Observations on current events

Targeting Iran:

The build-up of a significant contingent of the U.S. Naval fleet in the Persian Gulf in recent weeks may mean an October (or sooner) Surprise, calculated to benefit the GOP in the November election. Fear is the only domestic political weapon they have left. Outside of immediate global oil market implications, it could mean a wider disastrous war, considering Iran's relationship with Russia and China.

IsraelNationalNews.com - Israel Has Decided: Iran Will Not Have Nukes
"Israel's leadership resolved, in top-level strategic discussions three months ago, to do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from having nuclear bombs. This is Maariv's front-page headline on Friday.
Maariv's veteran political reporter Ben Caspit stops short of detailing the precise solution Israel will implement to put an end to Iran's nuclear program, but writes, 'Preparations for an Israeli military option intended to stop Iran's nuclear program are underway.'
The results of the series of highest-level discussions are thus clear: 'The debate between those who believe in doing everything, including a military operation, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, and those who think we can live with Iranian nukes, has been settled.'
Not only that, but 'if the ayatollahs' regime does not fall in the next year, if the Americans do not strike militarily, and if the international sanctions do not break the Iranian nuclear plan, Israel will have to act forcefully,'..."

Technology:

San Francisco Chronicle: Comcast to restrict monthly broadband use
"Comcast soon will begin cracking down on heavy users of its Internet service in a move that critics fear could be a step toward restricting unlimited broadband access to download and upload files while surfing the Web.
The country's largest cable company and second-largest Internet provider said Thursday that beginning Oct. 1, residential users who download and/or upload more than 250 GB of data a month will be notified and asked to curb their use. Customers who exceed the limit a second time in six months will face termination of their account.
The limit clearly defines a policy that Comcast has had in place for many years. In the past, excessive users faced similar restrictions, but the limits were never spelled out and actually fluctuated month to month depending on overall traffic. Comcast would not disclose the range of the old limits..."

DNC - Follow The Money:

ABC News: ABC Reporter Arrested in Denver Taking Pictures of Senators, Big Donors
"Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.
Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit...
...Eslocker was released late today after posting $500 bond.
Eslocker and his ABC News colleagues are spending the week investigating the role of corporate lobbyists and wealthy donors at the convention for a series of Money Trail reports on ABC's 'World News with Charles Gibson,'."

It's a pity this isn't the sort of Democratic candidate that the Party Bosses get behind.

The Raw Story: Kucinich tells DNC: 'Wake up America!'
"He might not have had the marquee billing of a Mark Warner or a Hillary Clinton, but Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) nonetheless whipped his party faithful into a frenzy Tuesday evening.
The Ohio lawmaker and liberal stalwart who earlier sought the Democratic presidential nomination delivered a passionate address calling on those in the audience here in Denver and watching at home to 'wake up' and prevent another four years of Republican rule.
'Wake up America,' Kucinich declared from the podium of the Democratic National Convention. 'In 2001 the oil companies, the war contractors and the neocon-artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. ... Trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war paid for with borrowed money.'
Though he never mentioned GOP nominee John McCain by name, Kucinich's address was in line with Democrats' strategy to take a harsher tone of attack against the Arizona Republican and his party.
'We cannot afford another Republican administration,' Kucinich said. 'Wake up, America; the insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America; the pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America; the speculators took over Wall Street. ... Wake up, America; we went into Iraq for oil.'
Kucinich, a favorite of the party's liberal base who has led a push to impeach President Bush, enumerated some of the administration's most egregious abuses but said they would not dampen Democrats' spirits. As his speech crescendoed to its peak, the audience rose in boisterous applause.
'This administration can tap our phones -- but they can't tamper our creative spirit,' he said. 'They can open our mail, but the can't open economic opportunities. They can track our every move, but they lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline, and electricity skyrockets. Now, they have skillfully played our post 9/11 fears, and they've allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many,'..."

Afghanistan:

AFP: UN Finds Evidence 90 Civilians Dead in US-Led Strikes
"A United Nations team has found 'convincing evidence' that 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed in US-led air strikes last week, the body's representative in Afghanistan said Tuesday..."


Domestic Surveillance:

NY Times Editorial: A New Rush to Spy
"There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.
Opening the door to sweeping investigations of this kind would be an invitation to the government to spy on people based on their race, religion or political activities. Before Mr. Mukasey goes any further, Congress should insist that the guidelines be fully vetted, and it should make certain that they do not pose a further threat to Americans’ civil liberties..."

