Observations on current events

Economics:

Democracy Now! - David Korten: 'Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth'
"David Korten: Well, it really starts with being clear that we have a failed economic system. And we’ve seen very dramatically the consequences of the financial failure. But what we’re not talking about is the connection to the environmental failure, the destruction of earth’s living systems, and the social failure of an economic system that by its very design, particularly as manifest on Wall Street, is designed to increase inequality. You know, having worked in international development for many years, I’m very familiar with the argument that the way to deal with poverty is, through economic growth, to bring up the bottom. But, of course, what we see—and we’ve seen this for decades—is that, in fact, economic growth tends to raise the top and depress the bottom.
Now, part of it’s coming to terms with the fact that we live on a finite planet. We’ve got finite resources. And the question is, what are our economic priorities? How do we allocate those resources? And it requires a fundamentally different approach to the economy: evaluating economic performance by the things that we really want, in terms of human and natural well-being, rather than a system that is purely designed to increase financial returns to the already very wealthy..."

Paul Krugman: Bad Faith Economics
"As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending..."


Energy:

Michael Klare: Repudiate the Carter Doctrine
"...So long as the United States adheres to a policy that legitimates the use of military force to protect the flow of oil, we run the risk of involvement in one war after another in the ever-volatile Persian Gulf region. True, other issues and objectives have been associated with these wars, but the underlying strategic premise for every U.S. intervention in the Gulf since 1980 has been the core concept of the Carter Doctrine: to disallow a hostile power from gaining control of the region and blocking our access to its oil.
This policy has done little to ensure us uninterrupted access to oil, and cost us great pain, misery, and expense. Despite the $600 billion or so we have already spent on the Iraq War (on the way to an estimated $2-$3 trillion, when all associated and follow-up costs are included), Iraq today is producing less oil today than it did when U.S. troops invaded the country six years ago. And despite the mammoth U.S. military presence in the Gulf area, Iran emerged as a major regional power amidst a rise in piracy and militant Islam. When all is said and done, conventional military force is an ineffective tool for protecting far-flung, highly vulnerable oil facilities and trade routes..."


The Middle East:

AP: Netanyahu would let West Bank settlements expand
"The front-runner in Israel's election said in an interview published Monday that he would let Jewish settlements expand in the West Bank if he's elected prime minister, threatening to put him at odds with the Obama administration..."


Privacy:

Robert Mitchell: What the Web knows about you
"How much private information is available about you in cyberspace? Social Security numbers are just the beginning...
...Information discovered online:
Full legal name
Date of birth
Social Security number
Current property addresses
Personal phone numbers
Business phone numbers
Previous addresses and phone numbers dating back to 1975 (except for cell phone numbers)
Real estate property deed descriptions and addresses
Property tax record from 2004
Assessed value of home from 1997
Identifying photographs
Digital image of signature
Mortgage documents (current and previous) and a legal agreement
Computerworld affiliation, stories and blog posts
Employment history
Resume with educational background going back to high school
Sex offender status (negative)
Affiliations with several nonprofits
Editorial award
Spouse's name, age and Social Security number
Names of friends and coworkers
Names, addresses, phone numbers and first six digits of Social Security numbers for neighbors past and present
Parents' names, address, phone and first five digits of Social Security numbers..."

Our (Fleeting) Civil Rights:

The Raw Story: Whistleblower: NSA spied on 'everyone' targeted journalists
"Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.
'The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications,' Tice claimed. 'It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.'
Tice further explained that 'even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected.'
According to Tice, in addition to this 'low-tech, dragnet' approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.
'In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them,' Tice told Olbermann. 'What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me.'
When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, 'An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists.'
'To what purpose?' Olbermann asked. 'I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?'
Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, 'If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything.' He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it 'was digitized and put on databases somewhere,'..."


The Bankster Bailout:

This, after the public was assured that Congress would protect its interest.
It seems they left massive loopholes, if the funds end up being paid out as bonuses at 'financially strapped' banks.

