March 6, 2010

      I’m deathly afraid that I am a “musselman.” In the lagers (storehouses) of political prisoners, mostly Jewish, in World War II Nazi Germany, a musselman was much more likely to die at a camp such as Auschwitz or Dachau than survive.

                A musselman had the wrong attitude for survival. He or she pitied himself 24/7 or protested inwardly (for there was no outward protest allowed) the injustice of it all. As a result, he or she would expend more energy protesting or whining than making a new type of “industry” or “job” of merely surviving.

                Most survivors accepted internment in those hellholes as just another job—albeit a VERY low-paying one with EXTREME assholes as bosses. If they played by the rules, found and played the angles (such aslining up  for soup so chances of getting potatoes were boosted), slept as much as possible, avoided work as much as possible, they had a greater chance to survive.

                This seems similar to the current population of humans on earth, who are the survivors of 14 billion years of evolution. As I understand it it is not necessarily the survival of the most intelligent or most handsome, but survival of those that were able to adapt to changes in the environment.

                In the U.S.’s new “totalitarian capitalism,” it is clear that those who will survive the tumultuous changes ongoing and upcoming due to global  warming and resource wars may be those who accept the need to lay low and be “good Germans” to the elite’s commands and the need to find and play the angles of lower-paying jobs and greater hassles of changed lifestyles.

                A motto I’ve lived by most of my life is: “You have no right to whine unless you are fighting to rectitify the problem.” Consequently, I’ve fought to attain the American Dream despite its being beyond my abilities or my circumstances, especially since “Saint” Reagan took over in 1980. And I’ve felt the need to fight the elite.

                It’s a real issue for Americans now: whether to fight the elite in a new totalitarian state that can brutally punish them, even with rendition, indefinite imprisonment, and torture; or whether to be “good Germans” and ignore the foul-smelling smoke coming from today’s “Auschwitzes” or ignore the unemployed or ignore being unemployed and lay low, living off the elite’s crumbs in order to extend our families’ lives, while hoping and waiting for a better future for our kids or grandkids.

                It is hard now, as it was in Nazi Germany, for over-educated people like myself to survive. Among the unknown statistics since the crash of summer 2008 are the numbers or percent of underemployed. Intellectuals working at Dunkin’ Donuts or as bartenders or as insurance salespeople—which can be compared to the Jews who worked for the Nazi guards at the lagers and only delayed their own cruel executions.

March 13, 2010

By Helena BaillioPh.D. (candidate) International Psychology: Organizations and Systems. Master of Science, International Relations: Global Studies. Bachelor of Science, Business Administration: Management. 15+ years management/operations experience in diverse environments.

http://www.internationalobservation.blogspot.com/

What is Westernized democracy?

Democracy as understood by Westernized principles is the theoretical solution to globalization and democratic peace.  Still there is much debate regarding a true and correct definition of democracy and the implications of freedom on an evolving democratic state.  The notion of democracy as having global applicability requires deep exploration considering the variant international personalities of states.  Realists often argue that war is inevitable and that if all countries are democratic they will still find something to disagree on.  Huntington’s “Clash of the Civilizations” lends support to this claim.  Arguably, democracy and globalization go hand in hand.  For a full democratic system to be employed across all nations, then there would be no reason for conflict as democracies do not fight other democracies according to the democratic peace theory.  According to this theory, though collective action, corruption is reduced and justice is further promoted.  Democracy is also credited with its ability to increase prosperity, protection, peace, and security.    To be more specific:  the more democracies in international relations, the more peace in the international society.  Additionally, through economic and political ties any disagreements would seemingly be curbed as not to disrupt a global system.  Yes, disagreements are inevitable, but war is presumably not in a fully democratic international society. 

The difference between developed and underdeveloped countries is further divided by social, cultural, and economic factors such as elitism (as a result of capitalism) and colonialism. If political culture and diversity are recognized as a critical components in shaping foreign policy goals, then states are more open to dialogue and communication that can lessen the prospect for conflict and enhance global integration. Through tolerance of diversity and shared values then it can be easily hypothesized that the Westernized democratic principles might come to fruition.

Yet, through our system of global trade, tariffs and sanctions restrict trade and create barriers to democratic peace.  Westernized “loose” notions that vaguely define democracy when coupled with these barriers leave developing states to illicit their own democratic policies, which in fact are often not viewed as democratic at all by Western Societies.  This provides evidence that while some countries are seeking democratic initiatives, with no real blueprint on what democracy is then they are often left to fend for themselves.  In this circumstance, it becomes much easier for the United States to proclaim that they are non-democratic States.  To the contrary, they are ready to pursue democracy; we are just unprepared to take the appropriate steps to show them the way.

Ignorance to acknowledge differences in culture and identity development make westernized democracy an infringement upon the principles of others with opposing views.  In Eastern societies, structure and order begins with the family unit and extends to the collective whole.  While governments and cultures may change, familial relationships are bound and strengthened by these changes. 

Lee Kuan Yew, the previous Prime Minister of Singapore states, “In the ultimate crisis….it is your human relationships that will see you through.”  These relationships cultivate a culture that is reliant on the family unit, and strives to preserve it by promoting order and peace.   In this light, Westernized principles of democracy undermine the potential for conflict as members seek stability and cumulative growth through the familial and social structure.

For democracy to flourish, order is fundamental.  A foreign policy that promotes democracy based on Westernized values essentially contradicts itself from Lee’s point of view.  While East Asian’s recognize that things are rapidly changing in their political and economic realm, Lee points out that their values and core beliefs will be something to which only they can preserve.  Modernization in technology and economic achievements are desired, but not so much by Westernized standards.  By allowing freedoms of choice without fully embracing Westernization, then change can occur within a culture that integrates peacefully all members of society.  Their choices are based, essentially, on a convergence of ideas that protects their cultural identity while at the same time seeking to “maximize opportunity (Lee)” as an individual and as a collective.  Stripping a state of its cultural roots and identities thus compromises its value systems.  

 Several aspects of Greek democracy are also exceptional deviants from Western democratic ideology. Political democracy was established as early as 8 B.C. in Athens, which cultivated an early sense of unity and citizenship within the country (U.S. Dept. of State 2008). Throughout time, warfare produced a weak economic and political state, yet against all odds strengthened its nationalism allowing for the spread of Greek influence and the preservation of its heritage. 

One of the biggest challenges of states and political systems is building community based on a common identity.  Greece defies this assertion as its unification and common identity is what defined its democratic ideology.  Having never achieved any real economic or political power, the Greeks pursued intellect and cultural preservation as a means of social equity.  Through cultural osmosis and adherence to cultural norms, they have maintained unity and nationalism. For example, 99 percent of the population speaks Greek, and 98 percent claim the Greek Orthodox religion (U.S. Dept. of State 2009).  Three thousand years of instability strengthened ties to cultural values and norms.  Resilience to years of challenges and instability bound the Hellenic society with their cultural heritage which has overshadowed political change.     The continuity of democracy for the Greeks was defined by its culture, which depends on ethics, tradition, and custom which form the basis for citizenship, society, and its political culture.   

 Like the Asian collective identity, the family in Greek society is extended to the whole of the Greek people, provided that they are supportive of the family unit.  This extended family unit provides the framework for the preservation of culture and tradition through education, tradition, language, and historical memories. Democracy is derived from the duties of citizenship.  Citizenship is the basis for political and social responsibilities based on the cultural message of preservation.  The transmission of Greek culture is viewed as a critical function of society in order for it to survive globalization.  With the transformation of society in the era of modernization, the structure of the family has also adjusted.  As the state changes in its organization, so too does the family. There is a reciprocal and mutual relationship between the two.

Costa Rica emphasizes democracy and human rights in its domestic and foreign policy.  The 2009 U.S. Department of State, Background Note: Costa Rica, cites its “political system has steadily developed maintaining democratic institutions and an orderly constitutional scheme for government succession.”  The stability of its political evolution has been attributed to its enlightened leadership, comparative prosperity, flexible class lines, educational opportunities, and avoidance of military involvement.  It has claimed a prestigious state in human rights as it has made it a priority in its foreign policy.    The Costa Rica Embassy notes that the ongoing policy of Costa Rica is “based in principles and values that lead the multicultural and multiethnic Costa Rican society such as peace, democracy, rule of law, disarmament, human rights, protection of the environment, and human development.” 

The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) notes Costa Rica as “exceptional” due to its “clarity about its strategic objectives, the application of suitable national policy instruments, and the presence of solid institutions (U.S. Dept. of State: ECLAC Report, 2003).” Furthermore, it was Costa Rica who proposed the creation of the United Nations High Commissions for Human Rights. By maintaining its high profile in the international community it has held the advantage of the ability to influence the international community through good-will, promoting international norms and a high-level of human development.  It has the power to take a leading position of influence as it has been a fundamental asset in the formation of several international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and its involvement with the United Nations.   It has directly modeled itself in line with the goals of the United Nations and established its reputation with its ability to achieve the goals of a stable democracy, environmental conservation, successful human development, lack of an army, and an emphasis on human rights and security. 

 The United States Department of State proclaimed Costa Rica’s ‘record on the environment and human rights and advocacy of peace through the settlement of disputes gives it weight in world affairs far beyond its size.” The political evolution of Costa Rica has generated a successful democratic state unlike others in the global environment.  It’s ability to advocate peace, and exert influence through soft power based on its core values and principles have given it a remarkable international presence.  The peaceful nature of political leaders throughout history who supported their people and their claim to independence gave it an individualistic nature which separated it from other Latin American countries. As the political parties of the country continually shifted roles over time in the political limelight, it essentially balanced the liberal/conservative dispute, thus establishing a routine in which the country was ultimately able to achieve its goals.  But in spite of its achievements and international recognition as a ‘model’ for others to follow, can it be defined as a democratic state?

No.

The democratic theory, as defined by Westernized principles, promotes individual liberties and happiness based on equality and individual rights.  Second, it is committed to economic and political freedom.  This freedom will in turn promote peace, prosperity, and cooperation.  It rests on the expansion of free trade.  It ascertains that the world is better off when trade is free, human rights are honored, and self-determination is present in order for a state to be considered as democratic.  The final criteria, however, is what separates the West from the rest:  Modernization. 

 Free trade presumably leads to development and economic growth, increases in production through open market trade, creates peace through economic ties, and fosters prosperity by removing barriers to trade.  Through free trade, interaction and information sharing are present which allows for modernization to take effect.  Additionally, by creating interdependence through deepening economic ties, cooperation is less likely to be jeopardized.   Globalization as it is universally applicable promotes interest and facilitates effective functioning.  Through national self-determination, liberalism flourishes preventing control over people. Primarily, through collective global interactions democratic states can solve problems that they could not otherwise overcome. 

Democracy is a derivative of the Greek word “demos”, meaning “the people.”  Under the generic tenet of democracy, people can manage society collectively, and are able to participate in social decisions.  A lack of individualism and free capitalism, in summary, defies Westernized democratic principles.  Therefore, states that see themselves as democratic through human rights initiatives, freedom of peoples, and the practice of ideologies that motivate and mobilize citizens in order to achieve their political, economic, and social goals that lead to an improvement in social conditions and well-being are ostracized by the Westernized collective.  Ironically, it is the very states that maintain a sense of collective identity and nationalism that are cast out by the democratic community that so vigorously advocate collective integration for the advancement of peace and democracy.

Just as we would not compromise our political integrity, it is hard to imagine that anyone else would either.

Does Obama Remember Bush 41's ‘Read My Lips, No New Taxes’ Fate? By Brenda Kruger Huffman

(AXcess News) Chicago - When I read the Feb. 22, Business Week interview with President Obama's "agnostic" response to a question referring to his commitment level to his campaign pledge (taxes would remain the same or go down for those making less than $250,000 annually or for roughly 95% of Americans), my first reaction was: Do you remember former President George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips, no new taxes" pledge in the 1988 presidential campaign?  Do you remember not honoring that and raising taxes in his first term severely politically damaged him and greatly contributed to his 1992 reelection loss?  Does President Obama?  Does Congress? 

My first thoughts were: President Obama's "agnostic" response was a cold shoulder to the American taxpayers considering this constant tax pledge during his campaign and first year in office.  I believe this tax pledge was one of the deciding factors for many that voted for him.

It is inconceivable to me that anyone in Washington believes they are entitled to spend and tax to the point that all Americans will be looking at huge tax increases and new government fees to pay for all of the new spending.  President Obama's "agnostic" response was a glimpse of realism that tax hikes will also be affecting those making less than $250,000 annually.  It may come in an income tax hike for them or in other forms of taxes and fees, but it appears it is coming. 

Feb. 14, 2010

I think the U.S. already is lost. Our lauded democracy gone. A totalitarian state already in its place.

I had thought about taking my shoeshine kit (yes, I bought one after 365 days of unemployment on Jan 29, 2010) to the public areas near Goldman Sachs and getting back some of my tax money by charging $5 per shine. But I realize that the big heads walking past me wearing Bostonians could have me renditioned to Egypt and I would end up back here as breakfast sausage for my own son.

I thought about Obama simply saying that I am a terrorist because my presence near his friends at Goldman Sachs is a "clear and present danger." I'd have no habeus corpus, no lawyer, no trial, no communication with my son for years. There also likely are cameras near Goldman Sachs. My facial features (movie-star handsome, of course) would go into a database. My email would be read (it likely already is), my phone monitored, my house subject to no-warrant raids at 2 a.m. when I take my nightly pee.

Let's see, corporations run the nation, I am subject to monitoring, torture, rendition, blacklisting, threats to my family, death at the whim of a president, no lawyer in court, no gathering in a crowd even in public places, my facial, financial and ID data known to everyone and their brother. Yes, I think American is lost. It is a totalitarian state. The Supreme Court, in “Citizens United” helped make us into, at best, serfs, working for the corporations, living in corporation housing and shopping at the company store.

In January, five radical Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned 100 years of American law in “Citizens United.”

They gave huge corporations a Constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect candidates at all levels, from mayor to president.

This ruling will opens the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.

In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce spent $145 million to defeat healthcare and global warming laws - twice as much as the Democratic Party. In November, they could spend 10 or 100 times as much simply to defeat all Democrats.

What the First Amendment should say: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the PEOPLE’S freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The website www.democrats.com asks that we

Support a Constitutional Amendment clarifying the First Amendment right of free speech belongs to people, not Corporations

Support legislation to prohibit political spending by Corporations with any foreign shareholders

Support legislation requiring shareholders in non-foreign Corporations to unanimously approve political expenses

Support the Fair Elections Now Act to match small campaign contributions with public funds, creating a level playing field for candidates who refuse to accept Corporate contributions

Buy only from Corporations which oppose political spending

A recent article in Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald (previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006.):

“If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one:

“The fact that the Government labels Person X a "Terrorist" is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist.

“That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly.  In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists -- only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong -- by itself should compel a recognition of this truth.  But it doesn't.  

“All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials -- the response from Bush followers was the same:’But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?’

“What they actually meant was:’the Government has claimed they are Terrorists,’ but in their minds, that was the same thing as:  ‘they are Terrorists.’ They recognized no distinction between ‘a government accusation’ and ‘unchallengeable truth;’ in the authoritarian's mind, by definition, those are synonymous.

“The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that -- away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) -- the Government should have to demonstrate someone's guilt before it's assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.).  But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary.  Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists.  How do they know that?  Because the Government said so.  Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that's all the ‘proof’ that is needed.

“That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now.  Why?  Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well.  Just look at the reaction to the Government's recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.  Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki.  But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he's a Terrorist:  usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki's vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he's in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government).  The Government can literally just flash someone's face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered.

“That's enough for many people -- including many Democrats -- to march forward overnight and mindlessly proclaim that al-Awlaki is ‘a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans’ -- with several sounding exactly like Dick Cheney, screeching:  "Of course al-Awlaki should be killed without charges; he's a Terrorist who is trying to kill Americans!!!").  Even now, beyond government assertions about his associations, the public knows virtually nothing about al-Awlaki other than the fact that he's a Muslim cleric with a Muslim name dressed in Muslim garb, sitting in a Bad Arab Country expressing anger towards the actions of the U.S. and Israel. 

“But no matter.  That's more than enough.  They're willing not only to mindlessly embrace the Government's unproven accusation that their fellow citizen is a TERRORIST (‘a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans’), but even beyond that, to cheer for his due-process-free execution like drunken fans at a football game.  And the same people declare:  no civilian trials are necessary for Terrorists (meaning:  people accused by the Government of being Terrorists).  Even more amazingly, the identities of the other Americans on the hit list aren't even known, but that's OK:  they're Terrorists, because the Government said so.

“A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I'd read about things like the Salem witch hunts.  How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people's torturous death as "witches" without any real due process or meaningful evidence?  But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it's easy to see how things like that happen.

“It's just pure mob mentality:  an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone's forehead, and the adoring crowd -- frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other's hatred, fears and desire to be lead -- demands ‘justice.’

“The deeply confused premises [are] now locked into place on a bipartisan basis (‘no trials are needed to determine if someone is a Terrorist because Terrorists don't have rights’), imagine how much louder that will get if there is another successful terrorist attack in the U.S.  But in fairness to the 17th Century Puritans, at least the Salem witches received pretenses of due process and even trials (albeit with coerced confessions and speculative hearsay).  Even when it comes to our fellow citizens, we don't even bother with those.  For us, the mere accusation by our leaders is sufficient:  Kill that American Terrorist with a drone!

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Again, just this month, in another Salon article, Greenwald wrote “On the Claimed 'War Exception' to the Constitution.”

“I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists.  As The Washington Times' Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a recent Congressional hearing and he acknowledged its existence:

“The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

“Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .

“He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include ‘whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.’

“Although Blair emphasized that it requires ‘special permission’ before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that ‘permission’ is obtained:  the Preisdent, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch.  There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these ‘factors’ are weighed. 

“[I have written] about all the reasons why it's so dangerous -- as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious -- to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc.  That's basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial.  Who could possibly support that?

“[S]houldn't there at least be some judicial approval required?  Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks?  Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval?  Shouldn't we be at least as concerned about the President's being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight?  That seems much more Draconian to me. 

“It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn't it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it?  That would basically mean that courts would issue ‘assassination warrants’ or ‘murder warrants’ -- a repugnant idea given that they're tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial -- but isn't that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself?”

This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing.

“The severe dangers of vesting assassination powers in the President are so glaring that even GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra is able to see them (at least he is now that there's a Democratic President).  At yesterday's hearing, Hoekstra asked Adm. Blair about the threat that the President might order Americans killed due to their Constitutionally protected political speech rather than because they were actually engaged in Terrorism.  This concern is not an abstract one.  The current controversy has been triggered by the Obama administration's attempt to kill U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.  But al-Awalki has not been accused (let alone convicted) of trying to attack Americans.  Instead, he's accused of being a so-called ‘radical cleric’ who supports Al Qeada and now provides ‘encouragement’ to others to engage in attacks --  a charge al-Awalki's family vehemently denies (al-Awalki himself is in hiding due to fear that his own Government will assassinate him).”

Now you can see why I was afraid to even jokingly open a shoeshine stand in a public area near Goldman Sachs. I may have been accused of providing “encouragement” to others to engage in similar pranks, which, going back to the “domino theory” that supported the disasterous Vietnam War, could be seen as creating an imminent danger of escalation to acts that threaten the nation. Kind of like marijuana, which in the 1960s and early 1970s, was deemed a sure thing to lead to more dangerous drugs.

Obama's presidential assassination policy completely short-circuits any due process. Greenwald writes, “It literally makes Barack Obama the judge, jury and executioner even of American citizens. Beyond its specific application, it is yet another step -- a rather major one -- towards abandoning our basic system of checks and balances in the name of Terrorism and War.

That last point is the most important one here.  Atrios wrote the other day that a central prong in the Washington consensus is that "all it takes to nullify the constitution is to call someone a terrorist."  That's absolutely true, but a close corollary is that merely uttering the word "war" justifies the same thing.  That's particularly dangerous given that, by all accounts, this is a so-called "war" that will not end for a generation, if ever.  To justify the abridgment or even suspension of the Constitution on the ground of "war" is to advocate serious alterations to our Constitutional framework that are more or less permanent.  Greenwald lists several points about that "war" excuse: 

First, there's no "war exception" in the Constitution.  Even with real wars -- i.e., those involving combat between opposing armies -- the Constitution actually continues to constrain what government officials can do, most stringently as it concerns U.S. citizens.  Second, strictly speaking, we're not really "at war," as Congress has merely authorized the use of military force but has not formally or Constitutionally declared war.  Even the Bush administration conceded that this is a vital difference when it comes to legal rights.  In 2006, the Bush DOJ insisted that the wartime provision of FISA -- allowing the Government to eavesdrop for up to 15 days without a warrant -- didn't apply because Congress only enacted an AUMF, not a declaration of war.

Finally, the U.S. is fighting numerous undeclared wars, including ones involving military action:  given that our "War on Drugs" continues to rage, should the U.S. Government be able to target accused "drug kingpins" for assassination without a trial, the way we attempted to do in Afghanistan?  After all, Terrorists blow up airplanes but Drug Kingpins kill our kids!!!  The mindset that cheers for unlimited Presidential powers in the name of "war" invariably leads to exactly these sorts of expansions.

Far beyond the specific injustices of assassinating Americans without trials, the real significance, the real danger, is that we continue to be frightened into radically altering our system of government, Greenwald writes.  In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick encapsulated this problem perfectly; her whole article should be read, but this excerpt is superb:

“America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. . . .

“Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today. . . . In short, what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them. . . .

“We're terrified when a terror attack happens, and we're also terrified when it's thwarted. We're terrified when we give terrorists trials, and we're terrified when we warehouse them at Guantanamo without trials. If a terrorist cooperates without being tortured we complain about how much more he would have cooperated if he hadn't been read his rights. No matter how tough we've been on terror, we will never feel safe enough to ask for fewer safeguards. . . .

“But here's the paradox: It's not a terrorist's time bomb that's ticking. It's us. Since 9/11, we have become ever more willing to suspend basic protections and more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions. The failed Christmas bombing and its political aftermath have revealed that the terrorists have changed very little in the eight-plus years since the World Trade Center fell. What's changing -- what's slowly ticking its way down to zero -- is our own certainty that we can never be safe enough and our own confidence in the rule of law.

“Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?

“If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?

“If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?”

“Here we are,” Greenwald writes, “a new party in power, and the President's top intelligence official announces -- without any real controversy -- that the President claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, no trials, no judicial oversight of any kind.  The claimed power isn't ‘inherent’ -- it's based on alleged Congressional approval -- but it's safeguard-free and due-process-free just the same.  As Gore asked of less severe policies in 2006, if the President can do that, ‘then what can't he do?’ As long as we stay petrified of the Terrorists and wholly submissive whenever the word ‘war’ is uttered, the answer will continue to be:’nothing.’