Campaign 2008:

The list of taboos Nader cited in 2004 are equally valid today.
Obama's brand of 'change' is clearly preferable to McCain, but it's not nearly enough.

The Military- , Security- , Prison-Industrial complex is ravenous, and costs America too much. Corporate power, generally, still outweighs the voice of The People (due to Corporate Personhood) and it still out-shouts, out-spends, and out-lobbys The People (since money equals speech) on every issue Congress considers.
The Democratic Leadership Council (the corp. wing of the Democratic Party) still contributes to this problem.

Take money out of politics, and we begin to solve this problem.

Ralph Nader: What you won't hear
"Here is a short list of what you won't hear this week, either on the convention floor or in the party's platform. Call them the 12 taboos..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Eric Lichtblau: New Guidelines Would Give F.B.I. Broader Powers
"A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.
The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations.
Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by what they heard..."

On The So-Called 'Ban' On Off-Shore Drilling:

Thom Hartmann: Interview with Peter DeFazio on Drilling for Oil, June 18th 2008
"...[Thom]: So let me boil this down, Congressman DeFazio. Number one, the word 'ban' is a Republican meme, this is Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich is orchestrating this thing, and...

[DeFazio]: Sure. This is their way back to the majority and the White House, yeah.

[Thom]: Right, what they're trying to do is blame the cost of gasoline, half of which is the result of the decrease in the value of the dollar, the other quarter of which is arguably a function of supply and demand on the market place, who knows, and speculation, you add them all together, but I mean, if we were paying for gas in Euros right now we'd be paying two dollars and 25 cents a gallon. So they're going to try and shift the blame away from the Bush administration and their failed and catastrophic policies onto Democrats and environmentalists, number one.

And number two, you're saying that there is not a ban and in fact, what we've got, I mean, I'm looking at this Committee on Natural Resources report. Between 1997 and 2007 the number of drilling permits, now we're actually talking about permits for drilling, on public lands increased by 361 percent. There's over ten thousand of these permits that the oil companies are simply, they got them and they're just sitting on them.
So it sounds like what they're trying to do is two things. Number one, make political hay with this, and number two, help their buddies the oil companies get thousands or millions of more acres of land leased to them so that they can sit on it as it continues to appreciate in value as we slide into peak oil or as the value of oil goes up.

[DeFazio]: Eureka! Eureka! You've got it nailed, Thom.

[Thom]: That's the bottom line, period.

[DeFazio]: Wouldn't it be great if they could get whatever other potential areas there are under their control and sit on those too and wait for the day when, you know, they can make even more money on it. This isn't about domestic versus international production. I mean, and again, I just point to the former Naval Reserve. We sat on that land for seventy years. We knew there were massive oil reserves under it. Clinton leased it, they've drilled it, and they're sitting on it..."


Taxation:

One wonders how many voters who believe McCain actually represents their economic interests make anywhere near $200k a year...

Paul Krugman: Now That’s Rich
"Mr. McCain wants to preserve almost all the Bush tax cuts, and add to them by cutting taxes on corporations. Mr. Obama wants to roll back the high-end Bush tax cuts — the cuts in tax rates on the top two income brackets and the cuts in tax rates on income from dividends and capital gains — and use some of that money to reduce taxes lower down the scale.

According to estimates prepared by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, those Obama tax increases would fall overwhelmingly on people with incomes of more than $200,000 a year. Are such people rich? Well, maybe not: some of those Mr. Obama proposes taxing are only denizens of lower Richistan, although the really big tax increases would fall on upper Richistan. But one thing’s for sure: Mr. Obama isn’t planning to raise taxes on the middle class, by any reasonable definition — even that of the Bush administration.

O.K., the Bush administration hasn’t actually offered a definition of 'middle class.' But in May, the Treasury Department — which used to do serious tax studies, but these days just churns out Bush administration propaganda — released a report purporting to show, by looking at the tax bills of four hypothetical families, how the middle and working class would be hurt if the Bush tax cuts aren’t made permanent.

And when the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the report, it made an interesting catch. It turns out that Treasury’s hypothetical families got all their gains from the so-called middle-class provisions of the Bush tax cuts: the Child Tax Credit, the reduced tax bracket for lower incomes and marriage penalty relief.

These all happen to be provisions that Mr. Obama proposes leaving in place. In other words,
the Bush administration itself implicitly defines the middle class as consisting of people making too little to end up paying additional taxes under the Obama plan.
Of course, all the evidence in the world won’t stop Republicans from claiming, as they always do, that Democrats are going to impose a crippling tax burden on ordinary hard-working Americans..."