Financial Times (UK) - Merrill delivered bonuses before BofA deal
"Merrill Lynch took the unusual step of accelerating bonus payments by a month last year, doling out billions of dollars to employees just three days before the closing of its sale to Bank of America.
The timing is notable because the money was paid as Merrill’s losses were mounting and Ken Lewis, BofA’s chief executive, was seeking additional funds from the government’s troubled asset recovery programme to help close the deal.
Merrill and BofA shareholders voted to approve the takeover on December 5. Three days later, Merrill’s compensation committee approved the bonuses, which were paid on December 29. In past years, Merrill had paid bonuses later – usually late January or early February, according to company officials.Within days of the compensation committee meeting, BofA officials said they became aware that Merrill’s fourth-quarter losses would be greater than expected and began talks with the US Treasury on securing additional Tarp money.
Last week, BofA said it would be receiving $20bn in Tarp money, in addition to the $25bn that had been earmarked for it and Merrill last year. It was then revealed that Merrill had suffered a $21.5bn operating loss in the fourth quarter.
Despite the magnitude of the losses, Merrill had set aside $15bn for 2008 compensation, a sum that was only 6 per cent lower than the total in 2007, when the investment bank’s losses were smaller.
The bulk of $15bn in compensation was paid out as salary and benefits throughout the course of the year. A person familiar with the matter estimated that about $3bn to $4bn was paid out in bonuses in December.
Nancy Bush, an analyst with NAB Research, described the size of the 2008 Merrill bonus payments as 'ridiculous'.
BofA said: 'Merrill Lynch was an independent company until January 1 2009. John Thain (Merrill’s chief executive) decided to pay year-end incentives in December as opposed to their normal date in January. BofA was informed of his decision.'
BofA declined to specify when Mr Thain informed the bank of his decision.
A source familiar with the matter says Mr Thain, in the weeks leading up to the December 8 compensation committee meeting, had been weighing the possibility of requesting a bonus of at least $10m for himself before ultimately deciding against such a move."

Healthcare:

Capital Times Editorial (WI) - Urge Congress to Enact Single-Payer Health Care
"...'Single Payer/Medicare for All: An Economic Stimulus Plan for the Nation' was released last week by the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association and is available at www.Calnurses.org. According to the study, such a reform would provide a major stimulus for the sputtering U.S. economy, creating slightly more than the number of jobs lost in 2008.
'These dramatic new findings document for the first time that a single-payer system could not only solve our health care crisis, but also substantially contribute to putting America back to work and assisting the economic recovery,' argues NNOC/CNA Co-president Geri Jenkins, RN.
Specifically, says Jenkins, expanding Medicare to include the uninsured and those on Medicaid or employer-sponsored health plans, and expanding coverage for those with limited Medicare, would:
1. Create 2.6 million permanent, well-paying jobs (slightly exceeding the number of jobs lost in 2008) -- and they would be jobs that are not easily shipped overseas.
2. Boost the economy with $317 billion in increased business and public revenues.
3. Add $100 billion in employee compensation.
4. Infuse public budgets with $44 billion in new tax revenues.
'Through direct and supplemental expenditures, health care is already a uniquely dominant force in the U.S. economy,' says the study's lead author, Don DeMoro, who directs the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, the NNOC/CNA's research arm. 'If we were to expand our present Medicare system to cover all Americans, the economic stimulus alone would create an immense engine that would help drive our national economy for decades to come,'..."


Economics:

Michael Parenti: Capitalism's Self-Inflicted Apocalypse
"...In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, 'capitalist democracies.' In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, 'We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.
In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently 'malfunction' to the benefit of the more conservative candidates.
At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings-applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy's social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one's own choosing..."


Energy:

New Scientist: Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump
"An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that's just where the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found - abandoned at the world's oldest nuclear processing site.
The potentially dangerous find was made at Hanford, Washington State, the site of a nuclear reservation, established in 1943 to support the US's pioneering nuclear weapons program.
Hanford made the plutonium-239 for Trinity, the first ever nuclear weapon test, on 16 July 1945. Just three-and-a-half weeks later, more Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear strike on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
But sloppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth..."

The Bush Legacy:

There are so many misdeeds to cover and Olbermann does it well. In a just world, the man would be sitting in the docket at the Hague, awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity.

Keith Olbermann: Bush Years: 8 in 8 Minutes

Our (Fleeting) Civil Rights:

Detroit Free Press: Supreme Court OKs use of evidence from illegal search
"A divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that drug evidence found during an unlawful arrest arising from a computer error about a warrant could be used at trial against the defendant.
When police mistakes that lead to an unlawful search arise from “negligence ... rather than systematic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements,” evidence need not be kept from trial, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 5-4 majority in the case from Alabama. He was joined by the four other conservative justices: Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The four liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer — dissented. They said that because the search violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the evidence should have been excluded..."

