From jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca Mon Jun 1 04:46:33 2009 From: jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca (Janet M Eaton) Date: Mon Jun 1 04:49:15 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM by Greg Palast Message-ID: <4A239569.10734.430C3318@jmeaton.ns.sympatico.ca> ------- Forwarded message follows ------- Send reply to: palast@gregpalast.net From: "Greg Palast" To: "jmeaton@ns.sympatico.ca" Date sent: Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:17:55 -0400 Subject: Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM by Greg Palast Monday, June 1, 2009 Screw the autoworkers. They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day. Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion. The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal. I smell a rat. Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning. When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name. But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi. Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replace by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock. Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams. Preventive Detention for Pensions So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal. In 1974, after a series of scandalous take-downs of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits. The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no. Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries." Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits." "The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits." Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin. Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration - channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance. Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must "...act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses." By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock. This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically-connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds. House of Rubin Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM? As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding). With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever." Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers? And it's been a good year for Se?or Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler - indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the US taxpayer. ("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates Hell. Subtle these guys are not.) While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero. If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension. It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car. ****** Economist and journalist Greg Palast, a former trade union contract negotiator, is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. He is a GM bondholder and card-carrying member of United Automobile Workers Local 1981. Palast's latest reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD, "Palast Investigates: from 8- Mile to the Amazon - on the trail of the financial marauders." Watch the trailer here. ------- End of forwarded message ------- From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Mon Jun 1 18:14:53 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Mon Jun 1 18:19:10 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] The Alternative Shareholder Meeting Chevron Didn't Attend Message-ID: <014301c9e320$0ea2d1e0$01ad57ca@jfos> The Alternative Shareholder Meeting Chevron Didn't Attend Font-Line Reporting from the Chevron Protest: See Full article at: http://matadorchange.com/first-person-dispatch-from-the-chevron-protest/ How many activists does it take to shut down the main entrance to the headquarters of the 2nd largest U.S. oil corporation? Six. Well, six, plus dozens of supporters and organizers of an international campaign called The True Cost of Chevron. The purpose was to draw attention to Chevron?s environmental and human rights abuses from Richmond, CA?the location of one of its largest refineries?to Ecuador, where a judge is set to decide this fall on the long-standing lawsuit that seeks damages of $27 billion for toxic environmental pollution in the Amazon rainforest and its communities. The setting is Chevron?s annual shareholders? meeting in affluent San Ramon, CA, about 30 miles from its second largest refinery in Richmond, CA. It was too close for me not to miss. Blocking the entrance was not the goal of the demonstration yesterday. Rather, it set the stage for two events that marked the day: First, proxy shareholders came from the many countries around the world where Chevron operates to share the stories and concerns of their respective communities to the Board and Chevron CEO David J. O?Reilly (the 15th highest paid U.S. CEO). Second, the announcement and discussion of ?An Alternative Annual Report? entitled ?The True Cost of Chevron? that is in striking contrast to Chevron?s own 2008 Annual Shareholder Report, which highlights its remarkable financial success, boasting nearly $24 billion in profits last year. ?What Chevron's annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns, or the global movement gaining voice and strength against Chevron's abuses,? reads the report. http://truecostofchevron.com/ Put together by broad coalition of organizations that include Amazon Watch, Global Exchange, Justice in Nigeria Now, Corpwatch, Richmond Progressive Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, and Crude Accountability, the Alternative Report chronicles abuses in countries such as Nigeria, Philippines, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Burma, Canada, and the USA. It covers everything from Chevron?s successful lobbying of high-level political connections to air pollution, toxic spills, industrial accidents, discriminatory labor practices, human rights abuses, and environmental and health devastation from Canada to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Its demands to Chevron are very clear and simple: clean up your mess, clean up your act, stop aligning yourself with dictatorships and militaries, pay your fair share, and be transparent. I was among several dozen activists who accompanied the proxy shareholders to the security gate, where they were sent off with good cheer and warm solidarity. Soon after the shareholders went in, 6 local activists from Unconventional Action in the Bay Area and Rising