congressional Republicans seem bent on collaborating, while Democrats (who can still be cowed by the White House’s with-us-or-against-us baiting) aren’t doing enough to stop it.
The fight is over the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on electronic communications that involve someone in the United States. The test is whether there is probable cause to believe that the person being communicated with is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist.
Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he was no longer going to obey that law. He authorized the National Security Agency to intercept international telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and other residents of this country without a court order. He told the public nothing and Congress next to nothing about what he was doing, until The Times disclosed the spying in December 2005...
...Congress was debating this issue yesterday, and the final outcome was unclear. But there are very clear lines that must not be crossed.
First, all electronic surveillance of communication that originates or ends in the United States must be subject to approval and review by the FISA court under the 1978 law. (That court, by the way, has rejected only one warrant in the last two years.)
Second, any measure Congress approves now must have a firm expiration date. Closed-door meetings under the pressure of a looming vacation are no place for such serious business.
The administration and its Republican supporters in Congress argue that American intelligence is blinded by FISA and have seized on neatly timed warnings of heightened terrorist activity to scare everyone. It is vital for Americans, especially lawmakers, to resist that argument. It is pure propaganda..."


In Russia:

Mike Whitney: Kissinger’s secret meeting with Putin
"When a political heavyweight, like Henry Kissinger, jets-off on a secret mission to Moscow; it usually shows up in the news.
Not this time.
This time the media completely ignored -- or should we say censored -- Kissinger’s trip to Russia and his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In fact, apart from a few short blurps in the Moscow Times and one measly article in the UK Guardian, no major news organization even covered the story. There hasn’t been as much as a peep out of anyone in the American media.
Nothing. That means the meetings were probably arranged by Dick Cheney. The secretive Veep doesn’t like anyone knowing what he’s up to..."


Why Doesn't Bush Care About the GOP's Chances In 2008?

Paul Craig Roberts: My wake-up call: Watch for another 9/11-WMD experience
"This is a wake-up call that we are about to experience another 9/11-WMD experience.
The wake-up call is unlikely to be effective, because the American attitude toward government changed fundamentally 70-odd years ago. Prior to the 1930s, Americans were suspicious of government, but with the arrival of the Great Depression, Tojo, and Hitler, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Americans that government existed to protect them from rapacious private interests and foreign threats. Today, Americans are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to government than they are to family members, friends, and those who would warn them about the government’s protection.
Intelligent observers are puzzled that President Bush is persisting in a futile and unpopular war at the obvious expense of his party’s electoral chances in 2008...
...A number of pundits have concluded that the reason the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush’s follies is that they expect Bush’s unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory next year.
There is a problem with this reasoning. It assumes that Cheney, Rove, and the Republicans are ignorant of these facts or are content for the Republican Party to be destroyed after Bush has his warmonger-police state fling. 'After me, the deluge.'
Isn’t it more likely that Cheney and Rove have in mind events that will, once again, rally the people behind President Bush and the Republican Party, that is fighting the 'war on terror' that the Democrats 'want to lose'?
Such events could take a number of forms. As even diehard Republican Patrick J. Buchanan observed on July 17, with three US aircraft carrier battle groups in congested waters off Iran, another Tonkin Gulf incident could easily be engineered to set us at war with Iran.
If Bush’s intentions were merely to bomb a nuclear reactor, he would not need three carrier strike forces.
Lately, the administration has switched to blaming Iran for the war in Iraq. The US Senate has already lined up behind the latest lie with a 97-0 vote to condemn Iran.
Alternatively, false flag 'terrorist' strikes could be orchestrated in the US. The Bush administration has already infiltrated some dissident groups and encouraged them to participate in terrorist talk, for which they were arrested. It is possible that the administration could provoke some groups to actual acts of violence.
Many Americans dismiss suspicion of their government as treasonous, and most believe conspiracy to be impossible 'because someone would talk.'
There is no basis in any known fact for this opinion...
...The Bush administration is preparing us for more terrorist attacks. The latest intelligence report says that Al Qaeda has regrouped, rebuilt, and has the ability to come after us again. 'Al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here,' says the report.
Security operatives, such as Michael Chertoff, and various instruments of administration propaganda have warned that we will be attacked before next year’s election. Chertoff is not a person who wants to be known as Chicken Little for telling us that the sky is falling.
Bush has the Republican Party in such a mess that it cannot survive without another 9/11. Whether authentic or orchestrated, an attack will activate Bush’s new executive orders, which create a dictatorial police state in event of 'national emergency,'..."