Glenn Greenwald: Jan. 15's FISA ruling: a case study in 8 years of lying and ignorance
"...[January 15], The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau (one of the NYT reporters who originally broke the NSA story yet often mindlessly recites false Bush claims even on this issue) wrote a story which reported that the FISA Court of Review had issued a decision 'validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order.' From start to finish, Lichtblau's description of the ruling was muddled and contradictory, even nonsensical in some places.
Nonetheless, it was crystal clear even from Lichtblau's poorly written story that the court's ruling had nothing whatsoever to do with whether Bush acted legally or properly when he ordered warrantless eavesdropping on Americans from 2001-2006, when warrantless eavesdropping was a felony under FISA. To the contrary, as I explained earlier today (here) -- and as Talk Left's Armando and Anonymous Liberal (both lawyers) also detailed -- the FISA court was addressing a totally different and much narrower question: namely, whether the warrantless eavesdropping which Congress authorized in the 2007 Protect America Act was prohibited by the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
The ruling had nothing whatsoever to do with the central question at the heart of the NSA controversy: namely, whether Bush committed felonies by ordering warrantless eavesdropping in the face of a Congressional statute that explicitly made such eavesdropping a felony..."

The Bush Legacy:


W said not finding WMD was a 'major disappointment.' An illegal war with disasterous consequences for millions a 'disappointment' - unbelievable.

William Rivers Pitt: The Most Ridiculous Speech of All

Paul Krugman: Forgive and Forget?
"...if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies..."

Our (Fleeting) Civil Rights:

Court to the citizenry: screw you and the rights you thought you had.

NY Times: Intelligence Court Rules Wiretapping Power Legal
"A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, issued a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved..."

The Aftermath of War:

Hopefully Obama's nominee to head the VA will put a stop to the practice of dismissing those who suffer from PTSD as 'weak.'

The Army Times: PTSD Victim Booted from US Army for 'Misconduct'
"After serving two tours in Iraq - tours filled with killing enemy combatants and watching close friends die - Sgt. Adam Boyle, 27, returned home expecting the Army to take care of him.
Instead, service member advocates and Boyle's mother say his chain of command in the 3rd Psychological Operations Battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C., worked to end his military career at the first sign of weakness.
In October, a medical evaluation board physician at Bragg recommended that Boyle go through the military disability retirement process for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder - which is supposed to automatically earn him at least a 50 percent disability retirement rating - as well as for chronic headaches. The doctor also diagnosed Boyle with alcohol abuse and said he was probably missing formations due to the medications doctors put him on to treat his PTSD.
But in December, Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, commanding general of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, signed an order forcing Boyle out on an administrative discharge for a 'pattern of misconduct,' and ordering that the soldier pay back his re-enlistment bonus.
Last year, after a number of troops diagnosed with PTSD were administratively forced out for 'personality disorders' following combat deployments, the Defense Department changed its rules: The pertinent service surgeon general now must sign off on any personality-disorder discharge if a service member has been diagnosed with PTSD..."

Israel-Gaza:

CS Monitor: Gaza: Israel under fire for alleged white phosphorus use
"Marc Garlasco has been on the northern border of Gaza for the past five days watching what he says are white phosphorus munitions exploding over a crowded refugee camp.
Mr. Garlasco, a senior military analyst for New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), says that the way Israel is using the incendiary device is illegal. White phosphorus shells contain more than 100 felt filaments that ignite upon contact with the atmosphere, drift to earth, and burn intensely for at least 10 to 12 minutes.
The usage of white phosphorus is not illegal under international law if it's used in military operations as a smoke screen to cover troop movements or against bunkers, armored vehicles, and ammunition dumps. But its use is forbidden against people – civilians and soldiers alike – under nearly all military codes and laws...
...While the phosphorus explosives are widely condemned for raining down indiscriminate harm, questions have also arisen about the possible use of another weapon called Dense Inert Metal Explosives, or DIME, that was created by the US Air Force. DIME is designed to be used in crowded urban areas since the weapons are highly lethal but have an extremely limited range of explosive force that can reduce collateral damage.
Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who worked in Gaza's main Shifa hospital during the first weeks of the conflict, and who spoke to media in Egypt and Norway in recent days, is the main source for allegations of DIME use.
'This is a new generation of very powerful small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters,' he told reporters. 'There is a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.'
Al Jazeera, which has reporters in Gaza, has described hospital cases that appear to conform to the clean tearing of limbs that DIME can cause.
Italian scientists from the New Weapons Research Committee, which examines emerging military technology, said in a statement that 'evidence is mounting' of DIME usage, saying the wounds may be 'untreatable' due to metals like tungsten that enter the body. DIME is packed with tungsten dust that forms micro-shrapnel upon detonation..."