Tide locked-down the main entrance lane by locking their arms in PVC tubes painted yellow with the words ?Chevron kills? in black lettering written on them. They were soon joined by myself and dozens of others that lined up behind them, claiming a space for speakers to explain why we were there. Chevron security forces and San Ramon police did not attempt to remove us. Perhaps they decided not to take action in order not to draw more negative media attention than it is already getting. The coalition of organizers also produced a clever subvertisement campaign called ?Chevrong? that mirrored and mocked Chevron?s latest ?Human Energy? ad campaign. Images of representatives of communities around the world are shown with a quote, such ?I will try not to breathe polluted air? along with a factoid highlighting a particular abuse in a specific region. The week prior to the meeting, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the appearance of these images wheat-pasted on billboards and poles around town. CBS Outdoor had refused to sell ad space on its billboards. When contacted, the CBS spokesperson said that it was against policy to have attack ads that were negative in character. Alongside this was a form of subvertisement theater organized in large part by long-time activist David Solnit, author of Army of None. The alternative campaign is meant to speak the truth about the real effects of Chevron?s actions behind the fancy rhetoric of Chevron?s greenwashing campaign. Instead, Chevron?s ?Human Energy? becomes ?Inhumane Energy? and the subvertisement images read, ?I will expose greenwashing,? and ?I will expose toxic pollution.? Activists held the ads up to frame their faces behind the subversive words and chanted in unison, ?I will expose--green washing! Will you join me? Yes, I will!? While the shareholder meeting was taking place speakers from organizations such as Amazon Watch, National Lawyers Guild, and individuals like Antonia Juhasz--lead organizer and editor of the Alternative Report--and Rebecca Solnit, author of the much-praised Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, highlighted the grievances against Chevron and the need to keep putting pressure on the big oil giants. One member of Iraq Veterans Against the War told about how he was reassigned from his communications/intelligence duties in Iraq to protect oil pipelines. At about 10:30, the shareholders came out and shared some what occurred in the meeting inside. It was reported that Chevron's CEO David O'Reilly told them that the campaign?s Alternative Report, which he claimed he had seen, along with their grievances "are an insult to Chevron employees, and should be thrown in the trash." Speakers ranged from the Mayor of Richmond, Gayle McLaughlin, who reported that ?Chevron's response is emblematic of its approach to local communities?a systemic disregard and mockery of the communities in which it operates? to Christine Cordero of Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, who said, "While our communities suffer from Chevrons toxic emissions, catastrophic spills, leakages, and explosions, David O'Reilly speaks of his hurt feelings. This is about the health of communities and, ultimately, the long term of health of O'Reilly's corporation if he continues to choose to do nothing and ignore the costs of Chevron's operations in the Philippines." Paul Donowitz of EarthRights International added that "Chevron chose to turn a deaf ear to the communities who bear the crippling consequences of its operations. Chevron's complicity in human rights abuses in Burma, the billions in project revenues flowing to the brutal Burmese military junta who use these profits to oppress their own people are more evidence that this is a company that cares for only one thing ? its bottom line." A dozen or so people from the Burmese community, including a robed monk, were there to oppose Chevron?s actions in their country. After the speakers finished their reports, the rally was concluded with the chant "We?ll be back! We?ll be back!??echoing Ecuador representative Mr. Criollo?s promise that ?we?ll keep fighting until the end.? rElateD: http://matadorchange.com/an-open-letter-to-america/ From dnevrghm at powerup.com.au Mon Jun 1 23:45:13 2009 From: dnevrghm at powerup.com.au (Doug Everingham) Date: Mon Jun 1 23:57:06 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Re: French Scientist Who Mocked Gore's Nobel Prize as 'Political Gimmick' May Be Appointed to French Super-Ministry Post In-Reply-To: <001301c9e265$07232d90$0100000a@rob> References: <001301c9e265$07232d90$0100000a@rob> Message-ID: Relayed for info by Doug Everingham from Rob Totten ==== From: robtotten@westnet.com.au Subject: Fw: French Scientist Who Mocked Gore's Nobel Prize as 'Political Gimmick' May Be Appointed to French Super-Ministry Post Date: 1 June 2009 12:59:47 PM To: Undisclosed-Recipient:; ----- : Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2009 10:38 PM Subject: Fwd: French Scientist Who Mocked Gore's Nobel Prize as 'Political Gimmick' May Be Appointed to French Super-Ministry Post http://www.climatedepot.com/a/929/Et-Tu-Francois-Skeptical-Scientist- Who-Mocked-Gores-Nobel-Prize-as-Political-Gimmick-May-Be-Appointed-to- French-SuperMinistry-Post Et Tu Francois? Skeptical Scientist Who Mocked Gore's Nobel Prize as 'Political Gimmick' May Be Appointed to French Super-Ministry Post Ridiculed Gore's Warming Documentary as 'Nonsense' Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - By Marc Morano ? Climate Depot Washington, DC: French President Nicolas Sarkozy's appears ready to appoint renowned geophysicist and former socialist party leader Dr. Claude Allegre ? France's most outspoken global warming skeptic -- as the new super-ministry of industry and innovation. If Allegre, who has mocked former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Prize as ?a political gimmick,? is chosen for the appointment, it would send political earthquakes through Europe and the rest of the world. Allegre is a former believer in man-made global warming who reversed his views in recent years to become one of the most vocal dissenters of man-made global warming fears. Climate Depot first reported on Allegre's possible appointment to a government post on April 16, 2009. Allegre, a former French Socialist Party leader and a member of both the French and U.S. Academies of Science, was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, but he now says the cause of climate change is "unknown." Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books, and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. Allegre's possible appointment has 'drawn strong protests' from environmentalists, the Financial Times reported on May 27, 2009. "Putting him in charge of scientific research would be tantamount to 'giving the finger to scientists', said Nicolas Hulot, France's best- known environmental activist," told the Financial Times. But Allegre hit back at his environmental critics and accused them of "lies and distortions" about his record and beliefs. "As a scientist and citizen, I, unlike others, do not want environmentalism to accentuate the crisis or make the least well-off suffer more," Allegre said according to the May 27 Financial Times article. Called Gore's Nobel Prize 'Political Gimmick' Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992, letter titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" in which the scientists warned that global warming's "potential risks are very great." But Allegre now believes the global warming hysteria is motivated by money. "The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" he explained. (LINK) Allegre mocked former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Prize in 2007, calling it "a political gimmick." Allegre said on October 14, 2007, "The amount of nonsense in Al Gore's film! It's all politics; it's designed to intervene in American politics. It's scandalous." (LINK) Ridiculed 'Prophets of Doom' Allegre ridiculed what he termed the "prophets of doom of global warming" in a September 2006 article. (LINK) Allegre has mocked "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Capitol Hill's leading climate skeptic, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has highlighted Allegre's recent conversion to a dissenter of global warming. ?I find it ironic that a free market conservative capitalist in the U.S. Senate and a French Socialist scientist both apparently agree that sound science is not what is driving this debate, but greed by those who would use this issue to line their own pockets,? Inhofe said in an October 26, 2007 speech on the Senate floor. Allegre was also featured in several U.S. Senate reports on global warming highlighting dissenting scientists. Allegre was featured in a May 15, 2007, report entitled ?Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics.? In addition, Allegre was featured in the March 16, 2009, U.S. Senate report entitled ?Update: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims." Allegre's full entry in 2009's U.S. Senate Report: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims: Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top Geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books, and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of 123 the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the "prophets of doom of global warming" of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" "Glaciers' chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious," Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting, "Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution." Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers" and mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about man-made global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" in which the scientists warned that global warming's "potential risks are very great." Allegre mocked former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Prize in 2007, calling it "a political gimmick." Allegre said on October 14, 2007, "The amount of nonsense in Al Gore's film! It's all politics; it's designed to intervene in American politics. It's scandalous." Related Links: Climate Depot: French Reversal on Climate Policy? Outspoken Skeptical Scientist May Be Tapped as Government Minister! - April 16, 2009 2009 U.S. Senate Report: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims U.S. Senate Report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics National Post: Allegre's second thoughts -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090602/26bc0c01/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Tue Jun 2 20:22:12 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Tue Jun 2 20:22:56 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Stop NBC from swiftboating universal health care Message-ID: Dear Friends: NBC is getting ready to air ads against universal health care by a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights. The spokesman in the ads, and the founder of the group (!), is a thief named Rick Scott. "Conservatives for Patients Rights" is launching a $20 million campaign to defeat any chance of a public option similar to the infamous Harry and Louise Ads. I hope you will sign a petition urging NBC not to air ads by this fraudster. A petition will only take a moment. Here's the brief note I included (but of course you don't have to add anything-- just a signature will do): " 'To NBC News President Steve Capus 6/2/09 According to The Nation magazine on March 11, "Having Rick Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation. 'You see, the for-profit hospital chain Scott helped found--the one he ran and built his entire reputation on--was discovered to be in the habit of defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.' In 1997 dozens of whistleblowers stepped forward who had worked for the company and revealed that they kept two sets of books, one honest and one dishonest. Scott was never criminally charged, but his company was fined 1.7 billion, the largest fraud settlement in American history. Now this man has the gall to weigh in as a spokesman on the public policy debate on healthcare. Please, Mr. Capus, do not allow this thief a platform to peddle his toxic potion.' " You can read the whole Nation article (it's a good one) here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/hayes and sign the petition to NBC here: http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/nbc_healthcare/?r_by=-104684-XTA3iZx&rc= confemail Credo Action would like to get 50,000 signatures collected before the ad begins airing. They're in home stretch, but need more signatures in the next few hours. If possible for you to weigh in on this quickly, it would be great. Good health to all, B From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Tue Jun 2 22:16:26 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Tue Jun 2 22:37:35 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] What's new at Links: Shorter work