“Our willingness to suspend basic protections and become more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions will continue unabated.”

As they have with the “Citizens United” decision.

As Robert Fellmeth, who was one of "Nader's Raiders" and is now is the Price Professor of Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego Law School, wrote in the Harvard Law Record:.

 “With the recent Supreme Court holding in Citizens United, corporations and unions have first amendment protection to spend directly on political campaigns - at unprecedented levels. This is not the first ruling to protect speech rights for corporations - they also benefit from the Court's "Noerr-Pennington" doctrine, which exempts them from antitrust laws when they combine to influence legislation.

“But Jefferson and company might be quite surprised to learn that "originalists" citing the sanctity of their original intent would let loose upon our government hated British megacorporations of the colonial era, like the Hudson Bay Company, as a "person" with such rights to combine with other companies and win political influence.  We live in a world that is increasingly controlled by these horizontal organizations.  They, together with labor and professional alliances, dominate Washington and in state capitals.  They are euphemized as "stakeholders."

These tribal structures are often vehicles that represent the lowest common denominator of the ethical sensibilities of their membership. But the problem is not quite related to the easy demonizing Wall Street or corporate predation; it is that it is the job of corporations to invest capital, and then to try to maximize return on that capital for the stockholders who provided it.  That neutral, understandable task means that they should and must protect that investment, and if society has created market flaws that allow external costs in the exhaustion of the earth's resources, or health costs borne by others, this is not something they exist to correct.

“The problem is that they are now legally able to prevent correction.  The "socialist" moniker thrown at supporters of government intervention applies where the state excessively owns and operates the means of production., when the check between private and public becomes lost. But what do you call the evisceration of that check in a system where the means of production own and operate the state? Is industrial or special interest socialism not even more antithetical to American notions of check and balance?   

 “Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has radically shifted ground and allowed (contrary to the judgment of the people's democratic institutions) many billions of corporate and union money to directly influence elections, those interests with capital investment in current profitable enterprise - whether it be mining the seas, polluting the earth, or collecting medical benefits for power wheelchairs and Cialis on the backs of their grandchildren -- will increasingly lock-in their self-protection and their imposed external burden on others.  Their free ride, notwithstanding future costs, will be further and irretrievably calcified into public law.

And the band plays on in our totalitarian state.

If you own a cell phone, you should care about the outcome of a case that was scheduled to be argued at this writing (Feb. 12) in federal appeals court in Philadelphia. It was to decide whether the government can use your cell phone to track you -- even if it hasn't shown probable cause to believe it will turn up evidence of a crime, says Catherine Crump who is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology will ask the court to require that the government at least show probable cause before it can track your whereabouts.

Although most people don't realize it, cell phones double as tracking devices. Newer phones contain GPS chips, the same technology that allows car navigation systems to know where you are and give directions ("Turn right now"). But even older phones that don't have chips can be tracked by knowing the location of the cell towers they use to connect to a network.

There's no question that cell phones and cell-phone records can be useful for police officers who need to track the movements of those they believe to be breaking the law. And it is important for law enforcement agents to have the tools they need to stop crimes. However, it is just as important to make sure such tools are used responsibly, in a manner that safeguards our personal privacy.

But documents obtained by the ACLU and the EFF as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that the government takes advantage of this technology to track cell phones as extensively as possible -- often without first obtaining warrants -- except in states where courts step in to establish boundaries.

In fact, this issue gained national attention during last year's gubernatorial race in New Jersey. Documents turned over in our lawsuit revealed that the U.S. Attorney's Office -- under Chris Christie, now the governor -- was tracking cell phones without probable cause, in violation of a Justice Department recommendation.

The decision reached by the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals will not only bind federal courts throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. It will also be a key source of guidance to courts around the country as they grapple with this issue.

We hope the court will send a message that merely carrying a cell phone should not make people more susceptible to government surveillance. No one wants to feel as if a government agent is following her wherever she goes -- be it a friend's house, a place of worship, or a therapist's office -- and innocent Americans shouldn't have to feel that way.

The government has argued that "one who does not wish to disclose his movements to the government need not use a cellular telephone." This is a startling and dismaying statement coming from the United States. The government is supposed to care about people's privacy. It should not be forcing the nation's 277 million cell-phone subscribers to choose between risking being tracked and going without an essential communications tool.

What's at stake in the case is not whether it's OK for the government to track the locations of cell phones; we agree that cell-phone tracking is lawful and appropriate in certain situations. The question is whether the government should first have to show that it has good reason to think such tracking will turn up evidence of a crime.

This case is protecting innocent people from unjustified violations of their privacy.

From The New York Times’ Adam Liptak:

Ralph D. Fertig, a 79-year-old civil rights lawyer, says he would like to help a militant Kurdish group in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals. But he fears prosecution under a law banning even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.

Fertig  is challenging a law that bans even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.

The Supreme Court will soon hear Mr. Fertig's challenge to the law, in a case that pits First Amendment freedoms against the government's efforts to combat terrorism. The case represents the court's first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks - and its first chance to test the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.

Opponents of the law, which bans providing "material support" to terrorist organizations, say it violates American values in ways that would have made Senator Joseph R. McCarthy blush during the witch hunts of the cold war.

The government defends the law, under which it has secured many of its terrorism convictions in the last decade, as an important tool that takes account of the slippery nature of the nation's modern enemies.

The law takes a comprehensive approach to its ban on aid to terrorist groups, prohibiting not only providing cash, weapons and the like but also four more ambiguous sorts of help - "training," "personnel," "expert advice or assistance" and "service."

"Congress wants these organizations to be radioactive," Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case, referring to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.

Mr. Letter said it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization in Mr. Fertig's case or "to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, to a newspaper."

It would be no excuse, Mr. Letter went on, "to be saying, ‘I want to help them in a good way.' "

Mr. Fertig said he was saddened and mystified by the government's approach.

"Violence? Terrorism?" he asked in an interview in his Los Angeles home. "Totally repudiate it. My mission would be to work with them on peaceful resolutions of their conflicts, to try to convince them to use nonviolent means of protest on the model of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King."

Mr. Fertig said his commitment to nonviolence was not abstract. "I had most of my ribs broken," he said, after his 1961 arrest in Selma, Ala., for trying to integrate the interstate bus system as a freedom rider.

He paused, correcting himself. "I believe all my ribs were broken," he said.

Mr. Fertig is president of the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit group that has a long history of mediating international conflicts and promoting human rights. He and the project, along with a doctor and several other groups, sued to strike down the material-support law in 1998.

Two years earlier, passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act had made it a crime to provide "material support" to groups the State Department had designated as "foreign terrorist organizations." The definition of material support included "training" and "personnel." Later versions of the law, including amendments in the USA Patriot Act, added "expert advice or assistance" and "service."

In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright designated some 30 groups under the law, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings, and "has waged a violent insurgency that has claimed over 22,000 lives."

The litigation has bounced around in the lower courts for more than a decade as the law was amended and as it took on a central role in terrorism cases. Since 2001, the government says, it has prosecuted about 150 defendants for violating the material-support law, obtaining roughly 75 convictions.

The latest appeals court decision in Mr. Fertig's case, in 2007, ruled that the bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.

Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the consolidated cases in October. The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89. The court will hear arguments on Feb. 23.

David D. Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Mr. Fertig and other challengers to the law, told the court that the case concerned speech protected by the First Amendment "promoting lawful, nonviolent activities," including "human rights advocacy and peacemaking."

Solicitor General Elena Kagan countered that the law allowed Mr. Fertig and the other challengers to say anything they liked so long as they did not direct their efforts toward or coordinate them with the designated groups.

A number of victims of McCarthy-era persecution filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to remember the lessons of history.

"I signed the brief," said Chandler Davis, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, "because I can testify to the way in which the dubious repression of dissent disrupted lives and disrupted political discourse."

Professor Davis refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954 and was dismissed from his position at the University of Michigan. Unable to find work in the United States, he moved to Canada. In 1991, the University of Michigan established an annual lecture series on academic freedom in honor of Professor Davis and others it had mistreated in the McCarthy era.

Mr. Fertig said the current climate was in some ways worse.

"I think it's more dangerous than McCarthyism," he said. "It was not illegal to help the communists or to be a communist. You might lose your job, you might lose your friends, you might be ostracized. But you'd be free. Today, the same person would be thrown in jail."

A friend-of-the-court brief - prepared by Edwin Meese III, the former United States attorney general; John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer; and others - called the civil liberties critique of the material-support law naïve.

The law represents "a considered wartime judgment by the political branches of the optimal means to confront the unique challenges posed by terrorism," their brief said. Allowing any sort of contributions to terrorist organizations "simply because the donor intends that they be used for ‘peaceful' purposes directly conflicts with Congress's determination that no quarantine can effectively isolate ‘good' activities from the evil of terrorism."

Mr. Fertig said he could understand an argument against donating money, given the difficulty of controlling its use. But the sweep of the material-support law goes too far, he said.

"Fear is manipulated," Mr. Fertig said, "and the tools of the penal system are applied to inhibit people from speaking out."

Feb. 7, 2010

Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between a nation with government and no newspapers, or one with newspapers and no government, he'd always choose the latter. Jefferson, historically one of the harshest critics of newspapers, also said: "Where the press is free, and every man can read, all is safe."

Journalism reached its peak, perhaps, during and just after Watergate. It’s safe to say that Nixon was brought down by the diligence of Woodward and Bernstein initially, and, then, a slew of other reporters from magazines and TV. They all competed to get the next scoop on the tragicomedy.

Journalism, at that time, came closest to a full-fledged “profession,” as medicine and the law have always been regarded. I took journalism classes at the University of Minnesota and a main point of discussion was whether journalism had become a profession with a “code” to follow and with an association to reward and censor its participants.

Somehow, that question of professionalism for gathering news is now nowhere on the radar. It has been shot out of the sky.

The incipient code, which was stillborn sometime in the Reagan era, contained elements that included: objectivity; never failing to at least try to get both sides’ comments (even if it meant writing “Mr. Smith did not return several calls made to his office; quotes from a “common” person on the street on the subject matter. The press (newspapers, TV and radio) came oh-so-close to becoming a true Fourth Estate, contributing to knowledgable discussions among everyone from street vendors to CEOs about all local and national issues. Above all, it came close to giving a voice to the average person, which would have meant real power for the working stiff, which is just not the case in the United States these days.

Jefferson’s philosophy in the United States was accompanied by legislation ensuring various degrees of freedom of publishing and the press. The depth to which these laws are entrenched go to the heart of our Constitution. The concept of freedom of speech is often covered by the same laws as freedom of the press, thereby giving equal treatment to media and individuals.

The term Fourth Estate refers both to the press as representatives of the common person and to the common man. The term with respect to the common man seems to go back at least Henry Fielding in 1752 who is quoted as saying: “None of our political writers ... take[s] notice of any more than three estates, namely, Kings, Lords, and Commons ... passing by in silence that very large and powerful body which form the fourth estate in this community ... The Mob.”

 Jefferson knew that the Fourth Estate was a check on tyranny. He knew it was a hedge against secrecy. And he knew that no democracy could thrive -- or survive, even -- without a bright, shining light on government action.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPR) states that it is dedicated to the perpetuation of a free press as the cornerstone of our nation and our liberty. To ensure that the concept of self-government outlined by the U.S. Constitution remains a reality into future centuries

Questions about journalism’s status as a profession were valid in the mid-1970s and into the early 80s. But even having to raise those questions in the first place blithely ignores the constitutionally defined role of the press in this nation, and how vital that role is to the strength of democracy.

The SPR does not have the elaborate list of commandments that the lawyer’s New York Lawyer's Code of Professional Responsibility has. It hasn’t items that cover everything from: DR 2-106: Fees for Legal Services to DR 5-110: Sexual Relations with Clients to DR 8-102: Statements Concerning Judges and Other Adjudicatory Officers to Disciplinary Rule 9 - Client Funds and Property.

It's not that journalists, especially professional journalists and the so-called mainstream journalists (not the new-breed citizen journalist on the Internet’s Web blogs) don't deserve such vigilance or recognition. Afterall, it is unequivocally true that covering government issues and lack of openness by the government occupies as pivotal a space among press duties as anything else. It's what we, in the news business, do and, indeed, why we exist.

But the Society of Professional Journalists has no disciplinary rules. The SPR has no elaborate code. Anyone can become a mainstream journalist, if they can write. They could have a grade school education or a Ph.D.

As a reporter in the late 1970s and early 80s, I and my buddies loved “beating” the competition to a story and getting the truth behind Minneapolis or Bridgeport, Conn.-area politics. Our motto was “you’re not doing your job (as a reporter) unless someone is mad at you” (for exposing the truth behind his faux program for the common person or for telling the people about his secret, backroom meeting with so and so after the “open” meeting for the public. One time, I walked into a prison block at a Minnesota prison to talk to the inmates. Turns out I didn’t have proper clearance. The warden was mad!! But I got the inmates’ comments on prison conditions.

Former CBS broadcaster Dan Rather, whom I idolized during the Vietnam years and during Watergate— a result of his reputation for asking very tough questions and not being afraid to ask follow-up questions, of powerful people like President Richard Nixon and many others—left CBS in 2006 in the wake of a scandal surrounding questionable documentation for a story accusing President George W. Bush of being absent without leave during his military service. Today, Rather works as a journalist for entrepreneur Mark Cuban's HDNet network.. Rather now says journalism in recent years "has in some ways lost its guts." Rather reportedly said journalists have become lapdogs to power, rather than watchdogs.

He says journalists are giving in to the intimidation by government officials that access will be denied unless given on the officials’ terms only. "By and large, so many journalists have adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude)," Rather said. Because of this "access game," journalism has degenerated into a "very perilous state," "In many ways, what we in journalism need is a spine transplant." Says Rather "My role as a member of the press is to be sometimes a check and balance on power."

That’s how we saw it in the late 70s on into the mid and late 80s in Minneapolis and in Milford, a suburb of Bridgeport, Conn. If someone didn’t return phone calls, we’d call someone else to get a reliable source on the record about all issues.

Contrary to today’s apparently ubiquitous practice, we controlled what was “off the record.” For public figures who were used to answering reporters’ questions, we published everything they said before they remembered to say “This is off the record!” We never asked them or reminded them that something even could be off the record.

Back then, public figures that I covered, like Minneapolis Police Chief Anthony Bouza or Milford, Conn., Mayor Alberta Jagoe came to expect and respect our hounding. They answered every phone call. Ms. Jagoe tried to use us at the Bridgeport Post by having a daily 8 a.m. news conference (so she could get the page 1 headline in that day’s afternoon paper). But we’d dial our phones until our fingers were red trying to get her opponents’ viewpoint into every story. If we couldn’t, we always included a sentence: “Republican alderman so-and-so could not be reached for comment.” Then that Republican alderman would get the headline the next day.

Tony Bouza prospered, first as head of three precincts in Harlem, then as NYPD's Bronx Borough Commander from 1973 through 1976, then as head of the New York City Transit Police, and finally as Chief of Police of Minneapolis, Minn., from 1980 until February 1989. He was a regular source for me from 1980-1983 .

In Minnesota and Connecticut, we taped every conversation (with the public figures’ knowledge) or took copious notes, to serve as our defense against scatter-gun libel suits or verbal intimidation or denial of access. Often times, public officials were so mad at us they wouldn’t speak to us for weeks or months. We, like your typical doctor or lawyer, worked through lunch and/or dinner if the story, competition, and deadline demanded it. That’s very much professional dedication.

In Milford, Conn., the Post, New Haven Register and the Milford Citizen competed in a city of only 50,000. But that type of competition among media outlets—especially newspapers—is long gone. The end came with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, because of which large entertainment companies such as Time Warner, Viacom and Disney have been able to take over many of the country’s news outlets, inserting their own code of ethics and bias into the national news.

Jeff Cohen, who in 1986 founded Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has said the “news” pushed by the major radio/TV networks and newspapers slants unerringly toward the interests of the five major corporations that own the bulk of them. They bury stories of vital importance while spewing hours and column inches at the mind-deadening likes of Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears.

Their excuse is that they “give the public what it wants” and are “in business to make a profit.” But the real profit centers of the corporations that own the CM are not in providing news and information. General Electric, Westinghouse, Disney and the other media-financial-industrial behemoths have too much to lose from an accurate reporting of the true news of the world. To protect their core interests, they are bread-and-circus PR/diversion machines, not real news organizations. And they profit from war-time contracts.

The New York Times story about how the Pentagon used more than 75 retired military officers with ties to lucrative defense industry contracts, as a way “to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance,” shouldn’t be too surprising.

The article, written by Times reporter David Barstow, reveals the manipulations of the Bush PR machine, with Rumsfeld playing the puppet master; propaganda talking points found their way to military “analysts” hired by news networks and then sold to the American public as “independent” observers. Their ties to military contractors were never revealed.

Barstow did the kind of investigative reporting Woodward and Bernstein would have been proud of in the early 1970s. He unveiled the Pentagon military analyst program which has been said to be not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

But times goes on. And things are reborn. So is journalism. The belief we had at the Bridgeport Post, calling the other side until our fingers were red to get the opposition’s statement, is being called into question. Perhaps it should have been questioned sooner, given the impact of Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV News Anchor, and “America’s most trusted man” in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Cronkite, who always looked like your older, wiser uncle or grandfather, abandoned objectivity in his “proudest” moment, his February 1968 Vietnam commentary after a trip there to see for himself. It follows:

“Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I'm not sure.

The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff.

On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won't show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi's winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that -- negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms.

For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

This led to President Lyndon Johnson’s famous, perhaps, apocryphal quote: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, then I’ve lost the middle class” and his decision not to see reelection in 1968. However, the Vietnam war dragged on to 1975. Nixon, the presidential winner in 1968, had had no “secret” plan to end the war.

Chris Hedges of TruthDig.com argues that that belief in objectivity is killing the news. Cronkite’s break with objectivity (above) would seem to back him up.

“Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press,” writes Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

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

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

            “Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective and unbiased, is always highly interpretive, “Hedges writes. “It is defined by rigid stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters, hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts, statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create the ‘balance’ permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy.”

“Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers—but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror,’ ” Robert Fisk writes. “If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’.”

“In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk,” the former New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote. “Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”

If the U.S. Congress had the will to take action, it could create real mechanisms for enforcing the law and ensuring that government agencies are not allowed to continue getting away with covert domestic propaganda, which is the use of ex-generals on the corporate payroll as TV experts, where the public is left unable to know whether the opinions of “independent” analysts are truly independent. During the Vietnam War, official Pentagon statements became so mistrusted that the term “credibility gap” was coined to describe the distance between official statements and public perceptions. The government’s use of “surrogates” posing as independent experts extends the credibility gap not just to public officials but also to seemingly independent, private citizens and the news media.

The “Mainstream Media,” or MSM, can’t even be called that any more. Today’s mass media is Corporate, not Mainstream, and the distinction is critical. Calling the Corporate Media (CM) “mainstream” implies that it speaks for mid-road opinion, and it absolutely does not.

The mainstream of American opinion wants national health care. The CM does not.

In Minneapolis and in Milford, we tried to beat the competition. In Minneapolis in 1981-83 there were three TV stations, three major daily papers, several radio stations and several weekly papers.

But, we didn’t try to kill someone’s career. We’d sit with our paper’s lawyers and our managing editor to cut out parts we weren’t sure of or that might be libelous.

And we never took a nickel from a public or private source: no free meals or rides, no free pens, no free candy. We had pride in our incipient profession. We already considered it a profession. We were idealistic and out to defend the little guy against the powerful. We were not necessarily conservatives, but we were mostly college graduates who liked a good fight. We came from middle-class families before the middle class lost the ability (in recent decades) to own a home, pay for college, own a car, and plan for retirement. We felt like underdogs however, and rooted for the underdogs in the World Series or the NBA finals. We mostly were utopians, looking to reform the world and make things better for everyone. It was a kick to help the little guy, uncover a “big shot’s” scheme or simply “beat” our competition to a story.

Thankfully, just as the CM solidifies its power over our mass media outlets, the internet has burst forth as an open, wildly diverse medium for mainstream opinion and actual truth. Its preservation will require what Thomas Jefferson called “eternal vigilance.”

That includes restoring the Fairness Doctrine, enacted in the 1920s to guarantee balanced opinion on the emerging electronic medium of radio. It means a ban on unified corporate ownership of large fleets of radio, TV and print outlets. It means busting up the monopolies that warp public access to information and opinion.

Independent journalists are on the rise, attempting to counteract the corporate media’s bias. “The good news is that the independent media in our country is booming thanks to the Internet — it’s the failures of corporate media that has led millions of independent journalists to start asking questions. It’s an exciting time, but we have to keep the Internet safe from media conglomerates.”

Some worry about anonymity on a lot of Web sites and blogs. It's very easy to attack someone when you don't have to put your name to your complaints.

Modern media, including the creation of Internet-based news sources and the possibility that citizen journalism will greatly expand the field, has made it all but impossible to identify which journalists are notable, in the sense that they could be identified in the past.

But independent collectives or individuals citizen journalists likely will never have the funding to do the research the Times or the Washington Post did on the  Pentagon’s internal propaganda crime.

The real value of the Times piece is what it teaches us about investigative journalism.  What made the Times piece strong is that it relied on primary source documents — 8,000 pages of Defense Department documents, to be exact. It began as a federal Freedom of Information Act request submitted over two years ago! It wasn’t until the Times sued in federal court, and after several blown court-ordered deadlines, did the documents see the light of day.

And therein lies the crisis of modern journalism: with severe cutbacks in newspaper staffs because of a failing business model, investigative journalism, is becoming an endangered species.

Sure, bloggers and freelance writers can file Freedom of Information Act requests but you need serious time and resources to get beyond the bureaucratic foot-dragging and stonewalling. How much time and money, including all the legal bills, do you think it cost the Times to get that story and how many bloggers and free-lancers can afford to take on such labor-intensive work?

Unless this growing void is filled, the American public is heading straight into a pitiful paradox: more breadth and access to news and information (via the internet) but, little, or no depth; a mile wide but an inch deep.

Since the financial meltdown of late summer 2008, more and more journalists have become unemployed as the hard-copy, newspaper you can hold industry dies. Of course, many journalists, like myself, have families to feed, clothe and protect from the elements.

Finally, we now see reports calling for government action to actually fund journalism and keep investigative reports possible. But why would the government fund investigations against itself. How can this work?

Rory O’Connor in a cross-post from Media is a Plural says that American journalism is being reborn. He reports on a new book  The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols in which what they like to frame as “the patriotic case for government action” as a proposed remedy for “the malaise of the media.”

In a recent Manhattan forum sponsored by The Nation magazine, Nichols and McChesney discussed and debated the linked crises of hope, vision and lost revenue models currently afflicting American journalists – and by extension every other citizen. Other “media experts” on the panel included Pamela Newkirk of New York University Journalism School and columnist David Carr of the New York Times.