Financial Priorities:

Dean Baker: US workers need Social Security and Medicare now more than ever
"The classic definition of 'chutzpah' is the kid who kills both of his parents and then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Wall Street crew are out to top this. After wrecking the economy with their convoluted finances, and tapping the US Treasury for trillions in bail-out bucks, they now want to cut Social Security and Medicare because we don't have the money...
...The latest round of attacks on Social Security and Medicare are especially pernicious because they come at a time when the baby boom cohorts have just seen much of their wealth disappear due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the stock market plunge. Tens of millions of baby boomers who thought they were well-prepared for retirement two years ago, now find themselves with little or no home equity and very little left in their retirement funds. As a result, they will be almost totally dependent on Social Security and Medicare.
The attacks are made even worse by the fact that the attackers, people like Robert Rubin and Peter Peterson, promoted policies that led to this collapse and personally profited to the tune of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. In other words, after pushing the economy into a severe recession and destroying the life's savings of tens of millions of working families, the Wall Street crew now wants to take away their Social Security and Medicare. This can almost make killing your parents look like a petty offence."

Economics:

Bob Herbert: Where the Money Is
"...At some point, however, someone is going to have to talk about raising revenue. The dreaded T-word is going to come up: taxes.
Well, there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?
The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.
According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.
But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino..."


Domestic Surveillance:

ACLU: Video Surveillance


Energy:

Technology Review: RMI Map Reveals a Web of Oil Imports
"For an illuminating look at the web of oil imports that we depend on, check out this interactive Google Maps-based infographic at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization that promotes technology for energy efficiency...
...One of the most salient things illustrated by the map is just how long oil prices stayed low after the oil crisis of the late 1970s: long enough for people to forget the lessons of that crisis and start buying big, heavy cars again, and get truly addicted to oil."

The (Limited) Range Of Ideas:

This demonstrates a continuation, by the Washington pundits (and the status quo they wish to protect) of the tendency to wish to limit the range of ideas Americans will be presented a legitimate or worthy of consideration. How is that 'freedom'?

Glenn Greenwald: Obama's Allegedly 'New' Centrism and His ABC Interview Today
"The central tenets of the Beltway religion -- particularly when a Democrat is in the White House -- have long been 'centrism' and 'bipartisanship.' The only good Democrats are the ones who scorn their 'left-wing' base while embracing Republicans. In Beltway lingo, that's what 'pragmatism' and good 'post-partisanship' mean: a Democrat whose primary goal is to prove he's not one of those leftists..."


The Rule of Law:

Jack Balkin: Not One Truth Commission, But Many
"In the past eight years, our government has tortured people and spied on its own citizens. Administration lawyers created a series of secret laws to justify these activities. The Justice Department has been riddled with scandals alleging corruption, illegality and incompetence. What should the next administration do about these practices? Do we punish wrongdoing or discover the truth?
We should opt for the truth, for three reasons. First, we must restore America’s commitment to human rights by exposing and condemning our own abuses. Second, we must counteract the tendency toward secret laws that facilitate these violations. Third, we must create a public record of government misconduct as a lesson to future generations and a caution to future administrations..."


Health & Safety Regulation:

NYTimes Editorial: Not What We Call Due Diligence
"Despite rising concern that conflicts of interest may bias the outcome of clinical trials, the Food and Drug Administration has distressingly limited interest in rooting out the problem.
The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed all 118 applications for marketing drugs and medical devices that were approved by the F.D.A. in fiscal year 2007. It found appalling failures to collect information and act on it..."

Israel-Gaza:

Editor & Publisher: 'NYT' Silent But Israeli Daily Hits Press Restrictions in Gaza
"Three weeks into the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, The New York Times editorial page has barely mentioned the severe Israeli-enforced press restrictions that has hampered all media coverage from the war zone, including reporting on civilian casualties. The Time carried one brief mention in one editorial but no full editorial or repeated calls.
On the other hand, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz has been hitting the issue hard, including in its own editorial on Sunday, which concluded:

'In the Gaza War, journalists are being held in modest media facilities on the border of the coastal territory. Their positions have been filled, reporters and photographers alike, by troops of the IDF Spokesman's Office. The move is meant to present a sterile picture of war, to prevent Israeli media outlets from showing images of death, destruction and horror coming out of Gaza. But this is a shortsighted approach, one driven by the 'ostrich policy' of planting our heads firmly in the sand.
'In the age of the information superhighway, Israel and the world still see the same images and hear the same voices broadcast on most of the foreign television stations. The IDF's manipulations of the media, which willingly cooperates, may be good for the army, but it's very bad for Israeli democracy.'