Campaign 2008:

Ari Berman: McCain's Love of Lobbyists
"...Coziness between lawmakers and lobbyists is an old story in Washington, but in McCain's case such entanglements threaten to derail his maverick mystique. After his humiliating involvement in the Keating Five corruption scandal in the late 1980s, McCain worked tirelessly to cultivate a reputation as a chastened reformer. In the following years he made campaign-finance reform--specifically banning unlimited 'soft money' donations--a near crusade, working closely with Democratic Senator Russ Feingold and angering many Republicans. Embracing campaign-finance reform became a useful way for McCain to differentiate himself from his earlier incarnation and from the DeLays and Gingriches and Bushes who were corrupting the Republican Party. Yet his second run for the presidency, with its emphasis on courting conservative Republicans, highlights the fact that McCain has morphed back into a quintessential creature of Washington--just another politician who uses the issue of reform when it suits his agenda..."


Olympics:

Slashdot.org - Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud
"A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal...?"

Campaign 2008:

Norman Solomon: Progressives and Obama: The Clash of Narratives
"By now, across the progressive spectrum, some familiar storylines tell us the meaning of the Obama campaign. In a groove, each narrative digs its truths. But whether those particular truths are the most important at this historical moment is another story.
We can set aside the plotline that touts Obama as a visionary pragmatist who has earned the complete trust of progressives. The belief has diminished in recent months — in the wake of numerous Obama pronouncements on foreign policy, his FISA vote to damage the Fourth Amendment and the like — but such belief was never really grounded in his record as a politician or his policy positions..."

Robert Dreyfuss: McCain, Circa 2003
"There’s yet to be a solid, point-by-point effort to expose John McCain’s pre-2003 views on Iraq, when (along with his neocon advisers and cheerleaders) he led the charge to Baghdad. Barack Obama, so concerned about how to end the war in Iraq, seems to have forgotten the importance of questioning how it began, especially McCain’s pernicious role..."


The Bush/Cheney Legacy of Preemptive War:

Ray McGovern: Out Damn Blot: A Letter to Colin Powell
"Dear Colin,
You have said you regret the 'blot' on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation..."

W, hypocrite-extraordinaire insists on 'No bullying!'

Juan Cole: Putin’s War Enablers: Bush and Cheney
"The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.
Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow..."

Campaign 2008:

Frank Rich: The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
"...What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the 'agents of intolerance' of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct...
...While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his 'independence,' his 'maverick image' and his 'renegade reputation' — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is 'graded on a curve,'..."

Energy:

I have been awaiting this very breakthrough for quite some time!

Eureka Alert! Monash team learns from nature to split water
"An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen – touted as the clean, green fuel of the future – cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale.
Professor Leone Spiccia, Mr Robin Brimblecombe and Dr Annette Koo from Monash University teamed with Dr Gerhard Swiegers at the CSIRO and Professor Charles Dismukes at Princeton University to develop a system comprising a coating that can be impregnated with a form of manganese, a chemical essential to sustaining photosynthesis in plant life.
'We have copied nature, taking the elements and mechanisms found in plant life that have evolved over 3 billion years and recreated one of those processes in the laboratory,' Professor Spiccia said..."

Economics:

Salon.com - Nan Mooney, 'Not Keeping Up With Our Parents'
"Author Nan Mooney argues that the middle class is slipping, and fixing it is going to take more than cutting out lattes..."

The Caucausus:

Seumas Milne: This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression
"War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to come..."

Robert Scheer: Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?
"Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq..."


The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Democracy Now! - The Way of the World: Ron Suskind on How the Bush Admin Deliberately Faked an Iraq-al-Qaeda Connection and Undermined Diplomacy
"RON SUSKIND: ...then, during that spring and summer of 2003, as it becomes clear to all the world what the White House was briefed earlier, that there are no weapons, of course, this Habbush character becomes, let’s just say, radioactive inside of the White House. What are we going to do with Habbush? And as one of the key CIA officials says—and, of course, the White House has denied none of this, and they certainly—you know, they can’t deny any of this—is that everyone was terrified that Habbush would pop up on the screen during that summer of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. At that point, we dotted the 'I's and crossed the 'T's on his deal and agreed to pay him $5 million.

AMY GOODMAN: Who agreed?