The notion that a free society requires a free press is almost universally acknowledged. So is the fact that many legacy media outlets – the New York Times and The Nation among them – now face a resource emergency. The industry’s “lost revenue model” – the subject of seemingly endless posts, articles, speeches, books and above all industry conferences — has made it increasingly difficult to pay for newsgathering. But the question raised by the Nation forum – “So how do we save journalism?” — and the specific solutions offered by Nichols and McChesney – massive government subsidies to the tune of thirty billion dollars, a number they say correlates in today’s dollars with what was spent on media subsidies in the 1800s — are revealing new fault lines and dividing journalists and media-reform activists into sometimes unlikely camps.

As Nation editor/publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel noted, she and many others like Nichols and McChesney have been trying to raise the twinned issues of media and democracy for years.

And the notion that what Nichols dubbed “enlightened public subsidies” for mediamakers is, on first blush, undeniably attractive. After all, when the building is on fire, it can be awfully hard to question where the water should come from…

It’s also hard to question the McChesney/Nichols assertion that “creating a viable free press is the first duty … of the democratic state.” But can a vibrant press be kept free of government interference and censorship while being sustained by massive government subsidies? And even if the answer is yes—should it be? Increasingly media practitioners are weighing in on the subject – and many are saying “No.”

Among them are journalism professor Dan Kennedy and Open Source host Christopher Lydon. Writing in the Huffington Post, Lydon noted that “the Internet is already the government’s accidental gift” to journalism, “worth much more than $30 billion to have wiped out the cost of paper, printing, delivery and all the capital barriers to a worldwide marketplace of ideas.” For good measure Lydon added, “My guess is that Thomas Jefferson, a blogger in retirement, would be reading and reveling in the digital miracle that has enabled kindred spirits like Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Joshua Micah Marshall and Arianna Huffington… not to mention Robert McChesney, John Nichols and their admirable creation, FreePress.Net.”

Meanwhile Kennedy, one of new media’s most astute observers, also questioned the McChesney/Nichols prescription. “What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding ‘none,’” Kennedy wrote on his Media Nation blog.

As Kennedy concluded, “the real problem with government assistance” may well be that “once you start relying on it, you are forever subject to the vagaries of the political moment.”

David Carr made much the same point during the Nation panel discussion. “Government versus market—which is more dependable and efficient?” Carr asked, adding that giving government money to the press at a time when “we can’t fund schools, hospitals or infrastructure” might be a tough sell. He concluded by denouncing as “preposterous” the notion that “great journalism will come from government subsidies.”

Instead of depending “on Uncle Sam for handouts,” Carr opined, we would all be better off asking –and answering – the following question: “What are our cultural priorities?”

Jan. 31, 2010

In a Dec. 18, 2009 article by Binyamin Appelbaum of the Washington Post,a House subcommittee said it will investigate the Treasury Department's decision to change a long-standing law so that Citigroup could keep billions of dollars in tax breaks.

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) called Treasury's action a "farce" and an "outrage" during a hearing of the domestic policy subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Kucinich, the subcommittee chairman, said that he would demand an explanation from Treasury officials.

"This committee is not going to rest until we've examined this last deal threadbare, until we have spoken to every individual associated with it, examined every communication related to it, with every person that may have had an interest in it, or who may have had some kind of a channel of influence," Kucinich said.

The Internal Revenue Service, an arm of Treasury, ruled that Citigroup could keep $38 billion in tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value as the government sells its stake in the company. Federal law lets companies shelter profits from taxes in good years based on the amount of losses in previous bad years. But the law restricts the use of past losses if a company changes hands, to discourage profitable companies from buying unprofitable firms to avoid paying taxes.

Treasury's plan to sell its $25 billion stake in Citigroup would have qualified as a change of ownership under the law. The sale was postponed after Citigroup's stock plunged in value, but Treasury officials said they still planned to sell the government's shares over the next year.

Treasury officials said the government needed to grant the tax break in order to sell its shares in Citigroup because the company could not afford the loss. Officials also said that preserving the tax break would help the government sell its shares at a higher price. And they said the law was never intended to apply to deals involving the government.

Kucinich tore into that logic , questioning why the government needed to sell its shares immediately. He said that the government was inherently conflicted by its roles as a tax collector and as a shareholder in the company. He said it appeared that the shareholders had gotten the upper hand.

"This does a disservice to the taxpayers, it does not help the taxpayers recover the value of their investment and it raises troubling questions about how the administration is negotiating its role," Kucinich said.

Kucinich also said that he planned to investigate whether the IRS had the legal authority to issue the ruling that benefited Citigroup.

"The idea that the government is using its authority to pick winners and losers is very dangerous," Kucinich said.

When contacted for comment by Don’s Review on Jan. 28, Jon M. Diat, Head of Financial Communications for Citigroup in New York, said, “Steve, we are not commenting on this.”

Jan. 16, 2010

• Unlike the “free-market-is-god” U.S., the government of Norway has taken sensible measures to prepare for the coming collapses/crises, including establishing a “Petroleum Fund.”

From a talk by Governor Svein Gjedrem at the Argentum Conference, Sept. 30, 2004:

“The purpose of the Petroleum Fund

The Government Petroleum Fund is an important instrument in Norway's economic policy. It is designed to ensure that petroleum revenues are used not only by the current generation but also by future generations.

The Fund serves as a buffer between current petroleum revenues and the use of these revenues in the Norwegian economy. In this way, the economy is shielded from fluctuations in prices and extraction rates in the petroleum sector. Petroleum revenues may be gradually phased into the Norwegian economy.

The Fund is also a savings fund. In a few years, the increase in the elderly as a share of the total population will require public disbursements that are too large to be financed by current tax levels. The indirect costs associated with a level of taxes that is substantially higher than the current level would be considerable. It is therefore important that the central government has savings on which to draw.

Construction of the Fund

These two purposes imply that the Petroleum Fund must be invested outside the Norwegian economy. The Act relating to the Government Petroleum Fund stipulates that the Petroleum Fund shall receive all central government revenues from petroleum operations and that the capital from the Fund shall only be used over the central government budget. The act prohibits using capital from the Fund in any other way.

This stipulation ensures that once a year the government authorities make a decision about how much of the Fund can reasonably be used. This also ensures that all use of central government funds is subject to the same assessment and that alternative uses must be weighed against one another. It is evident from the background material for the Act relating to the Petroleum Fund that the Fund shall not be a second central government budget, and by implication it shall not be used for investments in financial assets that did not receive priority in the budget.

The Storting (Norwegian parliament) has approved a guideline for the use of petroleum revenues. It states that in general, the use shall be limited to 4 per cent, or the expected annual real return on the Petroleum Fund over time. This fiscal rule shall ensure the use of revenues in the Norwegian economy at a level that can be sustained over time. The chart shows actual use each year. In the last few years, the central government's use of petroleum revenues has been equivalent to somewhat more than 4 per cent of the Fund, in part because of unexpected shortfalls in other government revenues.

Government saving

Saving in the Petroleum Fund is the most important component of the government's financial saving. The Ministry of Trade and Industry¹ has estimated that the Fund accounts for more than half of the government's investments in capital markets. Investments in pure public corporations, national health enterprises and most wholly-owned government enterprises are excluded. Large enterprises such as Statkraft and Norway Post are thus not included. However, these two enterprises, with an estimated combined market value of between NOK 50 and NOK 100 billion, do not change the overall picture.

The capital in the Petroleum Fund has been invested in the international capital markets. The chart shows, however, that the government also invests substantial funds in the domestic markets. The Ministry of Trade and Industry and the National Insurance Fund are responsible for the two most important items. The Ministry of Trade and Industry manage government assets in a number of companies that are either engaged in business activities in Norway or that invest in companies that are engaged in such activities. The National Insurance Fund has a large portfolio of investments in listed Norwegian companies. Ownership shares that are managed by other ministries come in addition. All told, this amounts to considerable transfers of government capital to the Norwegian capital market.

The government's investments in the domestic capital market cannot be viewed, however, as particularly important for companies' financing possibilities in this market. The capital market has what economists call a separation effect. The government can construct its portfolio of financial investments without regard for the financing needs of Norwegian companies. By the same token, companies can choose their financing structure independently of the government's financial investments. The capital market is situated between the government as investor and companies' capital needs and ensures that the government's and companies' choices may be separated. The Norwegian capital market is part of a Nordic market and increasingly also a part of a larger international market. Capital markets are generally very efficient instruments for channelling funds from savers to investors.

Capital supply²

In the market, a price for capital is set. Companies that believe that they can, with sufficiently high probability, achieve an excess return on capital compared to what it costs in the market, will invest. A company acquires capital by using its ploughed-back profits or by raising a loan. In both cases, the market price of the capital is the price actually paid by the company.

A short supply of capital in the market could result in a market price that is too high. The required real return on investments could be higher than is socially desirable. But there is hardly a basis for claiming that market prices and required return in the Norwegian capital market are higher than in other countries. The level of fixed investment is also relatively high. This indicates that the supply of capital in the Norwegian market is satisfactory.

We know that market failure and efficiency losses are common phenomena in any real economy. A lack of information and transparency concerning investment projects is an important reason for this. Investors in capital markets very seldom have the same information about project profitability as the company that will actually implement the project.

Asymmetric information of this kind may mean that companies must pay more for capital than would have been the case if external investors had also had access to solid and reliable information about the profitability of an investment. It may also mean that some companies with solid projects do not acquire financing at all. This is a well-known argument that the supply of capital may be inadequate for some groups of companies. In particular, this may be the case for newly established companies. Potential investors in these types of companies usually have a more limited basis for assessing expected profitability and risk than they have when they invest in established companies.

There are a number of things to be said about this argument. First, asymmetric information among different market participants is not a particularly Norwegian phenomenon. This is a type of market failure which is found in all capital markets around the world.

Second, this is not an argument for a general increase in capital supply. If we tried to solve the problem in this way, the result could be considerable capital outflows. Other investors could move their capital to markets with higher expected returns. If they did not do this, the economy could incur substantial costs because projects that are not socially profitable would nevertheless acquire financing. The most efficient way of remedying market failure is through selective instruments, especially aimed at those who are affected by market failure.

The government has therefore established special funds or companies to provide financing to private companies, either by injecting equity capital or by providing loans that are not available in the ordinary capital market. It is difficult to acquire a complete overview of the scope of this type of government capital supply. A rough estimate is that government capital amounting to at least NOK 20 billion is currently invested in development projects in private companies.

Supplying capital on terms that are more favourable than those available in the ordinary capital market has been a regional policy instrument for a long time. It has gradually become a nationwide instrument. It is not easy to evaluate how successful this policy has been. However, the information provided by ordinary performance measures for business activities should not be underestimated. Supplying risk capital involves a considerable probability of loss. For the supply to be called successful, it must also involve a strong probability of unusually high profitability. Investments in development capital should on average generate a positive return for investors, including the government. If the government on average earns money, one can with great certainty say that the government remedies market failure. If on the other hand, the government loses money over time, it is more likely that the government contributes to wasting capital.

Selective support can easily conflict with international rules and regulations which Norway has a legal obligation to follow in accordance with the EEA agreement and its membership in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The rules and regulations shall ensure a level playing field for companies from different countries. Therefore, most forms of direct and indirect government support are prohibited. Government loans on more favourable terms than offered in the market would be a form of indirect government support which may only be used to a limited degree. It is in the interest of Norway to safeguard these rules and regulations in order to protect Norwegian companies in foreign markets.

Tax measures may also be adopted that affect the supply of capital, also for development projects. The publicly appointed committee which earlier this year evaluated the relationship between capital supply and economic developments pointed out that removing the wealth tax would have such a positive effect.

The rule stating that the Petroleum Fund may only be invested in foreign securities is primarily aimed at keeping the capital completely outside the Norwegian economy. This simplifies the conduct of economic policy. However, the rule also prevents the Fund's managers from being exposed to pressures from domestic market participants in need of capital.

The Petroleum Fund's investment strategy

The Petroleum Fund accounts for the dominant portion of government assets abroad. The Petroleum Fund is also the wealth component that is growing most rapidly. However, whether it is correct to call this saving can be debated. The petroleum wealth already exists in the North Sea. The government has direct ownership shares in this wealth and also has the right to an additional share in form of future tax claims.

The extraction of petroleum involves a conversion of government wealth, from petroleum wealth to financial investments. Through this conversion, the wealth becomes far more liquid and it is invested is a less risky manner. The chart shows experience from the last 18 years. The data indicate that expected return rises when petroleum wealth is converted to financial assets. In addition, risk is reduced.

In the years ahead, the capital in the Petroleum Fund will probably increase considerably. The chart shows the Ministry of Finance's estimates for growth until the end of 2009. The estimates are based on assumptions concerning oil and gas prices which at present appear to be conservative.

The current investment strategy is based on analyses conducted in 1997-1998 when it became clear that the Fund might become substantial. Since then, the investment strategy has remained unchanged, with 40 per cent of the Fund invested in equity instruments and 60 per cent in fixed income instruments. This 40/60 relationship is primarily responsible for determining both expected return on the Fund and the risk connected with the return over different time horizons.

A number of other changes have been made, however, that have resulted in a larger and more diversified investment universe for the Fund. The chart shows the main characteristics of the Petroleum Fund's current benchmark portfolio.

Management performance

Norges Bank manages the Petroleum Fund on behalf of the Ministry of Finance. Until now, the results have been relatively favourable, with an average real return on the Fund's investments since 1997of 3.6 per cent, after deductions for all management costs. The relatively secure return on interest-bearing government bonds provides a solid foundation. To achieve a higher return, part of the Fund is also invested in non-government-guaranteed bonds and in equities. The equity investments in particular have been responsible for wide fluctuations in returns from one quarter to another.

The fall in the equity markets from 2000 to 2003 is reflected in the chart. This is the main reason that average returns have not been higher. On the other hand, the fall in global interest rate levels has resulted in high returns on fixed income investments.

The return on the Petroleum Fund is primarily determined by the benchmark portfolio defined by the Ministry of Finance. However, Norges Bank also contributes through active management. Active management consists of a large number of small deviations from the benchmark portfolio. The Fund is managed through a range of individual mandates, both in Norges Bank and at external managers. The chart shows that risk-taking is broadly spread over many different managers.

Norges Bank's objective is to achieve an excess return of at least 0.25 percentage point each year. This assumes an excess return on considerably more than half of the positions taken. So far, the average annual excess return has been more than 0.4 percentage point. In monetary terms, the cumulative excess return is approximately NOK 12 billion, which is equivalent to roughly 8 percent of the total return on the Fund. The chart shows that this excess return has been achieved without increasing the risk associated with the Fund's investments. This is because the active management takes other kinds of risk than that which is inherent in the benchmark portfolio.

The excess return has been positive for most quarters. The trade-off between return and risk has been high, with a ratio over one. Of course, there is no guarantee that results will be as positive in the period ahead. The sharp growth in the Fund makes it more difficult to take sufficiently large positions in the active management.

Liabilities

The Pension Commission suggested that the Petroleum Fund be merged with the National Insurance Fund to form a new Government Pension Fund. Ordinary pension funds have clearly defined obligations in the form of future pension payments. The funds' objective is to meet these obligations with a reasonable degree of certainty. The authorities regulate the funds' activities, e.g. by requiring that the funds have capital that is most likely sufficient to cover future obligations.

Formulating objectives in this manner has a considerable impact on the choice of investment strategy in ordinary pension funds. In recent years, returns in capital markets have been weak, and in many countries, the value of pension funds' capital has decreased in relation to the funds' obligations. The decline in the pension fund's capital/obligations ratio has resulted in changes in the composition of portfolios in a number of funds.

The Pension Commission suggested that the Government Pension Fund should not be an ordinary pension fund. The government has substantial current tax revenues and can therefore use sources other than the proposed Government Pension Fund to cover pension obligations. As a result of the government's right to impose taxes, it would not be optimal to allow the investment strategy of such a fund to be governed by pension obligations. We can view a Government Pension Fund as part of the government's general assets, and the government's pension obligations as part of the government's general obligations.

The government has the possibility of maintaining a long investment horizon even if coverage of a future Government Pension Fund should fall below the desired level. This does not mean that the investment strategy will be completely unaffected by developments in pension obligations. In a few years, it will become necessary to use the return on the Petroleum Fund in addition to current petroleum revenues. It may then become more desirable to have requirements that ensure a more stable rise in the value of the Fund. On the other hand, the proposed fund is intended to be a permanent fund. We do not envision placing considerably more emphasis on short-term risk than is currently the case with the Government Petroleum Fund's investment strategy. Perhaps just the opposite.

Alternative investments

The Petroleum Fund's geographical diversification is unusually broad - the Fund's portfolio includes many countries and currencies. Other large funds' investments usually include more asset classes than the Petroleum Fund has. It is common, for example, for pension funds to invest a portion of their capital in real estate and private equity. Some pension funds also invest in the commodities markets.

The conclusion so far is that the Petroleum Fund shall not invest portions of the Fund in such alternative asset classes.

This assessment is based on two fundamental requirements for including new asset classes in the Petroleum Fund's portfolio. First, the asset class must contribute to improving the trade-off between expected return and risk. This means that returns on the new asset class must not fluctuate in pace with returns on the asset classes in which the Fund has already invested. The Fund must be able to diversify risk by investing in the new asset class.

Second, the markets in the new asset class must be of a certain size. The Petroleum Fund should not be the dominant investor in any market, because if it is, the investment would easily become illiquid and difficult to value. Given this restriction, the market's size must make it possible to invest a sufficient portion of the Petroleum Fund in the asset class that the effect on the Fund's return and risk is noticeable.

A new asset class involves a number of costs that are incurred regardless of the size of the investment. These fixed costs can only be justified if the investment is of a certain size. Investments in small asset classes will easily involve costs that are substantial in relation to the potential advantages in terms of greater risk diversification.

Private equity

Management of private equity requires expertise in active ownership of enterprises. Even large pension funds seldom find it profitable to build up this kind of special expertise within their own organisation. There are exceptions, but pension funds usually make investments indirectly through various types of partnerships. The funds must then commit to investing a specific amount, while in each partnership there is an operations manager, or leading partner, who decides when the investment is actually made. The funds pay an annual management fee to the leading partner and must also monitor the partnership to some degree.

The overall management costs for the funds are considerably higher than costs associated with investments in listed markets. The investment is usually difficult to value and as a result it is also difficult to sell. In the secondary market, prices are usually so low that a sale is not profitable. The pension fund must plan to have the investment in its portfolio until the agreed termination of the partnership. This will usually take about 10 years.

We do not have an adequate basis for estimating expected returns on any investments the Petroleum Fund might make in private equity. Returns may depend strongly on the leading partner in the partnerships entered into. It will be important to choose and gain access to the right partnerships. It will be demanding and costly to invest a sum of money in private equity that is so large that it noticeably affects the fund's total return and risk.

In the Petroleum Fund, transparency concerning management is important. This means that it should be possible for the principals and professionals outside the management organisation to assess the management performance of Norges Bank. This is important in order to maintain a high level of confidence in the Petroleum Fund as an instrument for investing government capital. When the benchmark index consists solely of listed instruments, it is easy for third parties to assess the returns in relation to average market returns. If the portfolio contained private equity, the fund might appear to be less transparent.

Private equity has not, however, been excluded conclusively as an investment instrument. Norges Bank regularly reviews the basis for the investment strategy. Part of this review is to evaluate whether the Petroleum Fund's current management structure can be adapted to investments in alternative asset classes. One option may be to report returns separately for that part of the Petroleum Fund that is invested in listed markets. These returns can then be assessed as they are today. Another option may be to provide thorough information to the public concerning investments in unlisted markets and the evaluations underlying these investments. However, even if the Petroleum Fund is allowed to invest in private equity at some later time, these investments will be made outside Norway.

There are a number of reasons that the government should become involved in markets that provide capital to development projects in ways other than through the Petroleum Fund. The government then has the possibility of reducing the effect of market failure that undoubtedly exists. Until now, however, history has taught us that government financial investments in these markets have often resulted in losses to the economy. The name Argentum, which is the Latin word for silver or silver heirlooms, can thus be interpreted as a positive signal.”

• More foresight and “socialist” sensibility from Norway as posted on the Post-Petrol-blogspot.com in December 2007:

(AP) It sounds like something from a science fiction film, a doomsday vault, dug into a frozen mountainside deep in an Arctic island's permafrost that will serve as a Noah's Ark for world seeds in case of a global catastrophe.

But Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality with start of construction Monday of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds.

Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland attended a cornerstone ceremony Monday near the town of Longyearbyen, in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole.

"This seed bank is of global importance. It will be the only one of its kind," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said. "It is our final safety net."

Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard" for its aim to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out by plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change.

The foil-packaged seeds will be stored at such temperatures that they could last thousands of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust. The trust, founded in 2004, has also worked on the project and will help run the vault, which is planned to open and start accepting seeds from around the world in September 2007.

At the ceremony, Nordic prime ministers poured seeds into a hollowed-out cornerstone which they then placed on the site. Stoltenberg quoted an old Norwegian expression: "From small seeds, big trees grow."

Oil-rich Norway first proposed the idea a year ago, drawing wide international interest. The Svalbard Archipelago, 300 miles north of the mainland, was selected because it is remote and far from many threats, as well as for its cold climate and permafrost.

The Nordic nation is footing the bill of up to about $4.8 million for infrastructure costs.

Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust who led a feasibility study on the project, said that crop diversity is also threatened by "accidents, mismanagement and shortsighted budget cuts."

Already, some 1,400 seed banks around the world, most of them national, hold samples of a country's crops.

But these banks "can be affected by shutdowns, natural disasters, war or simply a lack of money," Riis-Johansen, the agriculture minister, said.

Having duplicate seeds in the Svalbard vault is meant to offer a fail-safe system for the planet.

Svalbard's remote location and permafrost will help protect the seeds and safeguard their genetic makeup, experts say. The vault will have thick concrete walls, and even if all cooling systems fail, the temperature in the frozen mountain will never rise above freezing due to permafrost.

While the facility will be fenced in and guarded, Svalbard's free-roaming polar bears, known for their ferocity, could also act as natural guardians, according to the Trust.

The idea of a global seed bank has been around since the early 1980s but unresolved issues, such as ownership rights to genetic material, stalled it until the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization adopted the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in 2001.

While Norway will own the vault itself, countries sending seeds will own the material they deposit, much as with a bank safe deposit box. The Global Crop Diversity Trust will help developing countries pay the cost of preparing and sending seeds.

Feb. 7, 2010

With the gusher of reports on President Obamas keeping nearly all of W.s Constitution-shredding policies, it seems appropriate to publish a speech on Bushs shredding as given by the man-who-should-be-president-especially-after one year of the third term of Bush-Cheney-Obama.