"

Corruption, Fraud, and Lies:

Frank Rich: Eight Years of Madoffs
"Three days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.
The source for this news was a near-final draft of an as-yet-unpublished 513-page federal history of this nation-building fiasco. The document was assembled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction — led by a Bush appointee, no less. It pinpoints, among other transgressions, a governmental Ponzi scheme concocted to bamboozle Americans into believing they were accruing steady dividends on their investment in a 'new' Iraq.
The report quotes no less an authority than Colin Powell on how the scam worked. Back in 2003, Powell said, the Defense Department just “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ' Those of us who questioned these astonishing numbers were dismissed as fools, much like those who begged in vain to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge Madoff’s math.
What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused..."

Israel-Gaza:

Jimmy Carter: An Unnecessary War

Democracy Now! - Former Amb. Martin Indyk vs. Author Norman Finkelstein: A Debate on Israel's Assault on Gaza and the US Role in the Conflict
"...AMY GOODMAN: Norman Finkelstein, your assessment of why Israel attacked now?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, the record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Mr. Indyk is correct that Hamas had adhered to the ceasefire from June 17th until November 4th. On November 4th, here Mr. Indyk, I think, goes awry. The record is clear: Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point—and now I’m quoting the official Israeli website—Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.
Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha’aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday’s Ha’aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one, as Mr. Indyk I think correctly points out, to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman’s language basically means Israel’s capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.
And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas..."


The Guardian (UK) - UN levels war crimes warning at Israel over shelling of evacuee house in Zeitoun
"The Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza, the UN's most senior human rights official said tonight, as Israeli troops pressed on with their increasingly deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution demanding a ceasefire.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, singled out the killing this week of up to 30 Palestinians in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, when Israel shelled a house where its troops had told about 110 civilians to take shelter.
Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident 'appears to have all the elements of war crimes'. She called for 'credible, independent and transparent' investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law..."

Energy:

Michael T. Klare: The Problem of Cheap Oil
"Be careful what you wish for..."

Israel-Gaza:

The Raw Story: Kucinich: Israel may be using American weapons illegally
"Responding to media reports that Israel had bombed a UN school serving as a refuge for Palestinian civilians, Congressman Dennis Kucinich is calling for a Congressional report on Israel's possibly illegal misuse of US weapons.
His letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice follows..."


The So-Called Unitary Executive:

Raw Story: Cheney: Bush's actions legal if not impeached
"If you don't get punished, you didn't go anything wrong, right?
That's the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS' Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president's actions are legal if those actions didn't result in his impeachment.
Asked by Schieffer if he believed that anything the president does in time of war is legal, Cheney said there is 'historic precedent of taking action that you wouldn't take in peacetime.'
Cheney referenced Abraham Lincoln as an example of another president who 'suspended the writ of habeus corpus' during a war, prompting this exchange:

SCHIEFFER: But nobody thinks that was legal.

CHENEY: Well, no. It certainly was in the sense he wasn't impeached. And it was a wartime measure that he took that I think history says today, yeah, that was probably a good thing to do...',"


Endless War:

Bob Herbert: The Afghan Quagmire
"...What Mr. Obama doesn’t need, and what the U.S. cannot under any circumstances afford, is any more unnecessary warfare. And yet, while we haven’t even figured out how to extricate ourselves from the disaster in Iraq, Mr. Obama is planning to commit thousands of additional American troops to the war in Afghanistan, which is already more than seven years old and which long ago turned into a quagmire.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote an important piece for Newsweek warning against the proposed buildup. 'Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,' he said, 'consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.'
In an analysis in The Times last month, Michael Gordon noted that 'Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain,'..."


Economics:

Paul Krugman: Fighting Off Depression
"...We weren’t supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the 'central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.'
Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: 'You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.'
It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall..."

The Bush-Cheney Legacy:

Robert Parry: Two Dangerous Bush-Cheney Myths
"As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make their case for some positive legacy from the past eight years, two arguments are playing key roles: the notion that torturing terror suspects saved American lives and the belief that Bush's Iraq troop 'surge' transformed a disaster into something close to 'victory.'
Not only will these twin arguments be important in defining the public's future impression of where Bush should rank on the presidential list, but they could constrain how far President Barack Obama can go in reversing these policies. In other words, the perception of the past can affect the future..."


Israel-Gaza:

Ralph Nader: Letter to Bush on Gaza Crisis

Robert Fisk: Why Bombing Ashkelon is The Most Tragic Irony
"How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it - Askalaan in Arabic - were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world..."