RON SUSKIND: The White House, the administration. It’s—the United States government pays him $5 million. At this point, even those inside of CIA say it can only be considered hush money, because we didn’t use him for anything. You know, the CIA was saying, 'Look, he’s an expert on Iraq. Go talk to him.' But, of course, as the summer progressed, he’s the last person the White House wants to talk to.
But come fall of 2003, they come up with some way he might be useful, and that’s when the genesis of this letter clearly emerges. I have it dated around September, because people involved recall exactly where they were. And the White House orders the CIA to have a letter fabricated from Habbush to Saddam, as you said, backdated July 2001, which solves all of the White House’s political problems. As one person at the CIA said, it was a check-the-box for all of the White House’s yawning political nightmares at that period. At that point, of course, they’re being accused of going to war under false pretenses, an enormous historical charge.
The letter pops up just as planned. The mission is carried through, and everyone sees it, roiling the global news cycles. Tom Brokaw goes on and on on Meet the Press about it. William Safire writes about it in the New York Times. CNN—of course, O’Reilly flaunts it for four days straight.
That is illegal. It is illegal for the CIA to run disinformation campaigns on the United States..."

...and Part Two.

Iran:

Lord Sterling: Massive US Naval Armada Heads For Iran
"Operation Brimstone ended only one week ago. This was the joint US/UK/French naval war games in the Atlantic Ocean preparing for a naval blockade of Iran and the likely resulting war in the Persian Gulf area. The massive war games included a US Navy supercarrier battle group, an US Navy expeditionary carrier battle group, a Royal Navy carrier battle group, a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine plus a large number of US Navy cruisers, destroyers and frigates playing the 'enemy force'.
The lead American ship in these war games, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN71) and its Carrier Strike Group Two (CCSG-2) are now headed towards Iran along with the USS Ronald Reagon (CVN76) and its Carrier Strike Group Seven (CCSG-7) coming from Japan.
They are joining two existing USN battle groups in the Gulf area: the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN72) with its Carrier Strike Group Nine (CCSG-9); and the USS Peleliu (LHA-5) with its expeditionary strike group.Likely also under way towards the Persian Gulf is the USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7) and its expeditionary strike group, the UK Royal Navy HMS Ark Royal (R07) carrier battle group, assorted French naval assets including the nuclear hunter-killer submarine Amethyste and French Naval Rafale fighter jets on-board the USS Theodore Roosevelt. These ships took part in the just completed Operation Brimstone.
The build up of naval forces in the Gulf will be one of the largest multi-national naval armadas since the First and Second Gulf Wars..."


The Rule Of Law:

...selectively enforced.

NY Times: Mukasey Won't Pursue Charges in Hiring Inquiry
"Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday rejected the idea of criminally prosecuting former Justice Department employees who improperly used political litmus tests in hiring decisions, saying he had already taken strong internal steps in response to a 'painful' episode..."


Taxes:

Congressional Quarterly: Most Corporations Don’t Pay Income Taxes: GAO
"Most corporations, including the vast majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.
During the eight-year period covered by the report, 72 percent of foreign-owned corporations went at least one year without owing taxes, and the same was true for 55 percent of domestic corporations.
Small companies were much more likely to pay no taxes than larger companies. Still, more than 3,500 large domestic corporations — with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts — did not pay taxes in 2005.
The report said about 80 percent of the companies studied paid no taxes because they didn’t generate any profit after expenses. Money-losing companies can legitimately owe no tax, and others can use provisions of the tax code to lower or eliminate their liability..."

Energy:

One of Mr. Friedman's more sensible offerings...

Thomas Friedman: Flush With Energy
"...There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had 'a positive impact on job creation,' added Hedegaard. 'For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.' In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
'It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,' said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, 'we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.'
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
'I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,' Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. 'The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy,'..."


Penn State Engineering News - Compressor-free refrigerator may loom in the future
"Refrigerators and other cooling devices may one day lose their compressors and coils of piping and become solid state, according to Penn State researchers who are investigating electrically induced heat effects of some ferroelectric polymers.
'This is the first step in the development of an electric field refrigeration unit,' says Qiming Zhang, distinguished professor of electrical engineering. 'For the future, we can envision a flat panel refrigerator. No more coils, no more compressors, just solid polymer with appropriate heat exchangers.'
Other researchers have explored magnetic field refrigeration, but electricity is more convenient..."

Russia & Georgia At War:

Mark Ames: Getting Georgia's War On
"...According to a Reuters report from earlier in the day:

At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement.
The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides 'to renounce the use of force,' council diplomats said.