Here is the Transcript of Former Vice President Gore's Speech on Constitutional Issues, Courtesy CQ Transcripts Wire. The speech was delivered on Jan. 16, 2006:

GORE: Thank you very much.

I'd like to thank Michael Ostrolenk for that on-the-spot introduction, and I'd like to thank Michael and the other leaders of the Liberty Coalition for the wonderful work that they are doing to try to help Americans bridge many gaps that have sometimes unnecessarily divided us.

I want to thank them for co-sponsoring this event.

I want to thank Lisa Brown for her friendship to me and for her outstanding leadership of the American Constitution Society.

Tipper and I have long admired her work, and it's a pleasure to work with her.

To all of the distinguished guests who are here, Senator Dianne Feinstein...

(APPLAUSE)

... others who are present (inaudible).

And I want to commiserate with Congressman Bob Barr, who was connected live when we walked out on the stage, but having had similar occurrences with live video feeds before, I know what can happen and what he must be feeling right now.

GORE: And I want to thank all of you for coming.

I'd like to start by saying that Congressman Bob Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years. But we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens, Democrats and Republicans alike, to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the executive branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress precisely to prevent such abuses. It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored in our country.

(APPLAUSE)

And that is why many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences insofar as it is possible to do so and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all of our people.

And on this particular Martin Luther King Day it is especially important to recall for that for the last several years of his life Dr. King was illegally wiretapped, one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during that period.

GORE: The FBI privately labeled King the -- and I quote -- "the most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to -- again, I quote -- "take him off his pedestal."

The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide. This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder.

The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And one result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, often called FISA, which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance.

It included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as desired.

I voted for that law during my first term in Congress. And, for almost 30 years, the system has proven a valuable and workable means of affording a level of protection for American citizens while permitting foreign surveillance to continue whenever it is necessary.

And yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that, in spite of this long-settled law, the executive branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on -- and I quote the report -- "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages and other Internet traffic inside the United States."

GORE: The New York Times reported that the president decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program without search warrants or any new laws that would permit domestic intelligence collection.

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the president seemed to go out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But, surprisingly, the president's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the president confirmed the story was true but in the next breath declared that he has no intention of stopping or bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently.

(APPLAUSE)

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

(APPLAUSE)

Our founding fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men.

(APPLAUSE)

They recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution, our system of checks and balances, was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law.

GORE: As John Adams said, "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers or either of them to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the founders sought to nullify in the Constitution, an all-powerful executive; too reminiscent of the king from whom they had broken free.

(APPLAUSE)

In the words of James Madison, the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

(APPLAUSE)

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet on "Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that, in his phrase, "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law actually strengthens our democracy, of course, and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint under the rule of law.

(APPLAUSE)

And make no mistake: The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the normal processes of government that are designed to improve policy and avoid error.

GORE: And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents overreaching and checks the accretion to power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability helps our country avoid many serious mistakes that we would otherwise make.

Recently, for example, we learned from just-declassified documents after almost 40 years that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which authorized the tragic Vietnam War was actually based on false information.

And we now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq war 38 years later was also based on false information.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, the point is that America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. And that is the reason why following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

(APPLAUSE)

The president and I agree on one thing: The threat from terrorism is all too real.

There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attacks on September 11th and we must be ever vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is on the proposition that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government in order to protect Americans from terrorism when, in fact, doing so would make us weaker and more vulnerable.

(APPLAUSE)

And remember that, once violated, the rule of law is itself in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows, the greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles.

As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its mistakes and reveal errors, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police its activities.

GORE: And once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we do become a government of men and not laws.

The president's men have minced words about America's laws.

The attorney general, for example, openly conceded that the kind of surveillance, in his phrase, that we know they have been conducting, does require a court order unless authorized by statue.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing and no one inside or outside the administration claims that it does.

Incredibly, the administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11.

But this argument simply does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts.

First, another admission by the attorney general: He concedes that the administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that that is why they consulted with some members of Congress about the possibility of changing the statute.

Attorney General Gonzales says that they were told by the members of Congress consulted that this would probably not be possible. And so they decided not to make the request.

So how can they now argue that the authorization for the use of military force somehow implicitly authorized it all along?

Indeed, when the authorization was being debated, the administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically and the Congress refused to agree.

Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made clear statements during the debate on the floor of the House and Senate, respectively, clearly stating that that authorization did not operate domestically -- and there is no assertion to the contrary.

GORE: When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him the power he wanted when this measure was passed, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother.

But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote, "To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between the president and the Congress."

(APPLAUSE)

This is precisely the disrespect for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case during the Korean War. It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution.

And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

(APPLAUSE)

For example, as you know, the president has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that notwithstanding his American citizenship that person in prison has no right to talk with a lawyer, even if he wants to argue that the president or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

GORE: The president claims that he can imprison that American citizen -- any American citizen he chooses -- indefinitely, for the rest of his life, without even an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

No such right exists in the America that you and I know and love. It is foreign to our Constitution.

(APPLAUSE)

It must be rejected.

At the same time, the executive branch has also claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture and have plainly constituted torture -- in a widespread pattern that has been extensively documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by executive branch interrogators. Many more have been broken and humiliated. And, in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were completely innocent of any criminal charges whatsoever.

This is a shameful exercise of power that overturns a set of principles that you're nation has observed since General George Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War.

GORE: They have been observed by every president since then until now.

(APPLAUSE)

They violate the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture and our own laws against torture.

The president has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals on the streets of foreign cities and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes and nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been deeply shocked by these new and uncharacteristic patterns on the part of America.

For example, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan -- one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons -- registered a complaint to his home office about the cruelty and senselessness of the new U.S. practice that he witnessed. "This material we're getting is useless," he wrote. And then he continued with this: "We are selling our souls for dross. It is, in fact, positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution?

If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?

If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the executive branch's extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers, and I quote Dean Koh, "If the president has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal American safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is itself deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the executive branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so, and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore a healthy constitutional balance.

GORE: For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by Senator John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the president declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the executive branch claimed this it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. And when the Supreme Court disagreed, the president then engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the court from providing any meaningful content to the rights of the citizens affected.

A conservative jurist on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the executive branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle and, I quote him, "at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."

As a result of this unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the executive branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power must restored to our republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in large part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which, as you know, serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions in our history, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled constitutional crises.

GORE: These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live together under the rule of law.

The principal alternative to democracy throughout history has, of course, been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strong man or small group who exercised that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded.

When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was, in his memorable phrase, "whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure," he was not only saving our union. He was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fall, as did Athens and the Roman republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strong- man regime.

There have, of course, been other periods in American history when the executive branch claimed new powers later seen as excessive and mistaken.

Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

And when his successor, President Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses, in his first inaugural, he said, "The essential principles of our government form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. Should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain that road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety."

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: President Lincoln, of course, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after World War I, with the notorious red scare and "Palmer Raids."

The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II marked a shameful low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, of course, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTEL program was part and parcel of those abuses experienced by Dr. King and so many thousands of others.

But in each of these cases throughout American history, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, our nation recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

But there are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing so that this cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a globe where there are nuclear weapons and Cold War tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever-enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counterintelligence activities and allocate our military forces on the global stage.

When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership.

But as Justice Frankfurter wrote in that famous steel seizure case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

GORE: A second reason to believe that we may be experiencing something new, outside that historical cycle, is that we are, after all, told by this administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to last, in their phrase, "for the rest of our lives."

And so we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other presidents to justify arrogations of power will in this case persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be keenly aware of the startling advances in the sophistication of eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to easily sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and then mine it for intelligence. And this adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies grows.

Those technologies do have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways that are both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me. The threat of additional terror strikes is real and the concerted efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility.

Moreover, there is an in fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to any president to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat. And it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: And there is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle. This administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential power is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which ought to be more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the Constitution that the framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition.

Under this theory, the president's authority when acting as commander in chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary, cannot be checked by Congress. And President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as commander in chief, invoking it as frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, both domestic and foreign.

And when added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all-powerful executive branch, with a subservient Congress and subservient judiciary, is ironically accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish a form of dominance in the world.

And the common denominator...

(APPLAUSE)

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

The same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the executive branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals and to demand conformity from all executive branch employees.

GORE: For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to the FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's assertion that Martin Luther King was closely connected to communists.

The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division testified that his effort to tell the truth about Dr. King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated within the FBI and pressured.

And I quote: "It was evident," he said, "that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street." "The men and I," he continued, "discussed how to get out of trouble."

To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. "These men," he continued, "were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes. They had children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. So they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in."

The Constitution's framers, who studied human nature so closely, understood this dilemma quite well. As Alexander Hamilton put it, "A power over a man's support is a power over his will."

In any case, quite soon there was no more difference of opinion about Dr. King within the FBI, and the false accusation became the unanimous view.

And in exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between Al Qaida and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell, "We are all capable," he said, "of believing things which we know to be untrue and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right."

GORE: Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time. The only check on it is that, sooner or later, a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Two thousand two hundred American soldiers have lost their lives as this false belief bumped into a solid reality. And indeed, whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to gross mistakes and abuses.

That is part of human nature. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes, dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

(APPLAUSE)

It is human nature, whether for Republicans or Democrats or people of any set of views.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that, if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still does not know that the administration did, in fact, have the names of at least two of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have led to the identification of most of the others.

(APPLAUSE)

One of them was in the phone book. And yet, because of incompetence, unaccountable incompetence in the handling of the information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case, again, regardless of which party might be in power, that an executive branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power.

Often the request itself is used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

GORE: Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. That is why many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this president means that the next will have unchecked power as well. And the next may be someone whose values and beliefs you do not trust. And that is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this president has done.

(APPLAUSE)

If his attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, then our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next president or some future president will be able in the name of national security to restrict our liberties in a way the framers would never have imagined possible.

This same instinct to expand power and establish dominance has characterized the relationship between this administration and the courts and the Congress. In a properly functioning system, the judicial branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observe their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties, adhere to the rule of law.

Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands, notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The president's decision, for example, to ignore the FISA law was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA Court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap.

And yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the president simply did not take matters to it. And did not even let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The president's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure the courts will not will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a long-time supporter of a powerful executive, a supporter of that so-called unitary executive.

GORE: Whether you support his confirmation or not -- and I respect the fact that some of the co-sponsors of this event do; I do not -- but whatever your view, we must all agree...

(APPLAUSE)

... that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the administration has also supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the president's nominees.

The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of the courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance.

In short, the administration has demonstrated a contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage in our constitutional framework has been to the legislative branch.

The sharp decline of Congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the executive to attain this massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to the Congress in 1976. Served eight years in the House, eight in the Senate, presided over the Senate for eight as vice president.

Before that, as a young man, I saw the Congress firsthand as the son of a senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938 -- 10 years before I was born -- and left the Senate after I had graduated from college.

The Congress we have today is structurally unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served.

GORE: There are many distinguished and outstanding senators and congressmen serving today. I am honored to know them and to have worked with them.

But the legislative branch of government as a whole, under its current leadership, now operates as if it were entirely subservient to the executive branch.

(APPLAUSE)

It is astonishing to me and so foreign to what the Congress is supposed to be.

Moreover, too many members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate on the issues but, instead, raising money to purchase 30-second television commercials.

(APPLAUSE)

Moreover, there have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is.

(APPLAUSE)

In the '70s and '80s, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the executive branch to the fire no matter which party was in power.

And, yet, oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of the authorization committees has declined into insignificance.

The 13 annual appropriations bills are hardly ever actually passed as bills anymore. Often, everything is lumped into a familiar single giant measure that sometimes is not even available for members of Congress to even read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely disallowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the greatest deliberative body in the world, meaningful debate is now a rarity.

(APPLAUSE)

Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked, "Why is this chamber empty?"

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

GORE: And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give.

And, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization. So the willingness of Congress to challenge the executive branch is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the administration.

The executive branch time and again has co-opted Congress' role. And too often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

(APPLAUSE)

Look, for example, at the congressional role in overseeing this massive, four-year eavesdropping campaign that, on its face, seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights.

The president says he informed Congress. What he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and, sometimes, the leaders of the House and Senate.

This small group, in turn, claims they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to the vice president.

And, though I sympathize with the awkward position, the difficult position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking sufficient action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

(APPLAUSE)

Many did. Moreover, in the Congress as a whole, both House and Senate, the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption that some have fallen vulnerable to.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg threatening the integrity of our legislative branch of government.

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: And it is the pitiful state of our legislative state which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by the executive branch now threatening a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the Constitution of our country.

(APPLAUSE)

But there is yet another player. There is yet another constitutional player whose faults must also be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has accompanied these efforts by the executive branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people, collectively, are still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We must examine ourselves. We, as Lincoln put it, even we here must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and hollowing out and degradation of American democracy.

It's time to stand up for the American system that we know and love.

(APPLAUSE)

It is time to breathe new life back into America's democracy.

(APPLAUSE)

Thomas Jefferson said, "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will."

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: America is based on the belief that we can govern ourselves and exercise the power of self-government.

(APPLAUSE)

The American idea proceeded from the bedrock principle that all just power is derived from the consent of the governed. The intricate and finally balanced system, now in such danger, was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole.

The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely read newspaper essays. And they represented only one of 24 series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

And when the convention had done its best, it was the people in their various states that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the documents sent forward for ratification.

(APPLAUSE)

And it is we the people who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and for great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is now applicable in a new way to our present dilemma: "We must disenthrall ourselves," he said, "and then we shall save our country."

Forty years has passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. And its dominance has now become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second advertisements, and they're not The Federalist Papers.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: The political economy, supported by these short but expensive television ads, is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the executive branch to believe it can and should control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain secrecy in its operations. After all, if the other branches don't know what's happening, they can't be a check or a balance.

For example, when the administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program.

But rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the administration withheld facts and actively prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it had sought from the principal administration expert who had the information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far beyond the numbers given to Congress by the president. And the workings of the program would play out very differently than Congress had been told.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it, instead the Congress approved the program -- and, tragically, the entire initiative -- is now collapsing all over the country, with the administration making an appeal just this weekend asking major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

But the American people, who have a right to believe that its elected representatives will learn the truth and act on the basis of knowledge and utilize the rule of reason, have been let down.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House with no scientific training whatsoever.

GORE: Today one of the most distinguished scientific experts in the world on global warming, who works in NASA, has been ordered not to talk to members of the press; ordered to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the executive branch can monitor and control what he shares of his knowledge about global warming.

This is a planetary crisis. We owe ourselves a truthful and reasoned discussion.

(APPLAUSE)

One of the other ways the administration has tried to control the flow of information has been by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest.

(APPLAUSE)

President Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote, "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk. Yet in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the full Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol?

(APPLAUSE)

Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to be launched on a moment's notice to completely annihilate the country?

(APPLAUSE)

Is America really in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march, when the last generation had to fight and win two world wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did.

(APPLAUSE)

And yet they faithfully protected our freedom and now it's up to us to do the very same thing.

(APPLAUSE)

GORE: We have a duty as Americans to defend out citizens' rights not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

(APPLAUSE)

It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the executive branch and the president's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr when he said, and I quote, "The president has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

(APPLAUSE)

A special counsel should be immediately appointed by the attorney general to remedy these obvious conflicts of interest that prevents them from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the president.

(APPLAUSE)

We've had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special council with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice.

Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, has shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the executive branch has violated other laws.

(APPLAUSE)

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of this special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the president. And it should be a political issue in any race, regardless of party, section of the country, house of Congress, or anyone who opposes the appointment of a special counsel under these dangerous circumstances when our Constitution is at risk.

(APPLAUSE)

Secondly, new whistleblower protection should immediately be established for members of the executive branch who report evidence of wrongdoing, especially where it involves abuse of authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

(APPLAUSE)

Third, both houses of Congress should, of course, hold comprehensive and not just superficial hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the president.

GORE: And they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

(APPLAUSE)

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the executive branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should under no circumstances be granted unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

(APPLAUSE)

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist the their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion in the privacy of American citizens.

(APPLAUSE)

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

(APPLAUSE)

In closing, I mention that, along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope.

As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established by the people and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed, I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Thank you very much.

Jan. 23, 2010

Editor’s Note: Please see Part 1, published (below) in Don’s Review.

Millions expected Barack Obama to be the world’s savior when he was inaugurated in January 2009. Millions expected him to stop the wars in Iraq and quickly finish the war in Afghanistan. Millions expected him to solve the Great Recession with a massive “green jobs” program. All this within his first 100 days in office, ala FDR during the Great Depression.

            But those things are not part of the plan.

            The “powers-that-be,” which include Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and, above all, the Cheney task force (the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group), and now the well-meaning, but corporate-funded and -staffed, Obama administration ALREADY have a plan for solving the crises, and ALREADY have begun implementing it.

            It’s called the “Great Die-Off.” The elites who have been stripping the carcass of the middle and lower classes since Saint Reagan in 1980 are now going to let the rest die by the millions in the U.S. and the hundeds of millions worldwide until this little planet again can support whoever remains. The planet’s limitations (Peak Oil, Peak Coal, even Peak Uranium) will force an economic paradigm change from constant, infinite growth to a no-growth, status-quo economy within the next 10-20 years.

Part 2:

OIL

The United States has already committed to being in Iraq, the country with the world’s  second-largest known oil reserves for decades.

The Bush-Cheney Agenda: Missions Accomplished

• Already in May 2005, it was reported that four major military bases were being built around airfields in strategic locations and that those  bases had “a permanent character” to them.
• In mid-2008 the U.S. was nearing completion of a 21-building fortress-like embassy covering 104 acres in Baghdad for more than $1 billion.

Not counting military personnel at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and in and around Saudi Arabia, as well as naval deployments in the Gulf around Iraq, the total number of military personnel in Iraq never likely will drop below 50,000.

                Oil companies have buying back shares of their own stock to boost prices, but they also are awaiting the finalization of an Iraqi oil law that will allow them to pour money into rebuilding its infrastructure so future production can be perhaps five or six million barrels per day.

                However, that will never offset the decline.

                Bush did accomplish his threefold mission:

1. to occupy the country and make sure Russia, Iran or other countries did not have control
2. to partition the country in a way that made it less expensive to control the areas that had oil. Why pay to occupy an entire country when you can break it up and only protect those areas where the oil is? Although political maps will continue to show what Churchill drew up in the 1920s, for all intents and purposes Iraq no longer exists as a single country.

In the New York Times of October 2007, Peter Galbraith wrote  the Senate had voted to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up into a loose confederation of three regions—a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south, and a Sunni enclave in the center—with the national government in Baghdad having fewer powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil reserves.

While the nonbinding measure provoked strong reactions, it actually called for what Iraq’s Constitution ALREADY provides, and, what is reality on the ground.

The Kurdish provinces in the north are recognized in the Constitution, while other parts of Iraq can opt to form their own regions. The central government can never impose a tax..

There are significant details to be worked out. This is a major reason U.S. troops  have to stay; to keep piles of kindling from igniting and keep Russia and Iran out.

The U.S. military under Bush had been thinking this way for some time. Ruppert’s book contains a map that was prepared by the “Armed Forces Journal” in June 2006 and posted on the website. Although the map was quickly removed, it was copied and reposted on another website for posterity because it so accurately reflects predictions many of us had been making for four years prior. The story that went with it was called “Blood Borders—How a Better Middle East Would Look.” In the map, areas with BOLDFACE titles would be gaining territory. They are: Yemen; the Islamic Sacred State; Greater Jordan; Sunni Iraq; Arab Shia State; Free Kurdistan; Armenia; Azerbaijan; Free Baluchistan; and Greater Lebanon. Areas in GRAY titles would be losing territory and/or influence: Turkey, Syria, Saudi Homelands Independent Territories, Israel (yes, Israel), Egypt, U.A.E., Oman, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (yes, Pakistan).

1. to see to it that agreements were in place that allowed the U.S. , its oil industry, and its allies: access to Iraqi oil, a dominant share of the infrastructure work, and control over where most of the oil would be sold and to whom. THOSE AGREEMENTS ARE ALREADY WELL IN PLACE; though relatively little is known about them, Ruppert writes.

It appears that U.S. companies are confidant about their Iraqi future. We do not know what deals have already been made or how they will be presented to the Iraqi central government and the autonomous regions. Ruppert says he suspects that the Production Sharing Agreements (in mid-2008) will be put into place that will guarantee U.S. access for perhaps 30 years.

                As for Saudi Arabia, it is undisputed  that it contains about 25% of the known conventional oil reserves on the planet. Ruppert writes that there is increasing hard evidence that Saudi Arabia has passed or is about to pass its production peak and enter  what “might prove to be a very steep decline curve.”

                The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are entangled by investments. The BBC has estimated that Saudi-U.S. investment is $750 billion. One of Forbes’ richest men in the world, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is the single largest holder in Citigroup. He also holds 3% of total shares in Newscorp (FOX) making him the second-largest shareholder than Rupert Murdoch. He also sits on the board of directors of the infamous Carlyle Group.

                Ruppert writes that a recovery from the financial meltdown of 2008 is virtually impossible. “Oil will break through $100 a barrel if the economy returns GDP to pre-crash levels either last year or in 2010. “If ‘recovery’ really happens (meaning GDP starts to surpass 2008 levels, the $200 or $300 oil is inevitable,” Ruppert writes. “But all every oil-producing nation will do is rush to play catch up for a brief moment, before demand COLLAPSES all over again.”  [ALL CAPS MINE]

                The single greatest  need for the entire planet, Rupper writes, is to know the true status of Saudi fields and reserves. A collapse in Saudi production would send the global and U.S. economies reeling (further) in an instant. “For many reasons the Saudis have been reluctant to share, publicly at least, what they know. This information may already be in U.S. hands, however, highly classified.”

                A book by Matthew Simmons [see previous Ruppert story in Don’s Review], used hard data on field by field production to make a strong case that many Saudi fields were in decline and perhaps near collapse because of overly aggressive production.

                Though there appears to be little an American president can do to influence the Saudis, it is their reliance on U.S. military might that may offer leverage. “It also appears  that the U.S. military has prepared to partition Saudi Arabia, just like Iraq, when it becomes convenient.” [Ruppert cites the same map mentioned earlier in this article.]

FOOD

Historically, the balance in nature was tipped about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans first tilled the soil. “What remained of that balance vaporized in the last 100 years,” Ruppert writes.

                Over the last 60 years, humans have taken to artificially replenishing soil nutrients with chemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for all nitrogen-based fertilizers. “It greatly increase productivity, but is not sustainable and actually harms the soil,” Rupper says.

                This “green revolution” as it was called in the 1950s and 1960s is what accelerated the massive population explosion over the last century from just over one billion people to near seven billion people on the planet.