Arming Iraq's Security Forces:

AFP: US cannot account for 190,000 guns in Iraq: report
"The US government cannot account for 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to an investigation carried out by the Government Accountability Office.
According to the July 31 report, the military 'cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces.'
The weapons disappeared from records between June 2004 and September 2005, as the military struggled to rebuild the disbanded Iraqi forces from scratch amid increasing attacks from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
Since 2004 the military 'has not consistently collected supporting records confirming the dates the equipment was received, the quantities of equipment delivered, or the Iraqi units receiving the items,' the report said.
'Since 2006 the command has placed greater emphasis on collecting the supporting documents. However, GAO's review of the January 2007 property books found continuing problems with missing and incomplete records,'..."


Product Safety:

New York Times: Lead Paint Prompts Mattel to Recall 967,000 Toys
"Mattel, the maker of Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, is recalling nearly one million toys in the United States today because the products are covered in lead paint. According to Mattel, all the toys were made by a contract manufacturer in China.
The recall, the second biggest this year involving toys, covers 83 products made from April 19 to July 6...
...Mattel says it prevented more than two-thirds of the 967,000 affected toys from reaching consumers by stopping the products in its distribution centers and contacting retailers, like Wal-Mart, Target and Toys ‘R’ Us, late last week. But more than 300,000 of the tainted toys have been bought by consumers in the United States..."


Passing A U.S. Manufacturing Milestone:

New York Times: Foreign Automakers Pass Detroit in Monthly Sales
"Detroit auto companies’ grip on the American automobile market ended in July, when dismal auto sales gave foreign nameplates the lead for the first time ever, sales reports showed Wednesday.
The traditional American brands owned by General Motors, the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Group held 48.1 percent of the market in July, according to the Autodata Corporation, an industry statistics company in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.
That meant foreign auto companies held 51.9 percent of the market. Their previous high was in June, when they held 49.8 percent of automobile sales.
In July a year ago, Detroit companies held 52 percent of the American market, according to Autodata..."

Public Subsidies For More Nuclear Power:

The "inserted without debate" part of this is just charming. This is what lobbying does, and people need to wake up and smell the corruption. The notion of nuclear power being emissions-free or 'clean' is rediculous: the fuel needs to be mined and the waste is deadly for generations.

NY Times: Energy Bill Aids Expansion of Atomic Power
"A one-sentence provision buried in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill, inserted without debate at the urging of the nuclear power industry, could make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.
Lobbyists have told lawmakers and administration officials in recent weeks that the nuclear industry needs as much as $50 billion in loan guarantees over the next two years to finance a major expansion.
The biggest champion of the loan guarantees is Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee and one of the nuclear industry’s strongest supporters in Congress.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and the energy bill’s author, has long argued that nuclear power plants do not need federal loan guarantees. Mr. Bingaman said that the industry was over-interpreting the provision and that it would provide loan guarantees for only the most innovative power plants.
But the provision has the potential to considerably expand the nuclear industry, which plans to build 28 new reactors at an estimated cost of about $4 billion to $5 billion apiece. And while the nuclear industry would be the biggest beneficiary, the provision could also set the stage for billions of dollars in loan guarantees for power plants that use 'clean coal' technology and renewable fuels.
The nuclear industry is enjoying growing political support after decades of opposition from environmental groups and others concerned about the risks. An increasing number of lawmakers in both parties, worried about global warming and dependence on foreign oil, support some expansion of nuclear power...
...Industry executives insist that banks and Wall Street will not provide the money needed to build new reactors unless the loans are guaranteed in their entirety by the federal government.
The federal government guarantees many billions of loans each year to help farmers, exporters, small businesses and students. The government does not actually lend the money but agrees to pay it back in case the borrower defaults..."