The meaning of this is clear: the United States and Britain are backing Saakashvili's invasion. Why would we back Saakashvili's reckless war, when last year even Bush was denouncing the Pinochet-wannabe's violent attack on his own people during a peaceful opposition protest in Georgia's capital, as well as shutting down the opposition media and exiling of political opponents? That would be a brain-teaser if the last seven years hadn't answered this question so many painful times already.
But with McCain, answering this is a little trickier. When he issued today's Des Moines statement calling for Russia to do what Russia already did a few hours earlier, you have to ask yourself: either McCain's short-term memory is totally shot, encased in an impenetrable tomb of aluminum-zirconium plaque... or worse, McCain simply doesn't give a damn about reality, he just wants to get Georgia's war on, as badly as Saakashvili does.
The awful truth is probably a combination of the two, which is the worst of all worlds, considering McCain's raving Russophobia, and his campaign team's financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili. As has been reported, McCain's top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to lobby his interests in the United States..."

Economics:

William Greider: Bailing Out the Bad Guys: What Congress and Bush Do Best
"Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) boldly proposed a $300 billion commitment to buy up Fannie Mae stock and save the plunging share price--that is, save the shareholders from their mistakes. So much for market discipline. For everyone else, Washington recommends a cold shower.
Talk about warped priorities! The government puts up $29 billion as a 'sweetener' for JP Morgan but can only come up with $4 billion for Cleveland, Detroit and other urban ruins. Even the mortgage-relief bill is a tepid gesture. It basically asks, but does not compel, the bankers to act kindlier toward millions of defaulting families.
A generation of conservative propaganda, arguing that markets make wiser decisions than government, has been destroyed by these events. The interventions amount to socialism, American style, in which the government decides which private enterprises are 'too big to fail.' Trouble is, it was the government itself that created most of these mastodons--including the all-purpose banking conglomerates. The mega-banks arose in the 1990s, when a Democratic President and Republican Congress repealed the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented commercial banks from blending their business with investment banking. That combination was the source of incestuous self-dealing and fraudulent stock valuations that led directly to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.
Even before Congress and Bill Clinton repealed the law, the Federal Reserve had aggressively cleared the way by unilaterally authorizing Citigroup to cross the line. Wall Street proceeded, with accounting tricks described as 'modernization,' to re-create the same scandals from the 1920s in more sophisticated fashion. The financial crisis began when these gimmicky innovations blew up...

...Some suggestions:

§ Nationalize Fannie Mae and other government-supported enterprises instead of coddling them. Restore them to their original status as nonprofit federal agencies that provide a valuable service to housing and other markets. Make the investors eat their losses. Buy the shares at 2 cents on the dollar. Without a federal guarantee, these firms are doomed anyway.

§ Resolve the democratic contradiction of 'too big to fail' bailouts by dismantling the firms that are too big to fail--especially the newly created banking conglomerates that have done so much harm. Restore the boundaries between commercial banking and investment banking. In any case, market pressures are likely to shrink those behemoths as banks sell off their parts to survive. For the remaining big boys, revive antitrust enforcement. Set stern new conditions for emergency lending from government--supervised receivership, stricter lending rules to prevent recidivism and severe penalties for greed-crazed shareholders and executives.

§ Assign the Federal Reserve's regulatory role to a new public agency that is visible and politically accountable. Make the Fed a subsidiary agency of the Treasury Department and reform its decision-making on money and credit to restore an equitable balance between competing goals and interests--seeking full employment but also stable money and moderate inflation.

§ Begin the hard task of re-creating a regulated financial system Americans can trust, one that recognizes its obligations to the broad national interest. This requires regulatory reforms to cover moneypots like private-equity funds and to clear away the blatant conflicts of interest and double-dealing on Wall Street, and also to give responsible shareholders, workers and other interests a greater voice in corporate management and greater protection against rip-offs of personal savings.

§ Re-enact the federal law against usury. The details are difficult and can follow later, but this would be a meaningful first step toward restoring moral obligations in the financial sector. People would understand it, and so would a lot of the money guys. Maybe in the deepening crisis, Washington will begin to grasp that money is also a moral issue."


Energy:

There is a very silly BWM ad running on US television, in which they tout their selection of 'efficient' 28 MPG (highway) cars, because 'where they come from high gas prices are common.' What the US BMW-buyer is counted on not being aware of is how BMW customers in other nations are given a choice of petrol and diesel engine variants, some efficient enough to shame a Prius.

AutoBlogGreen: Alpina introduces D3 twin turbo diesel coupe, 43.6 MPG (US)
"...Alpina's latest effort is based on the 3-Series coupe with propulsion coming from a version of the 2.0L dual turbo diesel in the 123d. The D3 Bi-Turbo gets only a slight bump in power from 204 to 214 hp. Torque however swells from 295 lb-ft to 332 lb-ft. That's good enough for a sub 7 second 0-60 run while still getting a combined 43.6 mpg (US) with CO2 emissions of 143 g/km (all with the manual transmission)..."