                “Ancient civilizations perished because they did not rotate their crops,” Ruppert says, and farmers worldwide have returned to monocropping because of the oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides. Soils have been turned into addicts that can’t function without the chemicals.

                Globalization will die with ever-increasing fuel costs, Ruppert writes, and that is a good thing. All regions of the world will have to resort to localized food production.

                “In a very real sense we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow or agriculture. Along the way there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased four-fold  while crop yields only increased  three-fold. Now, we have reached the point of MARGINAL RETURNS. The ‘Green Revolution’ is becoming bankrupt.’”

                The U.S. food system consumes 10 times  more energy than it produces in food energy. Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It takes 500 years to replace one inch of topsoil, Ruppert writes, and the soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.

                Agricultural consumes 85% of all U.S. fresh water resources. Overdraft has made the Colorado River a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies much of the water for the southern and central plains states and on into New York will become unproductive in a matter of decades.

POPULATION

                QUOTE: “Our prosperity is built on the principal of exhausting the world’s  resources as quickly as possible, without any thought to our neighbors, all the other life on the planet, or our children.”

                “Considering a growth rate of 1.1% per year, the U.S. population is projected to double by 2050. As the population expands, an estimated one acre of land will be lost for every person added to the U.S. population. The United States will witness growing numbers of starvation fatalities.”

                “Given that  the current U.S. population is over 292 million, that would mean a reduction of 92 million,” Ruppert writes. “To achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster the U.S. must reduce its population by at least one-third.”

                The authors of these studies  believe that the agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050. However, Ruppert says the crisis is likely to happen much sooner.

                For sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion to 2 billion—a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. Ruppert writes that the end of this decade (2010—not 2020) could see spiraling food prices without relief. “And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced by the human race.”

END QUOTE

                Ruppert says, “considering the utter necessity of population reduction, there are three choices:

• We as a society can consciously make the choice not to add more people. Th is would be the most welcome, but would fly in the face of our biological imperative to procreate. It is further  complicated by the ability of modern medicine to extend our longevity and by the refusal of the Religious Right to consider issues of population management.
• We can force population cuts through government regulations. This would be  distasteful. A world of forced sterilization and population quotas. How easily this could lead to a culling of population using eugenics.
• We can endure unspeakable suffering and death. Should we fail to acknowledge this coming crisis, we will be faced with a die-off from which civilization may never recover. Under the die-off scenario, conditions will deteriorate so badly that the surviving humans would be a negligible fraction of the current total. And those survivors would suffer from the trauma of living through the death of their civilization, neighbors and family.

QUOTE: “Does our present lifestyle mean so much to us that we would subject ourselves and our children to this fast-approaching tragedy simply for a few more years of conspicuous consumption?”

ALTERNATIVE FUELS

Nuclear

Ruppert writes that “there are so many new types of reactor technologies being proposed and ‘on the drawing boards.’ However, they are all theoretical and as such of little practical relevance.

Here are some of the underlying truths that Ruppert found:

• There is not enough uranium to build enough reactors to meet energy demand globally
• Reactors cost between $2.5 billion and $6 billion per plant and take five to seven years to build AFTER the two-to-four-year permitting and licensing process
• Nuclear power cannot and will not displace the use of oil which mostly powers transportation
• Enormous amounts of raw materials and especially hydrocarbon energy and electricity are required to enrich uranium. The building of nuclear generating stations produces enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
• Nuclear plants require enormous amounts of security infrastructure that can only be provided or overseen by a rational government.
• The plants can have devastating malfunctions and produce toxic waste that is the most lethal substance known to humans and it stays that way for hundreds of thousands of years. The amount of energy required to imprison and monitor the wastes for thousands of years is incalculable.

Coal and ‘Clean Coal’

“Clean coal is one of the biggest lies in human history. It would be a suicidal policy,” Ruppert writes.

• There is not a single clean-coal generating plant in the WORLD. Coal combustion emits many poisonous substances like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and lots of particulate mater in addition to CO2.
• Commercially viable carbon sequestration is still a theoretical and hugely expensive proposition. It IS being done in real life, but not on a cost-effective basis and it is NOT being done at any generating plant ANYWHERE. Even if you figured out the initial processes, you would still have the very expensive proposition of compressing and transporting the CO2 over long distances to either underwater caverns or to geological formations.
• Then there is the solid waste. Each year U.S. power plants kick out enough of the stuff to fill a train of coal cars stretching from Manhattan to L.A. and back three and a half times.
• Julian Darley, now an energy analyst in London is the founder of the Post Carbon Institute. He says the only possibl efuture for mankind will be one whre carbon-based fuels are a SIDEBAR to other, sustainable regimes  He noted that mining coal by itself produces huge amounts of toxic waste. “Clean coal” doesn’t address that end of the equation at all. “Carbon sequestration has NOT been implemented yet. We’ve run out of money to use it. We’ll come back and do it later, maybe,…when there’s more money.”

Ruppert says that, as president, you look at the economy, the deficits and you understand that there isn’t going to be any retrofitting later on. Coal production could peak in as litte as 15 years. America’s railway system has been neglected and this is the only realistic way to ship coal over long distances.

The railways would have to be rebuilt. None of this has been set in motion as of yet.

Solar

Now this is one of the two best—if limited—alternatives. Obama knows this because the federal government has been moving  with little fanfare, but on a massive scale, to convert major military and other key installations to solar power.

At this stage of the transition, it is, in most cases, a means to STRETCH out our fossil fuels rather than to replace them. It also is very expensive and is far below the levels needed to begin across-the-nation conversion away from other sources. Solar will reduce fossil-fuel use for energy consumption, but do very little to assist transportation or food production.

Wind

This is another clear choice, but someone has to pay to build, install and maintain the windmills, transformers and power lines. It also can’t be applied uniformly throughout the country. Infrastructure and investments in terms of time and raw materials wil not produce the 270 million electric-powered vehicles needed in the U.S. (or the estimated 800 million for the planet)

LOCALIZATION

Ruppert writes that the end of the Age of Oil also will be the end of globalization, long-distance commutes, and long-distance  transportation of goods and services—period. Oil is the only transportation fuel we have today. Obama, I’m sure, already has grasped that there is NOT going to be a last-minute reprieve from some new magical solution.

Ad hoc networking already has begun between many U.S. cities to share ideas on efficiency, conservation and alternatives. As the supply of oil shrinks, the ability to survive will hinge on the degree to which a local community has liberated itself from depending on anything from the outside. “Somehow American must start producing  food where it is eaten." However, Ruppert says that he knows of no community that has a community-wide (not just municipal buildings and such) energy-usage mandate. None have fully embraced the transition to import-substitution businesses and local living/security. He knows of none that has begun storing emergency liquid fuel supplies and emergency warm spaces.

                “We must learn to work with our neighbors to develop sustainable lifestyles based upon sharing. This is difficult given  that Americans were brought up on rugged individualism and competition and have been taught to measure success in terms of consumer goods possessed.”

EMERGENCY PLAN

Although Ruppert makes things sound bleak—and I think the U.S. and the world are in for very hard times, perhaps times so hard the survivors will envy the dead--as a mega-transition takes place in the next 10-50 years because of Peak Oil and the harsh results of global warming, he tries in the great American tradition of “can-do” to come up with a 25-point plan. However, I won’t address some of his points, because it is obvious Obama, Cheney, et al., have no intention of helping them come about.

But Ruppert does say that the U.S. should:

• Create a second Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 750 million barrels of refined products for state and local governments
• Enact the “Oil Depletion Protocol,” and use all available diplomatic and economic means to encourage global ratification. The protocol includes “convention of nations” agreeing to “avoid profiteering from shortage,” “ allow poor countries to afford their imports,” and “avoid destabilizing financial flows arising from excessive oil prices.” [Editor’s note: Does any of this sound possible at this time, January 2010? No, it doesn’t. One gets the feeling that Ruppert felt compelled to put a bright side at the end of his book.]
• Eliminate all federal subsidies for ethanol and biofuel production. [Editor’s note: This also seems impossible, especially given a Jan. 22 story in The Guardian/UK that one quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the U.S. now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies. The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels. "The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels," said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington think tank ithat conducted the analysis.

CONCLUSION

Nothing is going on in Obama’s first year, with respect to Peak Oil, Peak Coal, and Peak Uranium, except a slight, unpublicized focus on solar energy solutions for military installations. This, combined with his refusal to restore civil liberties, stop monitoring private communications, reinforce Cheney policies of garrisoning the world—including North America with NorthCOMM.

No “millions of green jobs” have appeared as the home foreclosures continue and the layoffs continue. You begin to realize that the Bush-Cheney “die-off” plan also applies to the U.S.

Since Saint Reagan, the middle and lower classes have been pushed out of big cities and away from decent jobs. They’ve been taxed bit by bit—just enough so they won’t protest (for example the incremental increase in New York City subway fares). Unions have been busted, real income has been flat for the middle class since the mid-1970s. The public schools (not private schools) and infrastructure, such as the collapsed bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul, have been left to drift into disarray.

Saint Reagan started this “reality disaster movie” a bit after George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees and bought several baseball championships with his elitist money.

However, both Reagan (Bush, Cheney, the GOP, the neo-conservatives, the elite) and Steinbrenner always forget that they NEED the middle and lower classes. For example, how could the Yankees win baseball championships if they had no teams to play. The poor teams, such as the Kansas City Royals or the Minnesota Twins, are needed just to fill out the Yankees schedule and boost their TV revenue. It works the same way in the Reagan-Cheney-elite world.

If a die-off begins, the workers will storm the bastille and the elite will go down also. Even in a totalitarian regime-- which the U.S. is heading toward with the most recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations more rights than human beings--with commoners such as myself and my family and friends serving as serfs, eventually there will be other  Thomas Jeffersons, John Adams, and Alexander Hamiltons willing to risk their lives so they won’t have to live on “company” land or buy from the “company” store. Get ready for an American French Revolution.

Jan. 9, 2010

Millions expected Barack Obama to be the world’s savior when he was inaugurated in January 2009. Millions expected him to stop the wars in Iraq and quickly finish the war in Afghanistan. Millions expected him to solve the Great Recession with a massive “green jobs” program. All this within his first 100 days in office, ala FDR during the Great Depression.

            Millions expected him to restore America’s Constitution by restoring habeus corpus and stopping the all-encompassing surveillance of private citizens’ electronic correspondence. Millions expected him to fight tooth and nail for single-payor health care, especially since so many non-whites either have no insurance or are dying from poor health care. He also was expected to make the U.S. a leader in stemming global warming in Copenhagen.

            But those things are not part of the plan.

            The “powers-that-be,” which include Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and, above all, the Cheney task force (the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group), and now the well-meaning, but corporate-funded and -staffed, Obama administration ALREADY have a plan for solving the crises, and ALREADY have begun implementing it.

            It’s called the “Great Die-Off.” The elites who have been stripping the carcass of the middle and lower classes since Saint Reagan in 1980 are now going to let the rest die by the millions in the U.S. and the hundeds of millions worldwide until this little planet again can support whoever remains. The planet and laws of physics do not compromise. They will force an economic paradigm change from constant, infinite growth to a no-growth, status-quo economy within the next 10-20 years.

In 2005, a Goldman Sachs report said, “Ultimately, we agree that the energy bull market will roll over once ‘demand destruction’ really begins. We simply do not believe we have arrived at that point.” Perhaps, they await the results of America’s oil grabs in Iraq and Afghanistan (which manifests mainly in its natural gas pipelines connecting Europe to Russia). The plan began with deregulation of banks in the 1990s, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the transferral of money from the common taxpayer to the big banks in 2009. It continues with more media mergers pending, the establishment of “NorthComm,” a U.S. military base in America designed to squelch terrorists AND U.S. protestors, and the tightening of American bases worldwide in preparation for resource wars.

Historically, all colonization was a form of resource war. In the 1600s and 1700s, Britain and France sought out new places to produce food and supplies for their mainlands. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson jumped at the chance for the Louisiana Purchase and then sent Lewis and Clark towards the Pacific to ensure U.S. control. The Lousiana Purchase was made possible by the French Revolution, you may recall, and the dictatorship that followed. Napoleon needed money for his own conquests.

            Common people are in denial. But when their anger bursts forth, things could look like the French Revolution in which many elites lost their lives, France became a dictatorship, and a world war began. Or it could look like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” in which a man and his son wander south down the eastern U.S. seaboard scraping for food and hiding from cannibals.

            I’ve asked, in “Don’s Review,” “Where have all the green jobs gone?” “The solar panels?” “The conversion of GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants for production of electric cars or hydrogen-run cars? The emission restrictions? The inspiring speeches to help people break through their denial and confront the crisis? Why did Obama bring so many Goldman Sachs and Citigroup mates to his staff? With a smart guy like Obama, you know that there’s a plan and that he either has signed on to it as the most reasonable plan or someone is holding a gun to his head.

I think he has signed on to “demand destruction.” You could see it in his face as he spoke at Copenhagen about some wars being “necessary,” such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. You could see it in his face as he grimaced as he dodged talking about the U.S.’s lack of leadership in climate change treaties. It seemed to hurt him, but he was doing something he had to do—I think.

Michael C. Ruppert in “Confronting the Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World” (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2009) lays bare the answer I had suspected. I believe Ruppert because his book describes one of very few logical reasons for Obama’s lack of action. Ruppert’s book was made into a documentary called “CoLLapse,” which has played in movie theaters around the U.S. since late fall.

Jimmy Carter said it well 30 years ago as he—in a cardigan sweater—told us that we live in the age of oil and natural gas. What we don’t realize, with our limited perspectives, is that “twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.”
“The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution,” said the president from 1977-1981—and supposedly one of the worst in U.S. history.
“The second change took place in this century, with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel.”

            Now, the age of oil and natural gas is ending. Any deniers are prolonging the agony. All alternate energy sources will not maintain the lifestyle that oil and natural gas have given us.

            Ruppert tells us this, without the Carter gentleness, that calamity, including the deaths of millions in the U.S. and hundreds of millions around the world, is coming because of our “greed is good” mentality and the ongoing hype of the sales pitch called “the American Dream” since Saint Reagan took over for Carter in 1981. There is no magic cure when carbon-based fuel (mostly oil and natural gas) run out and only a handful of common people understand that. No elite (“powers that be,” as he calls them) or corporate pigs are going to let us know for fear of panic hoarding of oil. Within 10-20 years we face a forced localization of resources away from globalization towards community markets for food, energy, housing, water—everything. With the amount of denial in the air, Ruppert fears that the transition, which should have begun 30 years ago, could reach the horror of the French Revolution.  Near the end of his book he says that necessary steps have been taken so slowly that he fears the survivors will not be able to function because of the lost infrastructure and extreme grief.

            Humans have evolved into the dominant species on the planet. Unfortunately, they have embarked on a suicidal lifestyle based on a misguided paradigm that the economy must always grow. That economic paradigm, as I understand it, is twofold: much profit in today’s capitalist U.S. is simply entries in rich people’s ledgers; it does not produce anything physically useful for people; and little or none of that profit is invested in items needed to sustain society, such as infrastructure or soil replenishment. The new paradigm has to be more socialist, in that profits go towards maintaining a society that is livable for whomever remains after the “die-off.” Since Nixon totally disconnected U.S. currency from the gold or silver markets, the collapse became possible. Money had been tied to something material. Now, it is just a notation somewhere. The paradigm has become an economic pyramid scheme based on fiat (just printing money when needed) currency, fractional reserve banking (requiring banks to keep one-ninth of their outstanding loans in cold cash within their vaults), and debt-based expansion, which requires infinite growth. It has driven us, finally, to the edge of a cliff. Money can grow infinitely. Energy, i.e., the slaves needed to give money value, cannot.

Ruppert emphasizes that you can’t separate money from energy. Without energy there is no money; without money there is no energy. He cites physics’ laws of thermodynamics to say that “you can’t create energy,” “at least some energy always is lost with usage,” and “the planet has limited resources.”

The age of oil and natural gas enabled the planet’s dominant species to take charge and increase in numbers. This stands out in a stark graph at the book’s beginning that shows human population growing by a factor of six since 1850. The line on the graph travels horizontally from the time of Jesus to 1600 when it edges up a bit, then, with the Industrial Revolution in 1850, the line essentially becomes vertical, with no end in sight.

            In simple prose, touched with a bit of anger and desperation, Ruppert, a former LAPD narcotics investigator turned investigative journalist who also authored the award-winning 2004 book “Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil,” tells us that the U.S. already has a plan, primarily formulated by corporations and Cheney’s task force, which was funded by public money--yet Cheney fought successfully all the way to the Supreme Court to keep its minutes and findings secret from the world.

            Why keep them a secret?

Because NO economic recovery (i.e., growth)  is possible without using more energy. And there is NO combination of alternative energies anywhere—now or in the future—that will sustain the population, lifestyle, and infrastructure built by oil and fossil fuels.

            As a Dutch economist stated in 2003, “It may not be profitable to slow decline.”  “Simply put,” Ruppert writes, this means that “more money can be made—more quickly—by accelerating the decline, bankrupting the country, starving people, and selling off assets than by investing it in rebuilding under a new economic paradigm or by trying to soften the crash. The destruction of economies will also destroy demand for energy. ‘Demand destruction’ has lowered prices which have made it unprofitable to invest in alternative energies. This is the path chosen and advocated by investment houses like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and influential think tanks.”

            More money can be made “by stripping the carcass than they could by selling the companies intact and saving its jobs,” Ruppert writes.         

            “So who’s going to make all those electric cars everyone’s talking about?” Ruppert asks.

            In my opinion, perhaps, the roughest part of the whole coming collapse, is that it is understandable to a great degree: humans are not saints. The oil and fossil fuel economy only started roughly in 1850. People like Henry Ford and Howard Hughes were lauded for innovations in transportation that enabled people to travel across to the West Coast and develop our great nation from Hawaii to Maine. No one foresaw any problems with this new energy source until one man-- in 1949. Oil geologist and physicist M. King Hubbert, discovered and told us of this mathematical certainty after using his own research  and calculations that oil discovered in the U.S. had peaked in the 1930s. Based on three decades of data, he said the U.S. domestic oil production would peak in 1970. He was laughed at.

But he was absolutely right. Since 1970, U.S. oil production has been in an irreversible decline. Today the U.S. imports about 70 percent of the oil it needs to function on a daily basis. Later, I will discuss peak oil worldwide.

If no one would listen to Carter in 1977 and 1979, who would listen to Hubbert in 1949? It was a problem for the future. The U.S. was in a “can-do” mode, after saving the world twice in wars since 1914.

            Ruppert is not using classified information in his book. It all is basic, high school math and physics with data available on the Internet. You can’t argue with his logic. He says he is trying to lessen the suffering for as many people as possible. But there already is suffering. It seems likely—with no green jobs in the works and the near impossibility of even creating jobs to replace those lost SINCE summer 2008 and ones needed because of population growth since that time—that one day we will wake up and the subways won’t run, the water faucet won’t produce, the markets’ shelves will be bare. Ruppert, as he wrote the book in early 2009, says he has found few local communities taking steps.

            Some of Ruppert’s case follows. I plan to discuss his book further in the near future.

            Ruppert has only to look at how four-dollar gasoline recently caused a plunge in driven miles. That price made it impossible for thousands of homeowners to make their mortgage payments. The markets and economic planners had found the price-point at which demand could be destroyed. The author says we can expect a few short spikes and dips before demand will be destroyed forever—with little or nothing to replace a person’s dependence on his or her car.

            Contrary to popular fantasies, there is not a lot of oil left to be found and much of what remains is of a lesser quality, which means it is more expensive to refine.

            There are roughly 800 million internal-combustion-powered vehicles on the planet; there are more than 250 million passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone. Not only do they run on oil and gas, they are MADE from them. According to “National Geographic,” there are seven gallons of oil in every tire. All the plastics and vinyl you see in a car are made from oil. “Even if it became possible to replace all 800 million vehicles with a new power source, the world would have to use up much of the remaining oil to MAKE these new vehicles, powered by technology that is NOT there, on assembly lines that do NOT exist and would have to be constructed using coal, oil and natural gas.” One advantage that FDR did have over Obama: he had enormous resources to draw upon to switch Detroit’s car plants into war-machine plants.

            Hydrogen-powered vehicles are a myth, Ruppert says, George W., notwithstanding. It takes 1,113 gallons of gaseous hydrogen to equal the energy of one gallon of gasoline. Hydrogen is made from natural gas, and natural gas is in short supply. Even the most ardent promoters of hydrogen technology agree that commercially viable hydrogen cars are not possible for at least three decades, and that is only based on the wish that certain technological breakthroughs take place.

            Data from 2008 show that of the 50 largest oil-producing countries in the world, 42 have passed their peak and are declining. Mexico and Kuwait are having oil-field collapses—where production rates don’t softly decline, they plummet. It is the collapse of Mexico’s oil market that has made that nation a failed state, not its drug problems. World oil production is declining at about 4-6 percent  per year, with the rate increasing. Some say the decline’s rate already is 9 percent per year.

            “Don’s Review” in the near future will discuss Norway, which has for more than a decade been on a crash program preparing for a post-petroleum world.

            The “Drill, Baby, Drill!!” cries we heard during the Bush years and the grotesque Palin campaign, even if they do produce more oil, will be like “refilling Niagara Falls with a garden hose.” And who is going to pay for those very expensive drills? That is one reason Bush was pushing to open up formerly “forbidden” zones to drilling. But it would only soften the crash a bit. And where would America find that kind of money now?

            One of the world’s leading energy investment bankers, Matthew Simmons, has said in many lectures that it would take the discovery of THREE Saudi Arabias just to offset the decline. They aren’t there. And it would take five to seven years to develop them.

            Before the financial meltdown of 2008 the International Energy Agency and OPEC had estimated a 30 percent global INCREASE in demand for oil over the next two decades. However, since September 2008, the fawning corporate media has been flooded with stories about how the growth in demand has REVERSED.

            The media also have changed since FDR’s time, although he could and did manipulate them as best one man can. Recent announcements, based on ONE test well in a new field off of Brazil said that the field may contain 33 billion barrels of oil. Contrast this with the capacity of Saudi Arabia’s biggest field, Ghawar, which, after 60 years of use, remains a mystery. The hype surrounding that one test drill indicates the pressure people worldwide feel as they face up to reality a bit at a time.

            Before the Great Recession, Arctic oil was a hot topic. Ruppert writes: “It will take a minimum of 10 years to bring online, and, because it’s all underwater, it will never produce as Ghawar has (as much as five-plus million barrels a day). The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska is guesstimated to hold five to 12 billion barrels, but they are in widely scattered deposits, with the biggest likely to be five percent of Ghawar. “There are no roads there. There are no wells there. There is no pipeline in place. The infrastructure is enormously expensive. How many $125 million wells will we be able to pay for? How many will be dry holes? Those deposits will be needed to save lives and help maintain basic services.”