AutoBlogGreen: In the AutoblogGreen Garage: 2008 BMW 123d 3-door hatchback
"...The 1-Series can be had with three different variants of the 2.0L diesel engine with 143 and 177 hp in addition to the 204-hp unit we tested. The 123d is officially rated at 45.2 mpg (US) while the 143-hp 118d is rated at 52.3 mpg (U.S.)...
...The 123d has a particulate filter that eliminates virtually all the soot but it doesn't pass Tier 2 Bin 5 NOx standards in its current form. Since the displacement is only 2.0L BMW could probably get by with a lean NOx trap like VW uses on the Jetta instead of urea injection if they chose to bring it to the U.S. Unfortunately BMW has indicated that it doesn't currently have any plans to re-introduce any of its four-cylinder engines to the U.S. market. That really is a shame because a 177-hp version is available in the 320d in Europe. With the interior volume of a 320d Touring wagon, and only 100 lbs more mass, this would be a killer combination with near 40 mpg real world mileage..."

Grist Magazine: An interview with author James Howard Kunstler
"Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler, known for predicting our post-peak-oil future in nonfiction works such as The Long Emergency, has also brought his forecasts to life through fiction..."

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Raw Story: Tape: Top CIA official confesses order to forge Iraq-9/11 letter came on White House stationery
"A forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was ordered on White House stationery and probably came from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a new transcript of a conversation with the Central Intelligence Agency's former Deputy Chief of Clandestine Operations Robert Richer.
The transcript was posted Friday by author Ron Suskind of an interview conducted in June. It comes on the heels of denials by both the White House and Richer of a claim Suskind made in his new book, The Way of The World. The book was leaked to Politico's Mike Allen on Monday, and released Tuesday.
On Tuesday, the White House released a statement on Richer's behalf. In it, Richer declared, 'I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document ... as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book.'
The denial, however, directly contradicts Richer's own remarks in the transcript."

Energy:

AutoBlog: Swiss proposal would be among the most extreme anti-car laws anywhere
"...A move to drastically restrict cars spearheaded by the Swiss Green Party youth section has already gained 130,000 signatures. If the proposal passes a majority of the voters and more than half of the countries 26 states, it would ban all cars that weigh more than 4,820 lbs, emit more than 250 g/km of CO2, have a front end dangerous to pedestrians or that don't have a particulate filter for a diesel engine..."

I doubt the Swiss will approve this law, but its intent was to ban heavy CO2 emitters like SUVs.
It already costs significantly more to register such vehicles there. Apparently such costs, nor the high fuel costs are discouraging enough people.

For comparison, a VW Passat wagon with a 200 hp gasoline engine emits 204 g/km CO2.
An equivalent turbo diesel engine in the same car w/particulate filter emits 156 g/km.

But the people on the right in this country tell us CO2 isn't even a pollutant...

Executive Compensation:

WJS: Companies Tap Pension Plans To Fund Executive Benefits
"At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.
The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail. Now, with the current bear market in stocks weakening many pension plans, this practice could put more in jeopardy.
How many is impossible to tell. Neither the Internal Revenue Service nor other agencies track this maneuver. Employers generally reveal little about it. Some benefits consultants have warned them not to, in order to forestall a backlash by regulators and lower-level workers.
The background: Federal law encourages employers to offer pensions by giving companies a tax deduction when they contribute cash to a pension plan, and by letting the money in the plan grow tax free. Executives, like anyone else, can participate in these plans.
But their benefits can't be disproportionately large. IRS rules say pension plans must not 'discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees.' If a company wants to give its executives larger pensions -- as most do -- it must provide 'supplemental' executive pensions, which don't carry any tax advantages.
The trick is to find a way to move some of the obligations for supplemental pensions into the plan that qualifies for tax breaks. Benefits consultants market sophisticated techniques to help companies do just that, without running afoul of IRS rules against favoring the highly paid..."


Economics:

Steve Weissman: How Much Change Does Robert Rubin Believe In?
"'Foreclosure Phil' Gramm and nice guy Robert Rubin put two different faces on the power players who move so easily between Wall Street and Washington.
The personification of old-fashioned, dog-eat-dog capitalism, Gramm appears to find moral virtue in the survival of the fittest and policy guidance in Marie Antoinette's 'Let them eat cake.' In his long tenure as the Senate's top Republican on economic policy, he led the fight to roll back state and federal regulation of the economy,
encouraging both the Enron scandal and the sub-prime lending frenzy..."