            Natural gas deposits in the U.S. remain viable. But the nation imports more than half. The largest known reserves in the world are in Russia and Turkmenistan. All the pipelines carrying Russian gas to the U.K. flow through the heart of  Europe (and many via Afghanistan). The cost of heat has become  so expensive that each year as many as 50,000 British citizens, mostly elderly, freeze to death because they have to choose between food and warmth. In recent years Russia has twice shut off gas flows through the Ukraine because it had to keep its own citizens from freezing.

            Thus, the plan to garrison the world with U.S. bases, most recently in Iraq, to assure a certain amount of oil and gas reaches the U.S.

            “The utmost priority for all nations is to know, with the highest possible degree of certainty, how much oil is left, where it is, and what kind it is,” Ruppert writes. “Much of that work has ALREADY been done, but it has been kept a secret from America and the world. That information is contained in the [Cheney task force’s] report.” But what Ruppert has gleaned from his research is that the Saudis have been pumping their oil virtually flat-out for six decades. “However, if one looks at their current declared reserve numbers, one finds that they are claiming to have almost the same amount of oil as 60 years ago. Imagine that!!”

            Simmons says many experts believe Saudi Arabia may well have entered decline and be on the brink of collapse in some fields—including Ghawar. The implications of this are dire as the world hopes for an economic recovery from the meltdown of 2008-2009.

            First, it is a given that if Saudi Arabia has entered decline, planet Earth has entered decline. Oil geologists have been scouring the planet since 1920. There is NO chance of finding another Ghawar, let alone the three or four needed to offset the decline in other countries. “It would already have been found. The Saudis know this, the oil companies know this, and Wall Street knows this,” Ruppert says. “Thus, if it became known that Saudi Arabia has entered decline, it would rock the kingdom’s standing and signal to the whole world that humankind is in deep trouble.”

            In April 2008, Nobu Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency said, “…$22 trillion in investment in energy-supply infrastructure will be needed by 2030.” “Where is that money to come from?” Ruppert asks.”Do we just keep printing money?” “It is needed to keep aging oil and gas infrastructure operational and it is needed to construct new offshore oil rigs.”

            “The rigs themselves take years to build before drilling can begin. The ones already built, in large part, have already been leased by Saudi Arabia. “That’s right,” Ruppert says. “Why, if Saudi Arabia insists that their onshore reserves are adequate to meet demand growth for 20 years, are they frantically exploring offshore for oil that would cost three to 10 times as much to produce?”

            The term “clean coal” is a marketing gimmick,” Ruppert says, “because the technology does not remove the poisons from either the mining or the combustion--only the exhaust gases. And it has never been implemented commercially.” Also, coal is not found everywhere. It must be transported to those plants by rail on a railway system that has been neglected for decades.

            In 2005, Bush repealed the Public Utility Holding Companies Act, which was an FDR measure that focused solely on public need. The repeal made it possible for private citizens, such as Warren Buffet, to gobble up once pulbicly owned and/or regulated power companies. It also relieved the new owners of the mandate to keep excess capacity to prepare for weather-related emergencies. In the age of climate change, “that is just plain stupid,” Ruppert says. Such utilities’ owners now may selectively decide which customers get electricity and which don’t. Profit is the sole criterion for success. They also now can trade their energy reserves not caring “a whit about who freezes to death or whose small business is shut down.”

            Simmons says, “We can see the inevitable issues that would follow a major blackout: no water, no sewage; no gasoline.” On that topic, in July 2008, Reuters reported that a $1.6 trillion bill is coming due as governments face the daunting task of repairing roads, bridges and the aging infrastrucure as a whole.” Later, again from Reuters, “Cash-strapped U.S. state and city governments are likely to sell or lease more highways, bridges and airports to investors desperate for stable returns after being frazzled by the credit crisis….Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, The Carlyle Group, Credit Suisse, and General Electric have ALREADY dedicated more than $25 billion to these purchases or leases of public propety.”

            Ruppert says, “If I were a corporation, I would be tickled to death to have taxpayer money build roads which I can buy for pennies on the dollar and then charge people fees to use.”

            I mentioned that “Don’s Review” already had asked “Where have all the green jobs gone?” Well, as an example of traditional governmental upside-down thinking, Obama has created some jobs, but in building new road expansions as if traffic were going to continue to increase as it has for the past 70 years. The U.S. currently is building roads almost as fast as it did in the 1950s. But a new price spike to $4 for gas has been shown to squash driving, since many drivers are unemployed or forced to use the money for food.

            “Those hoping that an economic recovery is possible must remember that NO economic recovery is possible EVEN CLOSE to where we were in early 2008 without driving oil consumption back up to where it was then. Contrast that with a [consensus] 9 percent decline rate. The numbers just don’t balance. They never have, and this is what M. King Hubbert so clearly understood in the late 1940s,” Ruppert says.

            “The key to understanding infrastructure lies at the heart of a complex civilization. Civilization can easly break down. Consider the implications if a gasoline tanker truck crashes and burns on a defective bridge. Consider the implications if a main sewer line collapses in New York City and takes three subway lines out of service. Consider the implications if the electricity, generated by oil or natural gas, stops providing the power to pump water out of those subways 24/7.”

            The Alternative Energy Structure…

…does NOT exist.

            Ignoring the maintenance costs just to keep surviving with the old system, the proponents of alterrnative energy sources like solar, tidal, and wind power also almost NEVER mention the infrastructure to make them work. Plans to greatly expand the use of wind power have yet to fully explain how thousands of miles of transmission wires and transformers are going to be built and who is going to pay for them. [This may explain why Obama has yet to get on the bully pulpit fully backing up such alternatives.] Ruppert says the world also has huge commodity shortages and copper is one of the most precious.

            He adds that the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day and the grid has no ability to STORE electricity generated at midnight that is needed at 3 p.m.

            “The battery technology to store electricity on a large scale doesn’t exist. Batteries are very expensive and don’t last that long. Even the batteries in vaunted hybrid cars need to be replaced after 70,000 to 80,000 miles.”

            “Hydrogen remains the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public,” Ruppert writets. “Hydrogen bleeds through many metals and has a tendency to turn them brittle. It cannot be pumped through hundreds of thousands of miles of existing natural gas pipelines. The pipes can’t handle hydrogen. So California’s ‘Hydrogen Highway,’ touted by Governor Schwarzenegger, is a true pipe dream.”

            Solar poses similar problems, Ruppert writes. It takes large quantities of energy and resources to make solar cells. It does have one overrwhelming advantage over other alternative energies: It can be installed where it is used, so there is no need for major infrastructure investments and it is scalable. Here is ONE weakness with Ruppert’s book: He says, “What do we do for electricity at night or on a cloudy day? The old system must be kept working.” This makes no common sense to me. I believe we have enough battery technology to store energy for night-time use and cloudy-day use.

            Please watch in “Don’s Review” for more on Ruppert’s book and on Norway’s crash program for a post-oil world.

Jan. 9, 2010

Before joining Senator John Glenn's Washington staff in 1985, Caroline Arnold  csarnold@neo.rr.com was a teacher, founded and ran a successful small business, and served three terms on the Kent (OH) Board of Education.  In retirement she keeps a garden, is principal cellist of the Stow Symphony, and serves on the Kent Sustainability Commission and on the boards of Kent Social Services and Family & Community Services in Portage County.

In an episode of the TV series "The Next Jihad" a tall, spare terrorist in turban and flowing robes approaches the American journalist who is bound crouched on the sand before him, and spits out these words: "Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!"

What? You haven't seen it? That may be because I just made it up - except for the words spoken by the terrorist. Those are from Bin Laden's "Letter to America" of November 2002.

Normally I watch very little TV - a few hours a month, at most. But over Christmas I had the opportunity to spend several evenings watching news shows, sit-coms, movies and commercials.. It struck me that the real world we live in is now reflecting TV programming far more than TV programs depict reality.

The attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day was quickly slotted into existing scripts and scenarios and adjusted skillfully accommodate new information.

There was a news "story" suggesting that Iran is trying to buy enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. Denials are in progress; and a document that "proves" the purchase has been denounced as an Israeli forgery. AP treats the story as true; AFP is doubtful. Stay tuned, this will be a big one, if they can sell it.

I noted that the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario has been replaced. The new script has Al Qaeda terrorists plotting evil in a village in a small Muslim nation - say Yemen. Should the US demand that the Yemeni government bomb the village and blow up the Bad Guys? Or do we have our own CIA take care of it? (I understand that the CIA has its own drones and missiles, and doesn't have to work through the generals at the Pentagon.) Does the US, does any nation or person, have the moral authority to order the assassination of persons suspected or accused of "evil"?

Steve Fournier, in his Current Invective web-site12/29/09 (www.currentinvective.com ) addresses that question: "If Barack Obama had no constitutional authority to order or request an attack on residents of Yemen, might he have had some moral authority to do so? He did win the Nobel peace prize, after all .... That prize says that all of the killing, all of the destruction, all of the displacement, all of the desecration in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Yugoslavia and, yes, Vietnam, have been in the interest of peace and not motivated by hubris or arrogance or, God forbid, profit. Universally acknowledged as the world's only superpower, America has and will always have the moral authority to kill people, even children, in the interest of peace. Because we can, acting through our president, wield this awesome power, we must."

That sounds a lot like the premise of the TV series "24" in which some people must die or suffer in the cause of the greater good. The series supported the Bush administration's use of torture, promoting the idea that violence and torture were necessary in dealing with terrorists.

While those of us who are trying to make sense of a world by discussing, debating, doubting, examining our consciences and calculating the consequences of various courses of action in the real world, those with simpler Operating Systems based on TV scripts and plots that divide the real world into Us /Them, Good Guys/ Bad Guys pass us on the Right. Those with money and power devise made-for TV thrillers both factual and fictional that keep us glued to our TV sets, eating ourselves to obesity, and concluding that truth and justice in the real world are best served by following the plots dreamed up by scriptwriters, generals, or presidents.

Fournier continues: "An American official plots with a Yemeni official to launch missiles on civilians. ... In the interests of peace, they kill some bad guys, along with many other people. In reply, and to deter further attacks, a fanatic plots with a bombmaker to kill passengers on an airliner in Detroit. Is there a legal distinction between these two plots?"

I tend to view both as made-for-TV events, and, with Fournier, I see no legal distinction, and believe both bombers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. "But," Fournier admits, "there is no case against the US president ... because he is acting on the moral authority of the American people and not on his own account, and this places him above the law. As for the Detroit bomber, why put him on trial at all? We would just be giving him a soapbox from which to spout accusations against us, moral exemplars in a dangerous world. Why not just string him up?"

It seems that Al Qaeda is succeeding at tempting the US to engage in violence that fuels resistance, resentment, revenge and Jihad all over the Islamic world.

"The Next Jihad" is already in the can. Watch for it.

© 2010 Kent Ravenna Record-Courier

Dec. 11, 2009

President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan decision to send another 30,000 U.S. troops into that backward country in search of only 100 suspected al-Qaeda terrorists dredges up the same nasty questions that have clouded presidential politics since the Cold War began and reached full “bloom” with the Bush-Cheney regime. For Obama they may include: Is he too young and naïve? Are military, corporate and congressional elites duping him, having found an apparent weakness (a need to please others in power positions)? Does Obama have the guts needed to be a real leader, a prophet, a visionary? So far, his time in office seems like just another tightening of the stranglehold the U.S. military-industrial complex has had on America since Hiroshima.

                The best presidents, I believe, of the 20^th century were FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK. In fact, with JFK’s death came the end of chances for peace on this tiny planet in unison among all of its tribes (nations).

                According to a monk and a noted author, JFK’s “peace speech” at American University’s graduation ceremony in Washington in the spring of 1963 was a tipping point for the military-industrial complex, of which Eisenhower warned us in his departing address of January 1961. The peace speech set in motion finalization of plans for a coup d’etat that JFK and RFK foresaw as a possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Yet, they gutted it out, even though JFK knew it could cost him a second term. It ended up costing much more.

Perhaps the Kennedy brothers, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., killed exactly one year after his anti-Vietnam speech, were naïve. In retrospect, given the reality of the Bush-Cheney—and now—Obama wars, which are building an American Empire meant to last decades in Iraq, Afghanistan and nuke-possessor Pakistan, they were naive.

                Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a 20th century American Catholic writer. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist and student of comparative religion. In letters to associates in January 1963, he identified the forces in the U.S. that threatened a nuclear holocaust:

“In actual fact it would seem that [during World War II] this country became a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of this country are largely reduced to passivity, confusion, thoughtlessness and ignorance so that they blindly follow any line unraveled for them by the mass media.” Merton wrote that he was protesting not just the horror of war but “against a suicidal moral evil and a total lack of ethics and rationality with which interntional policies tend to be conducted….President Kennedy is a shrewd leader. He has the highest motives, but he is, without a doubt, in a position sometimes so impossible as to be absurd.”

No doubt, Obama’s surge in Afghanistan was wrought out of “absurd,” lose-lose factors.

                “What is needed is what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals, but for man as a whole. Kennedy [is breaking through into that]. But such people are before long marked out for assassination,” Merton wrote.

                After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in late 1961, Kennedy reacted with a vengeance to what had been revealed as a plot by the CIA to force his hand into attacking Cuba. He began to take steps to deal with the CIA by taking military-type operations out of their hands. Kennedy’s National Security Action Memoranda 55 told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it was they (not the CIA) who were his principal military advisers in peacetime as well as wartime. He then asked the three principal CIA planners for the Bay of Pigs to resign: Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell.

                James W. Douglass in “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y., 2008) recounts that Dulles’ feelings toward Kennedy were revealed years later, in interviews with “Harper’s” Willie Morris. In one discussion, Dulles stunned Morris with an abrupt comment. “That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.” Douglass is an author, activist, and Christian theologian born in the late 1930s. He and his wife, Shelley Douglass, founded the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Wash., and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house in Birmingham, Ala. In 1997 the Douglasses received the Pacem in Terris Award.

                In 1962, Merton wrote, “Our sudden rush into technological mastery has made us servants of our own weapons. Our weapons dictate what we do. They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our politicians, they sell our mass media. We live by them. But if they continue to rule us, we also will die by them.” Merton was a cloistered monk who watched no TV and saw only an occasional newspaper, but he saw that “[Our weapons] have now made it plain that they are the friends of the ‘preemptive strike.’ They are most advantageous to those who use them first. So, nobody wants to be too late in using them second. [Consequently, people] begin to see things that aren’t there.”

                How eery those statements are in light of George W.’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, doctrine of preemptive warfare, and belligerence towards Iran. Obama has seemed to continue those policies. It seems likely that he is feeling as much or more pressure than Kennedy felt in 1962 and 1963, especially with the 2008 financial meltdown and Great Recession. Let us hope he is not caving in completely, as indicated by his acquiescence to the military’s request for a “surge” in Afghanistan. This is especially true because of potential weapons science is developing, as I write this, in the areas of stem-cell research and neuroscience. Those weapons would be even more devasting than the use of a couple of nuclear missiles.

                During the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy taped all meetings with his advisers. Pressure for a preemptive strike on Cuba was tremendous. Kennedy would leave the Situation Room at times, but leave the tape machine recording all conversations. It became apparent when the tapes were declassified that he was isolated, except for RFK. Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay challenged the president when JFK was inside the room: “This blockade is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich [a 1938 conference at which Britain, to avoid war, forced the Czech people to cede territory to Hitler]. I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention RIGHT NOW.”

                Douglass writes that the general had taken their generation’s ultimate metaphor for cowardice and flung it in the President’s face.

                “President Kennedy,” historian Sheldon Stern says, “in a remarkable display of sang froid refused to take the bait; he said absolutely nothing.”

                Ending the awkward silence, the chiefs of the Navy, Army and Marine Corps all argued for prompt bombing and invading of Cuba. LeMay again broke in and almost taunted Kennedy: “I think the blockade would be considered a pretty weak response by a lot of our friends and neutrals. You’re in a pretty bad fix.”

                Kennedy: “What’d you say?”

                LeMay: “You’re in a pretty bad fix.”

                Kennedy: [laughing] “You’re in with me, personally.”

                Obama, noted for his sang froid in times of stress, hopefully has not lost that quality. Candidate Obama had mentioned being open to conversations with Iran’s leaders. That was one thing that Kennedy and Krushchev accomplished prior to the Missile Crisis. And that rapport resolve it peacefully: They had met in Vienna and corresponded personally by written letters before the crisis arose. “They knew each other as a human being that each could respect,” Douglass writes. Let’s hope that Obama goes through with his pledge to initiate talks with the U.S.’s long enemies list.

                The next tipping point that led to the killing of JFK as authorized by unknown elites and carried out by a willing combination of CIA, FBI and Mafia forces, according to Douglass’ theory, was Kennedy’s self-named “peace speech” at commencement at American University.

                Kennedy broke a renewed deadlock between himself and Krushchev by transforming the context of the conflict, Douglass writes. “By the empathy he expressed toward the Russian perspective, Kennedy created a bridge to Krushchev.” But, at the same time, JFK’s speech opened a still wider chasm between himself and his own military and intelligence advisers. To the Pentagon and CIA, Kennedy’s words of peace at American University were treason.

                As Merton mentioned above, their resistance to Kennedy’s peace stand can be understood from the standpoint of the independent power base they had developed shortly after World War II. President Harry Truman had shook hands and patted backs and exulted after the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Truman continued to use the bomb as a threat to try to force Soviet concessions.

                However, on a wider front, Truman is known for the Truman Doctrine of “containment” of the USSR. But the Pentagon carried it out by encircling the USSR with U.S. bases and patrolling forces. “To match the efficiency of a totalitarian enemy, U.S. military leaders urged legislation that would mobilize the nation to a state of CONSTANT readiness for war.” This, of course, is reminiscent of Bush’s call for a never-ending Global War on Terror after 9/11.

                Under Truman and then Eisenhower, the CIA soon became known as a paramilitary organization and the national security doctrine of “plausible deniability’ began, combining lying with hypocrisy. It grew, despite Kennedy’s efforts, to the monster we saw flourish with Bush-Cheney and now see surviving quite well under Obama.

                Richard Helms, fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, testified before Congress and the Church Committee around 1970 that he and other CIA members thought they knew the president’s mind better than he did.

                But Kennedy acted with a mind of his own and was trying to reverse 18 years of U.S.-Soviet polarization.

                Kennedy’s rejection of a Pax Americana in his “peace speech” was a direct act of resistance to the military-industrial complex. What Ike revealed as the greatest threat to democracy, JFK in the middle of his presidency chose to resist. However, that military-industrial complex “was totally dependent on a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” Douglass writes. That Pax Americana, policed by the Pentagon was considered the system’s indispensable, hugely profitable means of containing and defeating the hated Communism dictatorships. It STILL is in the news as Americans, especially neo-cons and the far right, believe they know what’s best for the world and are the shining “city on the hill,” according to Saint Reagan—.

                The nonviolent theme of the American University Address is that self-examination is the beginning of peace. In this, JFK does seem naïve to human beings’ baser instincts--their lusts for blood, power and sex.

                What follows are pertinent sections of Kennedy’s speech:

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity.

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

To secure these ends, America's weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.

And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough — more than enough — of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.”

Kennedy’s speech was received less favorably in his own country. In contrast to the Soviet media, which were electrified by the speech, the U.S. media ignored or downplayed it. For the first time in Americans had LESS opportunity to read and hear their president’s words than did the Russian people.

                Another tipping point was occurring. While nuclear disarmament had suddenly become feasible, JFK’s position in his own government had become precarious. Kennedy was turning faster than was safe for a Cold War leader. Even though, unbelievably, Nikita Krushchev had become Kennedy’s competitor in actions for peace, JFK’s rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government.

                JFK’s June 10, 1963 call for an end to the Cold War, a bit more than five months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address, calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before he was killed.

                Each of these transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a prophet traditionally receives, writes Douglass.

                Different from Obama’s seeming constant desire for conciliation with Congress to get ANY kind of version of his programs passed, when Kennedy heard that Krushchev already had made preparations to welcome U.S. test-ban negotiators to Moscow--although he said getting Senate ratification would be “miraculous”--he began engineering the Senate’s vote; he was committed at all costs to seeing it accomplished, says Douglass.

                During the negotiations, Kennedy himself spent hours in the cramped White House Situation Room, editing the U.S. position as if he were at the Moscow table. Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin said “[Averell Harriman] would just get on the phone with Kennedy and things would be decided. It was amazing.” Harriman soon initialed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing tests except underground.

                Again, unlike Obama has shown so far regarding key programs such as health care and climate chaange, the next night Kennedy made a TV appeal against the advice of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. JFK had decided to take the issue of ratification IMMEDIATELY to the people. “We’ve got to hit the country while the country is hot,” he told Rusk. “That’s the only thing that makes any impression to those god-damned Senators….They’ll move as the country moves.”

                Kennedy also initiated whirlwind public education on the treaty, coordinated by Norman Cousins. The so-called Citizens Committee mounted a national campaign for Senate ratification. By the end of August, the tide had gone from 15 to one against the test ban to three to two against.

                All the while, writes Douglass, they were “bucking the military industrial complex—and the media. [This sounds very similar to the run up to the Iraq War. But George W. did not have to “buck” the complex, instead he catered to it. W. also had the Fawning Corporate Media to work with, a much easier task. Here, Kennedy had fewer corporate-owned fawns doing the bidding of their owners. One anti-peace corporate hack was the “U.S. News and World Report,” which quickly came out with the headline, “Is U.S. Giving Up in the Arms Race?”

                In an even more telling headline, revealing in its transparent concern for money over peace and human lives, “U.S. News and World Report” on Aug. 12 headlined, “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Business?” That article began: “Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut? There is alull in the Cold War. Before the Senate is a treaty for a test ban. A nonagression agreement is being proposed by Russia’s Krushchev. Talk of peace is catching on.” The magazine went on to reassure its readers, however, that defense spending would be sustained by such Cold War factors as Cuba remaining a Russian base, “the guerrilla war in South Vietnam, and the Red Chinese [who] are capable of starting a big war in Asia at any time.”

                However, Kennedy already had extended his peacemaking to Cuba and Vietnam. It had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban talks, the military wasn’t even involved. JFK had made a quick end run around them to negotiate the treaty. This is something Obama certainly is NOT known for during his first year—swiftness and acting like a leader in an ongoing, day-by-day battle. By moving so fast in the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the MOST IMPORTANT military question of the time, Douglass writes.

                JFK and RFK were not going to let the military force their hand as it nearly had during the Cuban missile crisis. One wonders if Obama had moved faster regarding single-payor health insurance, the House’s and Senate’s bloated, ineffectual packages would not still be twisting in the wind, potentially leaving millions of uninsured in the country, thousands of whom will die in the next 12 months.