Paul Krugman: A Slow-Mo Meltdown
"A year ago, as the outlines of the current financial crisis were just becoming clear, I suggested that this crisis, unlike a superficially similar crisis in 1998, wouldn't end quickly.
It hasn't.
The good news, I guess, is that we've been experiencing a sort of slow-motion meltdown, lacking in dramatic Black Fridays and such. The gradual way the crisis has unfolded has led to an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate among economists about whether what we're suffering really deserves to be called a recession.
Yet even a slo-mo crisis can do a lot of damage if it goes on for a year and counting.
Home prices are down about 16 percent over the past year, and show no sign of stabilizing. The pain from this bust is widely spread: there are millions of American families who didn't buy mortgage-backed securities and haven't lost their houses, but have nonetheless been impoverished by the destruction of much or all of their home equity.
Meanwhile, the job market has deteriorated even more than you'd guess from the jump in the headline unemployment rate. The broadest measure of unemployment, which takes into account the rapidly rising number of workers forced to take cuts in paid hours and wages, has risen from 8.3 percent to 10.3 percent over the past year, roughly matching its high point five years ago.
And there's no end to the pain in sight..."

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

Mike Allen: Book says White House ordered forgery
"A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
Suskind writes in 'The Way of the World,' to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.
The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official 'that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.'
The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, 'Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’'
The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his 'spider hole') was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC's 'Meet the Press,'..."

FCC Enforcing 'Net Neutrality'

A rare positive move by the FCC.

Washington Post FCC Lambasts Comcast For Blocking P2P Traffic, But Doesn't Issue Fine
"The FCC lambasted Comcast for blocking traffic from some P2P users and evading its official position on the matter in a long awaited and 3-2 split ruling today. Prompted by a complaint filed by Free Press and Public Knowledge and complaints from Comcast subscribers who noticed problems using P2P applications such at BitTorrent, Comcast denied responsibility at first and then changed its story at least three more times as new details emerged. 'Comcast's interference is far more invasive and widespread than the company first conceded,' the commission wrote in its ruling. The FCC didn't fine Comcast but ordered it to cease all 'discriminatory network-management practices' by the end of the year..."

Banking Regulation:

NY Times Editorial: The Banks and Private Equity
"Many banks are ailing, lamed by hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans and poor investments and hamstrung by the prospect of continued multibillion- dollar losses.
There is no painless solution. If banks retrench by making fewer loans, families and businesses are hurt and with them, the broader economy. If banks cope by building bigger cushions against losses, shareholders take the hit in the form of lower dividends, lower earnings per share, lower stock prices or some combination.
Yet, for the past month, some private equity firms have been promoting what they claim would be a relatively pain-free fix of the nation’s banks. And the Federal Reserve — which must know that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is — has yet to say no, as it should.
Private equity firms say they are ready to invest huge amounts in ailing banks — provided the Fed eases up on the regulations that would otherwise apply to such large investments. The firms’ desire to jump in makes perfect sense. Bank shares are cheap now, but for the most part, are likely to rebound when the economy improves. The firms’ push for easier rules, however, is a dangerous power grab, and should be rejected..."


Campaign 2008:

Bob Herbert: Running While Black
"...Evidence? John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.
Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.
The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, 'Harold, call me.'
Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.
The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place..."

Energy:

ABC News: Researchers Find Cheap Way to Store Solar: "Researchers have made a major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store energy from the sun. In so doing, they have solved one of the key problems in making solar energy a dominant source of electricity.
Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it's needed, including when the sun isn't shining.
Solar power is ultimately limited by the fact that the solar cells only produce their peak output for a few hours each day. The proposed solution of using sunlight to split water, storing solar energy in the form of hydrogen, hasn't been practical because the reaction required too much energy, and suitable catalysts were too expensive or used extremely rare materials. Nocera's catalyst clears the way for cheap and abundant water-splitting technologies..."


Asia Times (Hong Kong) - Russia takes control of Turkmen (world?) gas
"From the details coming out of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and Moscow over the weekend, it is apparent that the great game over Caspian energy has taken a dramatic turn. In the geopolitics of energy security, nothing like this has happened before. The United States has suffered a huge defeat in the race for Caspian gas. The question now is how much longer Washington could afford to keep Iran out of the energy market.
Gazprom, Russia's energy leviathan, signed two major agreements in Ashgabat on Friday outlining a new scheme for purchase of Turkmen gas. The first one elaborates the price formation principles that will be guiding the Russian gas purchase from Turkmenistan during the next 20-year period. The second agreement is a unique one, making Gazprom the donor for local Turkmen energy projects. In essence, the two agreements ensure that Russia will keep control over Turkmen gas exports..."