                After the “peace speech,” the intricate conspiracy of then-termed “hardline” corporate and military elite was set in motion, says Douglass. JFK and Krushchev already were committed to a nuclear test ban treaty and a program of talks for total nuclear disarmament of the USSR and the U.S. by the end of the 1960s. The conspiracy also saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as capable of continuing JFK’s plans.

                JFK and RFK were “clever lads,” according to Claire Booth Luce and learned quickly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. That crisis had seared them. During the Missile Crisis, RFK, in his climactic meeting with Dobrynin had used that quickly gained knowledge of the U.S. military’s toughness to force Krushchev’s hand: “The President is in a grave situation and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. We ask you to pass the President’s message to Chairman Krushchev: Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. The President is appealing directly to Chairman Krushchev for his help. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”

                Douglass’ book, which may get little attention because of the hundreds of other JFK conspiracy books, has a ring of truth to it, if only because both Douglass and Merton, writing about the complex, are and were religious men.

                Since that time, Eisenhower’s warning—which went unheeded but stands as one of history’s greatest prophecies—came true. The U.S. has been run since World War II by that hidden, loose, syndicate of corporate and military heads and corporate “masters of the universe” that we now call either the neo-cons or simply our undeclared, denied corporate state-- a country run by the corporations for the corporations, with common people edging decade by decade closer to serfdom under the rule of megaconglomerates and nameless, bloodless, heartless, bureaucrats focusing only on profits.

                Ike’s prophecy and warning on Jan. 17, 1961 follows in part:

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, and thus indicated the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry. But, it is said, that the president chose to strike the word congressional in order to placate members of the legislative branch of the federal government.

                Both JFK and MLK likely foresaw their demise and said so boldly in statements.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK told Arthur Schlesinger that “The military are mad. They wanted to do this.” The President also talked to his brother, RFK. When Robert got ready to leave, John said, in reference to the death of Abraham Lincoln, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” His brother replied, If you go, I want to go with you.”

They would both go soon, writes Douglass.

In a speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated,  Dr. King said, “…And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.”

Obama, no coward he and no fool he—especially with his being the first black president and receiving a security force earlier than other candidates in the 2008 race and with the recent lapse in security that allowed Michaele and Tareq Salahi, reality TV hopefuls, to crash a White House party—may have been forced with the “absurd” choice of agreeing to feed the military-industrial complex now and save his life on the chance that he is more likely to attain a second term and additional chances to push progressive changes through the great, slowly turning, corporate ship of state.

                JFK never got that chance. On Feb. 4, 2001, Sergei Krushchev, by then a senior fellow in international studies at Brown University, said of JFK and Krushchev, “I am convinced that if history had allowed them another six years, they would have brought the Cold War to a close before the end of the 1960s. I say this with good reason, because In 1963 my father made an official announcement to a session of the USSR Defense Council that he intended to reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 million to half a million and stop production on tanks. He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles made an attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money freed up would be put to better use in agriculture and housing construction. But fate decreed otherwise. In 1963, Kennedy was killed and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power.”

                In more foreshadowings of comments madetoday by congressional hawks and lobbyists’ doormats, after Kennedy finally got the support of the Joint Chiefs for the test ban, it was denounced by LeMay and Power, and Admiral Lewis Strauss said, “I’m not sure the reduction of tensions is NECESSARILY A GOOD THING.”

                By September, Kennedy’s hard, quick work showed a turnaround: 80 percent of people in polls favored the treaty. It was passed 80-19. Before his hard campaign, Kennedy told his staff he was “determined to win if it cost him the 1964 election.”

How many presidents in the nation’s history have EVER said such a thing in efforts toward peace—or toward anything? However, it’s likely what Obama needed to say and do to get single-payor health care passed “when the country was hot” for it. Now the time likely has passed. Even if he wins a second term, the timing may not be right. JFK, who had as little time in office and experience as a senator as Obama, knew to strike while the iron was hot. Perhaps Obama is not the gifted prophet that Merton mentioned or that JFK’s daughter, Caroline, and brother, Teddy, thought they saw when they endorsed him during the campaign.

                Is Obama just a corporate brand now? Or does he know that the military-industrial-congressional complex Eisenhower saw likely was satanic enough to have killed JFK, MLK and RFK? But has it progressed to the point where no man dare take the initiative to the extent that FDR, or Lincoln, or JFK did?

Jan. 23, 2010

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs," according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein's article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that "our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a 'crippled epistemology,' in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources."

By "crippled epistemology" Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public -- the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

Download a PDF of the article here.

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

"We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI," Estrin writes at the Rag Blog, expressing surprise that "a high-level presidential advisor" would support such a strategy.

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Sunstein has been the target of numerous "conspiracy theories" himself, mostly from the right wing political echo chamber, with conservative talking heads claiming he favors enacting "a second Bill of Rights" that would do away with the Second Amendment. Sunstein's recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some on the right as "a blueprint for online censorship."

Sunstein "wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading 'rumors,'" wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

Jan. 31, 2010

If it is a war against extremists and militancy inside Pakistan, it is a civil war because its origins stem from the US, NATO occupation of neighboring Afghanistan. The conflict should be seen as an extension of the ongoing resistance of the Afghan people to alien domination.

It is inaccurate to say that the US invaded Afghanistan because of the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda, writes. Shameem Akhtar, who is a professor of international relations, and a senior analyst & writer.  He was the dean of faculty of management, Baluchistan university, and former chairman of International Relations Department, Karachi University. This story was first published on www.islamonline.net.

Former BBC correspondent George Arney reported on September 18, 2001, that Niaz Naik, the former Pakistani foreign secretary, had told him that he was informed by US officials at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan in Berlin during July that year that unless Osama bin Laden were handed over swiftly, America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

                The wider objective, however, was to topple the Taliban regime and install a transitional government under King Mohammad Zahir Shah.

The invasion was to take place in mid-October 2001. Mr. Naik went on to say that he doubted that the US would have abandoned its plan to invade Afghanistan even if Osama were handed over by the Taliban.

Arney's story is corroborated by the Guardian correspondent David Leigh in his report published on September 26, 2001, in which he revealed that the Taliban had received specific warning by the US through secret diplomacy in Berlin in July that the Bush Administration would topple the entire regime militarily unless Osama is extradited to the US.

This was part of the larger design of US military, industrial complex to bring about regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

As the US needed bases in Pakistan to accomplish its pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush Administration sought to use Islamabad as a cat's paw to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Fortunately for President Bush, a usurper ruled there, devoid of all legitimacy, legal and moral, and he readily and willingly succumbed to US pressure and made a U-turn by severing all links with the Taliban.

He even joined the war against Afghanistan instead of using his leverage with the Taliban to exhaust all means of peaceful settlement of the dispute.

The entire region, including Pakistan, was declared a war zone by the US military command, and the flights of all passenger planes were prohibited over a certain altitude, while no merchant ships could enter the harbors of Pakistan, thus bringing maritime trade (which comprises approximately 95 percent of Pakistan's import-export trade) to a standstill.

It is no wonder that Pakistan suffered a loss of 34 billion dollars because of its involvement in the Afghan war.

America's War

As one can see, it was America's war that was imposed upon Pakistan. Whether Pakistan could have avoided the war is a matter of controversy among politicians and political observers. But the war has fuelled insurgency in Pakistan's hitherto peaceful tribal territory adjacent to Afghanistan.

This insurgency shows no sign of abatement, as terrorist attacks on military and civilian centers in the capital and major cities of the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab continue with a vengeance, posing threat to the security of the state.

In the meantime, routine predator strikes by the US in Waziristan have taken a heavy toll of civilian lives amid accusations of Islamabad's complicity in the piratical attacks on tribespeople, which prompts them to resort to retaliatory strikes on the perpetrators.

Not satisfied with Pakistan's military operations in the tribal region, the US Administration has compelled Islamabad's fragile government to pull out its troops from the tense Indo-Pak border and deploy them in the restive tribal belt along the Pak-Afghan border.

Now Pakistan faces existential threat from the Taliban and not India, a perception which the country's military leadership is not prepared to share, given the unresolved disputes with New Delhi, which triggered four wars during the last 62 years.

At the same time, speculation (not entirely unfounded) is rife about the involvement of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the former Blackwater (now christened Xe Services) in murder, mayhem, and gunrunning as evidenced by the armed Americans who drive consulate vehicles through cities and, when intercepted, refuse to disclose their identity.

It is here that one recalls with dismay the role of General Stanley McChrystal, who until last year headed the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs drone attacks and targeted assassinations with the assistance of the operatives of the former Blackwater.

This was revealed by Jeremy Scahill's investigative report published in the US weekly the Nation. That may, perhaps, solve the mystery surrounding a series of assassinations of ulama belonging to various Islamic movements.

The sinister motive behind such acts of terror is to incite sectarian violence in Pakistan and lay the blame at the doors of religious extremists. Similar death squads were organized by the CIA in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to carry out political assassinations of nationalists who were opposed to US intervention.

At the time, the Sandinista government of Nicaragua complained to the International Court of Justice about the mining of Nicaraguan ports, the violation of the country's airspace, the killing and kidnapping of individuals on the Nicaraguan territory, and the threat or use of force by the US. The court in its decision in June 1986 held that the US was in breach of the customary rules of international law and international humanitarian law.

The above case is titled the "Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua." The precedent set by this case may be invoked by Pakistan to prevent the US drone attacks on its territory. Once the piratical attacks of the US have stopped, the irritant in the tribal insurgency would have gone, paving the way for pacification of the conflict.

If this were Pakistan's war, the government would have exercised its own judgment in dealing with the militants at home, either by conciliation or by resort to force.

But Islamabad's so-called operation against militants is subordinated to US military designs in the region, aimed at the encirclement of the People's Republic of China and the control of the transit of gas pipelines from Central Asia to South Asia. It is not aimless that China expressed its concern over the concentration of US, NATO troops in the region. India fits in the American scheme of things, hence the US-India nuclear deal.

Pakistan's National Interest

In this emerging security environment, Pakistan will have to be content with its role as a junior partner of India. Therefore, the sooner Islamabad extricates itself from the US "war on terror," the better it is for its security and independence.

Doesn't Islamabad realize that its military operation against the militants would leave its border with India vulnerable to a New Delhi offensive? If Pakistan permits the US to attack the suspected training centers of militants on its territory, will it be able to prevent India from doing so?

With Islamabad embroiled in internecine strife, it cannot negotiate with India from a position of strength. It may be forced to make a compromise that might be detrimental to its national interest.

Pakistan's preoccupation with tribal rebellion would not permit it to deal with separatist ethnic forces in Baluchistan. Undoubtedly, this is a threat to the territorial integrity of Pakistan.

After the total failure of the military operation in Baluchistan, the federal government has come round to the painful conclusion that political and not military action can bring militancy to an end. Granting general amnesty to the dissidents and engaging them in a meaningful dialogue on contentious issues is a laudable initiative.

The same gesture should be made to the militants in the tribal areas. But Islamabad has adopted double standards in dealing with the Baluchistan militants and the Pashtun militants, as if there were good militants and bad ones. This discriminatory policy would intensify the Pashtun insurgency and might drive them toward even more escalation.

The rulers have seen the consequences of military operations in the former East Pakistan, Baluchistan, Karachi, Sind, and FATA (federally administered tribal areas). If anything, the situation has only worsened. The surge of US troops, the expansion of war beyond the borders of Afghanistan, and the attacks on Quetta and Muridke as envisaged by Obama's new strategy would mean that US troops are at war with the people of Pakistan.

Any Solution?

The Obama Administration would be better advised to concentrate on its exit strategy, and to that end, it is imperative that it involve the UN in its peace-making efforts aimed at the establishment of a broad-based government in Afghanistan, because the Karzai Government has no legitimacy.

To fill the vacuum, the UN peacekeeping force, made up of troops of states not involved in the Afghan war, may be deployed until a government of national unity is able to assume full responsibility. Here the US can contribute to the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan under the aegis of the UN.

The insurgency in the tribal region is the spillover effect of US military occupation of Afghanistan, but Pakistan faces a far greater threat: the threat of ethnic violence as manifested in the bloody clashes among various linguistic groups in urban and rural Sind. These have been overshadowed by the counterinsurgency operations in FATA, but they may erupt at any moment, thus destabilizing the state.

The problem of ethnicity shall have priority over all other matters, lest there might be a disastrous implosion some day. Baluchistan is a case in point: The need of the hour is to provide a credible guarantee for the preservation of the province's language, culture, and tradition in a participatory federal democracy.

June 2, 2009

Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. —Jean Amery, "At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities."

By Jane Sutton – Tue Jun 2

MIAMI (Reuters) – A Yemeni captive died in an apparent suicide at the detention center for foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

It was the first death among Guantanamo prisoners since U.S. President Barack Obama took office in January and ordered the camp shut down by January 2010. His effort to empty the prison has been beset by frightened U.S. politicians who do not want Guantanamo prisoners moved to maximum-security prisons in their constituencies.

A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died.

Human rights groups condemned the death and said it underlined the need to end the system of "indefinite detention" at the prison camp that opened in 2002 under the Bush administration to hold terrorism suspects after the September 11 attacks on the United States that killed 3,000 people.

The latest death was the sixth among the camp's captives. Four had committed suicide and one had died of natural causes.

Guantanamo has been a focus of international criticism for denying detainees legal rights. The Obama administration is considering what to do with the 239 remaining captives held at Guantanamo, who include nearly 100 Yemenis.

The dead man had been held without charge at Guantanamo since February 2002. He had been on hunger strikes in the past to protest his detention, but was not among the more than two dozen long-term hunger strikers currently being force-fed at the camp, a Guantanamo spokesman said.

Human Rights First condemned the death as "a stark reminder of the inhumanity of indefinite detention without charges or trial."

The American Civil Liberties Union said it illustrated the need to resolve the detainees' fate in a regularly constituted court with long-established rules.

"There is no room for a system of indefinite detention without charge or trial under our Constitution," the ACLU said. "Those against whom there is no legitimate evidence must not be given a de facto life sentence by being locked up forever."

I am burdened with collective guilt, I say; not they. Time did its work, very quietly. The generation of the destroyers—the gas chamber constructors, the generals duty-bound to their Fuhrer—is growing old with honor. —Jean Amery, "At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities."

The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case in question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral turning back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being. —Jean Amery, "At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities."

Nov. 13, 2009

Remember this from Obama’s 2008 campaign?:

“Barack Obama will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy, invest in low emissions coal plants, and begin transition to a new digital electricity grid.

“A principal focus of this fund will be devoted to ensuring that technologies are developed in the U.S. and are rapidly commercialized in the U.S. and deployed around the globe. Invest in U.S.

“The Obama comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan will invest in America’s highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world.

“Obama will also provide specific tax assistance and loan guarantees to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-efficient cars and trucks are build in the U.S. with American workers.

“The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs.

“Obama will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth. The Obama plan will create new federal policies, and expand existing ones, that have been proven to create new American jobs. Obama will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own.

“Coal is our nation’s most abundant fossil fuel and is a critical component of economic development in China, India and other growing economies. Obama believes that the imperative to confront climate change requires that we prevent a new wave of traditional coal facilities in the U.S. and work aggressively to transfer low-carbon coal technologies around the world. Implementing these technologies as soon as possible is vital to the transition to a clean energy economy.”

With unemployment officially at the 10 percent mark, and, in reality, at the 17 percent mark with one in six American workers unemployed or grossly underemployed, we now can see what bunk “The Great Communicator II” shoveled during campaign 2008. So much bunk that he fooled the stalwart liberal Kennedy’s. “Potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own,” Obama said. It has been 10 months now after all, and he has lost credibility as a progressive and a politician.

Instead of Barack Obama using his bully pulpit like FDR to, with memorable, soaring rhetoric, persuade—and strong-arm—Americans and corporations (which are two different things) to create thousands or millions of jobs within his first 100 days or to convert auto- and truck-manufacturing plants into electric, non-oil-product auto-building plants, we see a continuing onslaught of “American Dream” commercials on the Fawning Corporate Media. Car commercials, one after another, all pitching sex, power, machismo, family vacations, joyrides, and so on—if you only buy THIS car--swamp our TV time.

The most egregious, insane and deplorably sick kind of way is the new Ram truck commercial, which began saturation usage Nov. 4.

This is the “Manifesto” TV Script for “Ram” pick-up trucks, which now stand in a separate division from Chrysler-Dodge:

My name is Ram

And my tank is full

I’m fueled by optimism

Driven by passion and stopped by nothing

I’m a can-do spirit in a get-it-done body

All brawn

All brain

I’m built not to last, but to outlast

Not to achieve, but to overachieve

I’m built to reward the doers who climb behind my wheel every day

By working even harder than they do

My tank is full

I carry a full payload

The loyalty of my owners

The accolades of my industry

I carry reputations

I carry livelihoods

I deliver the goods without fail

My tank is full

The road ahead of me is long but I know my destination

I will not yield

I will not downshift

I will not coast to a stop.

My name is Ram and my tank is full.

Chrysler has decided to separate Ram from the Dodge brand, so it’s time for the truck-loving Americans to know this. A few approaches come to mind when trying to ease something like this into people’s minds, and the team in charge of this took the most aggressive path.

Chrysler and their marketing partner came up with a one-minute commercial called “Manifesto.”

 According to AdAge, the TV spot ran 190 times on Nov. 4 during prime time, which means there’s a good chance you already know what I’m talking about. The budget for this is unknown, but it has to be huge. For example, it was played twice during the Yankees Game 6 of the World Series.

Even though the Ram trucks are genuinely legendary—I loved driving one during my summer college job for the electric department of Worthington, Minn., in the early 1970s—this ad goes beyond legend (to borrow a phrase from Major League Baseball’s own TV ads during the Series). It’s like the ultimate fighters you see on Spike TV. It oozes male testosterone while waving the American flag in viewers’ faces. If you are a conservative, you likely sit on the edge of your seat, saying, “Yeh, baby. You tell ‘em. We ain’t no wussy liberals in the good ol’ US of A. We can still whup them A-rab backsides!!!”

It denies global warming. It denies the need to decrease American consumption. It taunts other countries with “my tank is full”—meaning America will do anything to win the battle over oil, now being fought primarily in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. It appeals to the current American-lore schtick, first proposed by Saint Reagan, that Americans are the “city on the hill,” and SHOULD rule the world because we are the only people who can. All others are likely non-white-skinned billionaires and millionaires who have proved they are superior by the big weapons they can flaunt. (Penis envy, anyone?)

It appeals to Americans’ ridiculously convoluted rationale that Christianity and Judaism are in a state of war with Islam, so god is on our side: “I deliver the goods without fail. My tank is full. The road ahead of me is long but I know my destination.” Kind of like Jesus and God are watching over us only, as the Christians would say, and will deliver help without fail. If you follow the rules, you know your destination at the end of the long road of life.

On other levels, it unknowingly, to 99 percent of viewers, dupes their brains that are soaked with John Wayne American folklore: “I’m a can-do spirit in a get-it-done body.” And it throws in family values, too: “I carry reputations. I carry livelihoods.”

In a backdoor way, it carries a message to Americans that SHOULD be carried: We succeeded with the Manhattan Project, building a city-destroying bomb within a few years. I also appeals to FDR’s Americans, who converted the auto industry and other heavy industry from peacetime production to war production in a matter of months. THAT’s what is needed now to save the world and life as we know it.

So, this same one-minute joke of a chest-busting, testosterone-spewing commercial both tells us that President Barack Obama has been impotent so far in creating so-called green jobs to cure unemployment and stop pollution and in getting our corporate warlords to produce “green” transportation, AND that Americans have done just such impossible things in the past and, perhaps, could do so again in the future—if it’s not already too late. It’s way past Obama’s first 100 days. Way past.

Oct. 17, 2009

Aaron Tovo is a Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., human-rights activist with Amnesty International.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee surprised us all earlier this month when it awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama a mere nine months into his presidency. While it cited "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," it's clear that the committee meant this to be more than an acknowledgement of his bringing the United States back into the international fold. It meant it as a challenge for him to use his position to actually earn the Peace Prize.

His record on peace and human-rights issues has been mixed, yet it is early in his term in office and there are many opportunities for him to earn his prize. One area where he can do much better is international human-rights law.

The human-rights violations committed in recent years by U.S. personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere have been many and varied. They have included enforced disappearance, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (in some cases resulting in death in custody); prolonged incommunicado detention, as well as other forms of arbitrary and indefinite detention; secret international transfers of detainees without due process ("rendition"); and flagrantly unfair trials.

Hence the United States has violated treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT). The United States is a party to all of them.

I've made a list of tasks regarding these abuses by which President Obama could perhaps earn his Nobel Peace Prize:

• Charge Guantanamo detainees and give them fair trials in U.S. federal courts, or release them.

President Obama has indicated that he might try Guantanamo inmates in front of military tribunals instead of U.S. federal courts. Such trials have been widely criticized in the international community as unfair and would probably not be suffice to meet our international treaty obligations to provide fair trials. He has also endorsed indefinite detentions, which are a violation of international human-rights standards as well as the principles on which the United States was founded. Handling the inmates by respecting their basic right to due process would be a necessary step toward redeeming our nation in the eyes of the world community and earning any peace prize.

• Respect the rights of detainees at other U.S. facilities, like Bagram in Afghanistan.

Current policies still have loopholes for torture and abuse and, according to Amnesty International, U.S. detention facilities at Bagram and other facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq do not meet human-rights standards.

• Ensure that the United States will never again resort to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment — as defined by international law.

According to the recently released bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, the previous administration's Office of Legal Counsel "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws" and "rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody." The Bush administration went out of its way to distort and undermine the legal meaning of torture to provide a thin veil of legality to its abuses. Congress, meanwhile, failed badly in its role as a watchdog.

The Obama administration must work with Congress to remedy this situation by improving transparency and oversight. This obligation is set out in the previously mentioned ICCPR and UNCAT.

Preventing these abuses from recurring would entail showing that such abuses have serious consequences for the perpetrators. This leads me to another requirement Obama's earning his Nobel Prize:

• Ensure accountability for torture and other human-rights violations through an independent commission of inquiry; prosecutions where warranted; and redress and remedy for victims.

Several documentary films, such as "Torturing Democracy," have made a solid case that U.S. officials committed crimes under international law and that the widespread violations of human rights in the context of countering terrorism — including torture and enforced disappearance — were authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Rather than hold these officials accountable, President Obama has stated that he wants "to look forward rather than backwards" and let bygones be bygones. Such a blanket pardon on critical human-rights issues is not worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Furthermore, the U.S. government has a legal obligation to prosecute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and UNCAT. Establishing a commission of inquiry and following through on its recommendations would live up to these obligations and help hold perpetrators of abuse accountable.

• Produce and publish all remaining relevant policy memos that argued for, documented, and established the basis for coercive interrogation, detainee treatment and policy in the last administration.