Campaign 2008:

Isn't using the workplace for propaganda dissemination illegal?
But, of course, that's not what they were doing...

Reuters: Wal-Mart warns managers about labor bill
"Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday it has warned U.S. store managers in recent weeks about the possible consequences of a labor-friendly bill backed by Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama that would make it easier for workers to form unions.
But the retailer, which has kept its U.S. stores free of unions, stressed it was not telling employees how to vote.
The Wall Street Journal reported that about a dozen employees who attended meetings in seven states said executives had told them that unionization could force Wal-Mart to cut jobs as labor costs rise, and that employees would have to pay hefty union dues and get nothing in return.
The Journal said Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings do not specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's presidential election, but they make it clear that voting for Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in..."


Banking:

The Columbus Dispatch (OH) - Billions in tax deposits uninsured
"Your bank account is insured up to $100,000, but you still have a lot at stake in the event of a major failure: hundreds of billions of state and local tax dollars in accounts nationwide that are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Losses aren't likely, says a state official, but government treasurers are keeping a close eye on the funds.
Franklin County currently has $300 million of taxpayer money in banks; the city of Columbus easily has tens of millions; and local school districts hundreds of millions more, officials said...
...In 2006, FDIC-insured commercial banks held $289.7 billion in cash for state and local governments nationwide, of which only 24 percent was insured, according to an FDIC report issued this year.
The report noted that collateralized accounts carry risks: The collateral could lose value before it's sold to repay account holders or it could be missing because of bank fraud. To illustrate this point, the FDIC cited the 2002 failure of an Ohio bank, Oakwood Deposit Bank near Toledo, which collapsed in an embezzlement scandal.
'Some municipal depositors discovered that (Oakwood's) collateral securing their deposits was valued at significantly less than agreed, while other depositors found that the bank had pledged the same collateral multiple times,' the FDIC report says..."

Targeting Iran:

This reminds us of Bush's idea of flying U.S U2 spy planes over Iraq, painted in UN colors, hoping Saddam would shoot them down, fabricating a pretext for war. It reminds us of Operation Northwoods. It reminds us of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

ThinkProgress.org - EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them
"Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The 'meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’' according to one of Hersh’s sources.
During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.
Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected..."


Our (Fleeting) Constitutional Rights:

The Raw Story: Watchdog: Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans
"President Bush seems to be slowly turning the nation's massive surveillance apparatus upon its citizens, and some worry that administration assurances to protect civil liberties are nothing but empty promises.
With his update to a decades-old executive order governing the Intelligence Community, Bush is giving the Director of National Intelligence and the 16 agencies of the US Intelligence Community more power to access and share sensitive information on Americans with little to no independent oversight..."


Campaign 2008:

NY Times Editorial: Low-Road Express
"Well, that certainly didn’t take long. On July 3, news reports said Senator John McCain, worried that he might lose the election before it truly started, opened his doors to disciples of Karl Rove from the 2004 campaign and the Bush White House. Less than a month later, the results are on full display. The candidate who started out talking about high-minded, civil debate has wholeheartedly adopted Mr. Rove’s low-minded and uncivil playbook...
...Taking a page straight from Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, Mr. McCain has been trying to distract voters from his support for an unending war in Iraq by portraying Mr. Obama as unpatriotic and weak. This line of attack reached a crescendo last week when Mr. McCain fumed and fussed and went to places with European-sounding names while Mr. Obama traveled abroad.
Mr. McCain repeatedly said Mr. Obama 'would rather lose a war to win a political campaign' and that he 'does not understand' what is at stake in Iraq. He also accused Mr. Obama of canceling a visit to wounded American troops in a German military hospital because news cameras were not allowed. That’s a false account of what occurred — and Mr. McCain ignored Mr. Obama’s unheralded visit to a combat hospital in Baghdad.
Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain confuses opposition to an unnecessary war with a lack of spine and an unwillingness to use force when the nation is truly in danger. Obviously, Mr. Obama is untested as a commander in chief and his trip was intended to reassure voters. But Mr. McCain is as untested in this area as Mr. Obama, and it is hard to imagine a worse role model than the one Mr. McCain seems to be adopting: President Bush..."