Our nation and the world as a whole have much to learn from their response to terrorist threats. Lawyers for the Obama administration have already invoked the state secrets doctrine several times to prevent documents from being used in court, even though the general content of those documents is already widely known to the public. The Obama administration needs to do a better job than that of improving transparency. It is important that we expose the truth about the abuses that were committed in our name and hold the guilty responsible so that these abuses do not happen again.

So there you have it: Five things the Obama administration can and should do to earn his Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, "peace" is a broader issue than torture and enforced disappearances. I have focused on these issues because they flagrantly damaged the cause of world peace and are well within Obama's purview to remedy. They set the bar at a bare minimum for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Feb. 27, 2010

In a perverse way, you have to give credit to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) for placing a blanket hold on more than 70 pending nominations from the Obama Administration. In the wake of announcing earlier this month that he was releasing most of the holds, Shelby essentially admitted that he's a political extortionist. You have to admire a guy for that kind of honesty.

But here's what is not admirable about Shelby--and the Obama administration should keep this in mind going forward. Shelby's "Alabama hold 'em" gambit tells us that he is not serious about his objections on presidential nominees. In other words, there is no reason to think Shelby has legitimate grounds for objecting to any nominee. So Obama should move forward like a steamroller, challenging Shelby to hold his ground or dive out of the way.

Consider the sensitive U.S. attorney position in the Middle District of Alabama, site of the Don Siegelman prosecution. Joseph Van Heest, a highly regarded attorney from Montgomery, was ready for confirmation and could have been on the job months ago. But Shelby apparently objected, and the Obama administration decided not to fight for Van Heest's nomination.

That has caused George W. Bush appointee Leura Canary to remain in place, more than a year into the Obama administration. At last report, the White House was on the verge of nominating Montgomery lawyer George Beck, whose firm has strong ties to Karl Rove and Business Council of Alabama President Bill Canary. The possibility of a Beck nomination has drawn heavy fire from Alabama progressives.

After dropping his blanket hold on Obama nominees, Shelby tried to claim victory, stating that the tactic had accomplished his goal of drawing White House attention to two federal projects that could bring billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to Alabama. But The Washington Post reported:

The White House said that it agreed to none of Shelby's demands, and that the senator released the holds on his own accord.

The truth? Shelby's blanket hold probably accomplished nothing, and he released it because of the flood of criticism he had received--and the embarrassment he was causing for the Republican Party.

What should Obama do now? He needs to immediately address the U.S. attorney position in Montgomery. He should assume that Shelby has no legitimate grounds for voicing an objection and move forward with the nomination of Joseph Van Heest.

Leura Canary's ongoing presence as head of the Middle District of Alabama remains an embarrassment for the Obama Justice Department. The DOJ needs to show her the door pronto and allow Van Heest to start the arduous task of cleaning up the cesspool in Montgomery--starting with an investigation of Sen. Shelby's financial ties to Doss Aviation.

That's the the Colorado-based company that is partially owned by Mark Fuller, the federal judge who handled the Siegelman case. Shelby's alleged ties to that company are probably the No. 1 reason he wants to make sure a competent federal prosecutor is not placed in Montgomery, Alabama.

After Shelby's most recent stunt, Obama needs to make sure that he appoints an Alabama prosecutor with the disposition of a wolverine--one who has eyes for Richard Shelby's rear end.

Original: June 15, 2003 by the Kent-Ravenna Record Courier (Ohio)

Caroline Arnold retired in 1997 after 12 years on the staff of U.S. Senator John Glenn, both in Washington and in his Cleveland office, writing speeches and monitoring environmental, technical and educational issues in Ohio. Since her retirement, her essays frequently appear on the progressive web site, commondreams.org.[Editor's Note: This topic comes to mind each time the elite of the U.S. take a bit more power from us commoners. Despite its publication date, it seems appropriate today.]

... asked James Madison, author of the Bill or Rights, in short dialog with that title published in 1792. The first speaker, a proponent of Liberty -- clearly Madison himself -- replies: The people themselves. The sacred trust can be no where so safe as in the hands most interested in preserving it.

Not so, replies his opponent, an advocate of Order: The people are stupid, suspicious, licentious. They cannot safely trust themselves. When they have established government they should think of nothing but obedience, leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers.

Fast forward to 1991, the Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. In February Alfred Sikes, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), spoke at the Cleveland City Club about the wonders of new communications media and technologies that were then just coming on-line. In the Q & A following his speech I asked what threats these innovations might pose to freedom of speech, press, and religion under the Bill of Rights. His utterly chilling answer was that it would depend on how much free speech, free press, and freedom of religion "the public demands." In other words, if the people aren’t actively demanding these freedoms, they don’t need them.

Twelve years later, it is increasingly evident that advocates of Order are ascendant in Washington, and that the present Bush administration believes the people are "stupid, suspicious, licentious", and should leave "the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers."

Madison continues: ... [T]oo true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? That because the people may betray themselves, they ought to give themselves up, blindfold, to those who have an interest in betraying them? Rather conclude that the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it, as well as obey it.

In 1991, I was stunned by Sikes’ pronouncement. I thought the whole idea of the Bill of Rights was to protect the liberties that enlighten, awaken, and empower the people, and place those liberties out of the reach of both government and the marketplace of supply and demand.

Madison’s opponent counters: .... It is not the government that is disposed to fly off from the people; but the people that are ever ready to fly off from the government. Rather say then, enlighten the government, warn it to be vigilant, enrich it with influence, arm it with force, and to the people never pronounce but two words -- Submission and Confidence.

The recent action of the FCC in relaxing regulations on media ownership betrays the same reasoning: enrich the government with influence from large corporations, and say to the public "You ‘stupid, suspicious, licentious’ folks can get all the news, entertainment, religion and political doctrine you need to be obedient subjects (and submissive consumers) through the operation of the free market under giant media corporations. Don’t worry -- your government is enlightened, vigilant, ‘enriched with influence and armed with force’ and will take care of everything. Just don’t resist, ‘Trust Us’, and you won’t need liberty."

Madison flames in defense of Liberty:....What a perversion of the natural order of things! To make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite.

The voice of Order, anticipating Orwell and Ashcroft, disagrees: ....Wonderful as it may seem, the more you increase the attractive force of power, the more you enlarge the sphere of liberty; the more you make government independent and hostile towards the people, the better security you provide for their rights and interests.

Sikes’ 1991 statement presaged the current effort to privatize freedom of speech and press, and suggested that the press (expanded now to include broadcast media, photocopying, fax, and Internet) should be commodities available on commercial markets -- business opportunities for corporations.

Liberty up for sale? in response to public demand? by the same corporations that invest in government?

In the past two years we have already seen "message control" in our media displace dissenting views on war, terrorism, foreign policy, the environment, education and drugs. We have seen privatization and deregulation empower multinational corporations selling oil, weapons, drugs and the natural resources necessary for human life. We have seen the prophets of order decree that national security demands the suspension of rights of due process.

In Madison’s dialog the voice of Order accuses: ...You are destitute, I perceive, of every quality of a good citizen, or rather of a good subject. You have neither the light of faith nor the spirit of obedience. I denounce you to the government as an accomplice of atheism and anarchy.

On behalf of Liberty, Madison concludes: And I forbear to denounce you to the people, though a blasphemer of their rights and an idolater of tyranny. Liberty disdains to persecute.

Sikes was more prescient than he knew. Today there will be no freedoms unless the public demands them. If we do not act as keepers of our liberties, we will not have them. Indeed, there won’t even be a dialog between Liberty and Order.

Are we citizens or subjects? It’s up to us, the people.

Oct. 17, 2009

Don’s Review recently published a publically available document, the “mark-up” bill for health care as proposed by the six wise men in the Senante Fiance Committee.

This would seem a safe thing to do: It’s already in the public domain, other media will take bits and pieces of it according to what their corporate masters dictate. I should have the editors and management of Don’s Review should have no worries about imprisonment or being whisked away in the middle of the night leaving their wife and son wondering if their dead or alive.

But recent articles, one publish Friday, Oct.16, 2009 by CommonDreams.org indicate that most Americans still do not get it (an oft-used phrase, but an apt phrase)!!! That article attempted to make know to the United States of Illiterate baseball and Hollywood-star entranced citizens, that their “progressive” President Barack  Obama is not so different fromthat eight-year scourge they’d thought they’d purged in November. Obama in September renewed Bush's 9/11 State of Emergency by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg On September 10^th, President Obama reinstituted the national State of Emergency first declared by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 by placing the following language in the Federal Register.

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2009, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

As Dr. Harold C. Relyea, a specialist in national government with the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress, has written, “when the President formally declares a national emergency, he may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

Yet, while Dr. Relyea opines that Congress and the judiciary, as well as public opinion, “can restrain the executive regarding emergency powers,” nothing of the sort has occurred. 

Under the 1976 National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601-1651), Congress is required to review presidentially declared emergencies.  Specifically, “not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated.”  Over the past eight years, Congress has failed to obey its own law, a fact that casts doubt on the legality of the state of emergency.

As far as public opinion is concerned, how many Americans are even aware that a state of emergency even exists.  For that matter, how many members of Congress know?

Homeland Security Committee member Peter DeFazio (D-OR) took to the House floor in late 2007 to express his anger at being denied access to an executive branch document (National Security Presidential Directive 51 or NSPD-51) that "establish[es] a comprehensive national policy for the continuity of federal government structures" in a national emergency.

The New York Times, in a 2007 editorial titled “Making Martial Law Easier”, offered these words regarding NSPD-51:  “Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the President may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack, or to any ‘other condition.’ Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing.”

It’s noteworthy that this particular Times editorial was written a year before NorthCom, “unified combatant command of the U.S. military” covering the U.S., Canada and Mexico, began stationing troops on U.S. soil.  Established a year after 9/11, NorthCom is the first such command to cover the “domestic battlefield.” It is charged with “the protection of the United States homeland, and the support of local, state, and federal authorities.”

In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act with the intention of substantially limiting the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement.  By 2008, however, the 3^rd infantry’s 1^st brigade combat team (BCT) had been stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.  This force, known, as the Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF) “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios.”  Plans for the stationing of more brigades are swiftly being enacted.  As the Army Times pointed out, “This mission marks the first time an active unit of the U.S. military has been given a domestic assignment.” 

The demise of posse comitatus—a critical protection for ordinary citizens from the predations of overreaching government—has occurred without media comment or public resistance.

Despite campaign pronouncements that cheered civil libertarians, President Obama has largely maintained Bush era policies regarding rendition/torture, surveillance and preventive detention.  The denial of what has often been called “the Great Writ” of habeus corpus should send a shudder down the spine of every American citizen.  The United States Constitution states in Article 1 Section 5 that “the privilege of the writ of habeus corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of rebellion or Invasion the public safety may require it.”  The Obama administration is essentially arguing that the United States is currently in a state of resisting foreign invasion a full eight years after the attacks of 9/11!

This is ludicrous.  Dr. Relyea argues that Congress and the judiciary, as “co-equal branches of constitutional government,” serve as a check on the executive power.  As we have seen, Congress has either been shut out of this process, or, as in so many cases, it has capitulated.  Dr. Relyea then offers that public opinion can restrain the executive.  But the public doesn’t even know they’re living under a state of emergency.  The media doesn’t report it, and the government is certainly not in the business of providing information that might raise the hackles of real Americans.

It’s time for the American people to rise to this challenge.  Write your member of Congress, and your senators.  Tell them to obey their own laws.  Tell them to end this phony and treacherous state of emergency that imperils the freedom of us all.

Meanwhile, on October 7, 2009 in The Oregonian

Amy Goodman told of how a social worker from New York City was arrested while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid at his home -- all for using Twitter. Elliot Madison faces charges of hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. He was posting to a Twitter feed (or tweeting, as it is called) publicly available information about police activities around the G-20 protests, including information about where police had issued orders to disperse.

While alerting people to public information may not seem to be an arrestable offense, be forewarned: Many people have been arrested for the same "crime" -- in Iran, that is.

The U.S. State Department, impressed with the importance of Twitter to Iranian protests, asked Twitter to delay system maintenance that might have interrupted the service during the Iranian protests.

While Madison optimistically mused, "I'm expecting the State Department will come out and support us also," his lawyer, respected civil rights attorney Martin Stolar, said: "This is just unbelievable. It is the thinnest, silliest case that I've ever seen. It tends to criminalize support services for people who are involved in lawful protest activity. And it's just shocking that somebody could be arrested for essentially walking next to somebody and saying: 'Hey, don't go down that street, because the police have issued an order to disperse. Stay away from there.'"

Madison, his wife and housemates were roused from sleep the Joint Terrorism Task Force swept into their house, handcuffing them for hours, searching the house and removing computers and other property from everyone in the house. Madison said the FBI "for 16 hours, proceeded to take everything, from plush toys to kitchen magnets and lots of books ... they took Curious George stuffed animals."

Rather than encourage and support the use of distributed, decentralized social networks to strengthen our democracy and dissent (remember, the Obama campaign itself relied extensively on these online and mobile tools), the government seems headed in the opposite direction. Los Angeles Chief of Police William Bratton recently won acclaim at the annual meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization of police executives representing 63 of the largest cities in the United States and Canada. Bratton has launched "I Watch LA," described as "a community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism." The iWatch program, despite Bratton's assertion otherwise, is about spying on your neighbors and turning them in to the police.

While Elliot Madison was not physically harmed, his legal battles are just beginning, and his case could prove central to the future of free speech in the mobile, digital age.

It is time for the digital censors here in the U.S. to disperse.

Sept. 17, 2009 

The American Banker, the daily trade newspaper of record for U.S. bankers, says it is an independent newspaper covering the financial services industry. It says it is owned by SourceMedia and unaffiliated with any portion of the banking industry. Founded in 1835 and based in New York, American Banker's 70 reporters and editors in six cities monitor developments and breaking news affecting banks.

SourceMedia is a mid-sized business-to-business publishing company owned by Investcorp, according to Internet sources. Formerly the Thomson Media division of The Thomson Corporation, SourceMedia was sold by its parent company in 2004. Based in New York City, SourceMedia has offices in Washington, Chicago, Boston, Skokie, Ill., Duluth, Ga., and Lakeville, Conn. The company's other key publications include The Bond Buyer, the only daily newspaper focused exclusively on the municipal bond industry as well as National Mortgage News the leading weekly covering the U.S. mortgage industry.

Investcorp is a provider and manager of alternative investment products, serving high-net-worth private and institutional clients, including, primarily, the banking institutional investors of the Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Principally, Investcorp is an investment intermediary, acting as a vehicle to channel the wealth of its clients, which include six Arabian nations-- in the Persian Gulf into investments in the United States and Europe.

Institutional investors are organizations which pool large sums of money and invest those sums in companies. They include banks, insurance companies, retirement or pension funds, hedge funds and mutual funds. Their role in the economy is to act as highly specialized investors on behalf of others. For instance, an ordinary person will have a pension from his employer. The employer gives that person's pension contributions to a fund. The fund will buy shares in a company, or some other financial product. Funds are useful because they will hold a broad portfolio of investments in many companies. This spreads risk, so if one company fails, it will be only a small part of the whole fund's investment.

Institutional investors will have a lot of influence in the management of corporations because they will be entitled to exercise the voting rights in a company. They can engage in active role in corporate governance. Furthermore, because institutional investors have the freedom to buy and sell shares, they can play a large part in which companies stay solvent, and which go under. Influencing the conduct of listed companies, and providing them with capital are all part of the job of investment management.

Because of their sophistication, institutional investors may often participate in private placements of securities, in which certain aspects of the securities laws may be inapplicable. For example, in the United States, a private placement under Rule 506 of Regulation D may be made to an "accredited investor" without registering the offering of securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In essence, an institutional investor is an accredited investor defined in the rule as:

* a bank, insurance company, registered investment company (generally speaking, a mutual fund), business development company, or small business investment company;

* an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company, or registered investment adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in excess of $5 million;

* a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets exceeding $5 million;

* a director, executive officer, or general partner of the company selling the securities;

* a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors;

* a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase;

* a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year; or

* a trust with assets in excess of $5 million, not formed to acquire the securities offered, whose purchases a sophisticated person makes.

A number of phone calls were made to American Banker for comment on this article. The first two, to managing editor, Andrew J. Sobel, were not returned. The author then asked to speak to either the publisher or the executive editor. A man answered, but would not identify himself.

I told him my name and said I was laid off in January after nine years as Legal Editor at the New York Law Journal and that I wanted to write a story with the information that the newspaper of record for U.S. banks is owned by an Arabian company and is not independent from banks or the banking industry. I said it was for my new website, Don’s Review. I said that I have no income and am trying to make the website into a moneymaker to support my family.

He said, "That’s a very odd way of looking at our ownership structure [Investcorp being an Arabian entity]. Why are you writing this article?"

I said, "Because the American Banker is the paper of record for U.S. bankers and is said to be independent of banks, yet it is owned by Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, and has connections to banks even now. Could you please give me an email address for my questions and then someone could answer them and email the answers back to me. That way there would be no mistakes."

He said with an arrogant tone, "It doesn’t sound like a legitimate news source. I don’t think I’m going to help you."

Nevertheless, as a chastened commoner, I chugged onward, again using the Internet as my main source of information:

Investcorp has five lines of business: private equity, hedge funds, real estate, technology investment and Gulf growth capital. The ability to provide multiple product offerings to its clients is one of its key competitive strengths.

Founded in 1982, it has arranged investments with a combined value of approximately $41 billion. The company has grown to become one of the largest and most diverse alternative investment managers in terms of both product offerings and geography, and currently has over $13 billion in invested assets under management. The firm co-invests significantly with its clients across its lines of business to ensure a strong alignment of interests.

Investcorp’s three offices act in tandem, with the New York and London offices identifying investment opportunities, and the Bahrain office placing investment among a pool of Arab clients. Investcorp's placement capability is focused in the six nations of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.

American Banker has leaned heavily toward old-style, pure capitalism-as-usual and no new regulations to bring the U.S. and the world out of the financial meltdown that began in September 2008. It has been quoted as the leading authority by an ultra-conservative banking expert as many as 20 times within one of his 2,000-word newspaper columns.

American Banker has won praise for its coverage of important policy issues, including passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act--which many progressives call one of the main reasons for the Great Recession of 2009, congressional debates surrounding regulation of government-sponsored enterprises like the beleagured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the near-constant wave of mergers and acquisitions that affect banks. The newspaper is not to be confused with the American Bankers Association or other industry trade groups.

Investcorp was conceived as, and remains, a firm that is global in its outlook, attitude and culture. It operates out of three centers: New York, London, and Bahrain. The company is active in five primary areas:

Private equity, which target leveraged buyout investments in North America and Western Europe;

Technology Investments, which target venture capital investments in in North America and Western Europe;

Real Estate Investments in North America, with properties ranging from hotels to shopping malls, as well as residential and office buildings; hedge funds; and Gulf Growth Capital.

The private equity teams, based in London, New York and Bahrain, selects and arranges private equity investments. It looks for investment opportunities in mid-size companies with capable managers, prominent positions in their industries, a strong track record and potential for growth. These are the types of businesses where Investcorp's approach, which involves supporting management teams with a range of in house strategic and operational, as well as financial, resources, can most effectively increase value during the target three to seven year holding period.

The past and present portfolio includes more than 80 corporate investments, totaling $29 billion in acquisition value, in a broad range of industries and markets in North America and Western Europe.

Investcorp has become best known through a number of high-profile investments, including its purchase and resale of luxury brands including Gucci, Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co..

The concept behind the creation of Investcorp was devised and implemented at the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) during the period 1980-1982, when Dr. Jawad Hashim was its president. In July 1980 Hashim employed Nemir Kirdar as one of his advisers on one-year secondment from Chase Manhattan Bank. Initially, Kirdar’s task was to prepare certain feasibility studies in connection with the development of Arab financial markets, promotion of Arab monetary and economic integration and the quest for investment opportunities for the surplus of the oil-exporting Arab countries. Kirdar delivered a report entitled: "Arab Monetary Fund Project: Establishment of a Private Investment Company." Under the auspices of AMF and on its expense, a new financial institution, Investcorp, was created in 1981-1982.

Investcorp's first board of directors included Dr. Jawad Hashim and Nemir Kirdar. In July 1982, the final incorporation process was completed and Investcorp started to develop its policies and procedures manuals. In January 1983, Investcorp commenced business operations.

When Dr. Hashim assumed his post as president of the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF), Nemir Kirdar, as the representative of Chase Manhattan Bank discussed mainly the banking relationship between AMF and Chase Manhattan. Hashim also outlined the objectives of the AMF in relation to the promotion of Arab capital markets and the best ways of utilizing the financial surpluses of the Gulf region through a viable investment entity.

To give credibility to the concept which the AMF developed, Hashim, in his capacity as president of the AMF, sought to solicit first the participation of institutional investors, mainly the national banks of each Gulf State. Beginning in November 1980, he first wrote to the chairman of the Board of National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) Ahmed Khalifa Al-Suwaidi. Similar letters were sent to the National Bank of Bahrain, Bank of Oman, The Dubai Bank, National Bank of Sharjah, Qatar National Bank and Commercial Bank of Qatar.

The real estate team, based in New York, sources and performs due diligence, and arranges financing and the acquisition of US properties. The properties are typically aggregated into a series of multi-property portfolios for equity placement to Investcorp's clients. Since 1995, Investcorp has acquired around 200 properties, totaling approximately $10 billion in value. Investcorp currently has $6 billion of property under management. The team also advises on the real estate aspects of Investcorp's private equity investments.

Investcorp's venture capital team, known as Investcorp Technology Partners focuses on growth-oriented control investments in the technology sector. It invests in small to medium-sized technology-driven businesses in the U.S. and Europe and utilize a variety of transaction types. Currently, the team manages three funds with total commitments of over $1 billion. Over the last six years, the team has undertaken more than 30 investments in the U.S. and Europe.

By May 1981 (Nemir Kirdar was still an employee of AMF), the AMF "project" attracted many individuals and institutions to participate in the capital of the proposed company: Investcorp. Approximately US$55 million were committed by the participants. Institutional participants whom Dr. Hashim, as president of AMF, solicited included:

National Bank of Bahrain; Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait; Commercial Bank of Kuwait; Qatar National Bank; Saudi-Cairo Bank; and Gulf Union Insurance Co.

On April 12, 1982 (nearly eleven months after the application), Bahrain Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture approved the incorporation of Investcorp. Thus Investcorp (the AMF’s brainchild) came into legal existence with its official name being Arab Investment Banking Corp.

The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, is a trade bloc involving the six Arab states of the Persian Gulf with many economic and social objectives. Created on May 25, 1981, the 630-million-acre Council comprises the Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The unified economic agreement between the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council was signed on Nov. 11, 1981 in Riyadh. These countries are often referred to as The GCC States.