week, population and climate, El Salvador, Michael Lebowitz, Castro, S. Korea, Marta Harnecker, Tamils, Make Greed History, Mexico Message-ID: <4A26072A.6020402@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: Shorter work week, population and climate, El Salvador, Michael Lebowitz, Castro, S. Korea, Marta Harnecker, Tamils, Make Greed History, Mexico * * * Subscribe free to Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal - at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to links@dsp.org.au *Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in /Links/. * * * What's wrong with a 30-hour work week? By Don Fitz May 30, 2009 -- With millions of jobs lost during the first part of 2009, who is calling for a shorter work week to spread the work around? In the US, the vehicle industry sets the pace for organised labour. The only discussion at the top levels of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is how quickly the gains won during the last 50 years can be given back. Does the UAW have no memory of the 1930s and 1940s when a shorter work week was at centre of organising demands? * Read more Ten reasons why population control is not an answer to climate change By Simon Butler June 1, 2009 -- Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. The scientific evidence of the scale of the threat is overwhelming, compelling and frightening. Climate tipping points -- points which if crossed will lead to runaway global warming -- are being crossed now. A discussion has surfaced about whether population-control measures should be a key plank in the climate action movement's campaign arsenal. Below are 10 reasons why such a decision would hinder, rather than help, the necessary task of building a movement that can win. * Read more El Salvador: The beginning of a new era -- and great challenges By Jay Hartling May 31, 2009 -- El Salvador -- On Monday, June 1, 2009 El Salvador will turn a new page in its history with the inauguration of the country?s first left government, joining the ranks of the majority of Latin America. Representing the Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) ), Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, president and vice-president elect, will face a national assembly in which the FMLN is outnumbered by more than 2:1. Out of a total of 84 seats, the FMLN only have 35. This will make broad sweeping changes difficult, but not impossible, and may force Funes to use the power of the presidential veto as a bargaining chip. It is important that those of us observing from a distance understand the complicated environment within which the new government will be operating. * Read more Michael Lebowitz: '21st century socialism needs a 21st century Marxism' May 23, 2009 -- Michael Lebowitz is a Canadian Marxist economist. He is the director of the "Transformative practice and human development" program at the Caracas-based left-wing think tank, the Centro Internacional Miranda. He is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University and author of Build it Now: 21st Century Socialism and the 2004 Isaac Deutscher-prize winning Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. Christopher Kerr spoke with Lebowitz about capitalism's crisis and the socialist alternative. * Read more Fidel Castro's declarations of resistance Review by Alex Miller The Declarations of Havana, by Fidel Castro, with an introduction by Tariq Ali, Verso, 2008, 138 pages May 22, 2009 -- As Cuba celebrates the 50th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, it is fitting that three of the most famous documents relating to the struggle against Batista and the early days of the revolution are published together in a single volume. The Declarations of Havana is part of Verso's new "revolutions" series. * Read more South Korea: The legacy of the 1980 Kwangju uprising On the weekend of May 15-18, 2009, the city of Kwangju, South Korea, held the Kwangju International Peace Forum to celebrate the struggle for democracy in South Korea and to support similar struggles elsewhere in Asia. Christopher Kerr of South Korea-based solidarity group Venceremos caught up with George Katsiaficas to discuss the legacy of the 1980 Kwangju uprising. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #3 -- To be at the service of popular movements, not displace them [This is the third in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker We have previously stated that politics is the art of constructing a social and political force capable of changing the balance of forces in order to make possible tomorrow that which today appears to be impossible. But, to be able to construct a social force it is necessary for political organisations to demonstrate a great respect for grassroots movements; to contribute to their autonomous development, leaving behind all attempts at manipulation. They must take as their starting point that they aren't the only ones with ideas and proposals and, on the contrary, grassroots movements have much to offer us, because through their daily struggles they have also learned things, discovered new paths, found solutions and invented methods which can be of great value. * Read more Socialist Party of Malaysia condemns Sri Lanka's slaughter of Tamils By the Socialist Party of Malaysia (Parti Sosialis Malaysia, PSM) May 27, 2009 -- Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared victory over Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the last LTTE strongpoints crumbled. The victory is for no one but only the chauvinistic nationalist Sinhalese government led by Rajapaksa, which had launched a brutal, merciless and cold-blooded military offensive against the Tamil population for several months, inflicting nothing but death, destruction and misery. The victory proclaimed by Rajapaksa will not put an end to the conflict that has lasted for several decades, but signals a new assault on working people in Sri Lanka -- Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim. * Read more Scottish Socialist Party: `Make Greed History * Read more `The only fight we lose is the one we abandon': Mexico's first openly lesbian MP on LGBT rights and people's power By Rachel Evans May 21, 2009 -- Coyacan, Mexico -- I interviewed Patria Jim?nez in Coyacan's normally bustling markets. The onset of the swine flu crisis had emptied the streets and enforced a stiffness into Mexico's normally effusive greetings tradition. No kissing hello or shaking hands was encouraged. Jim?nez ignored swine-flu protocol and greeted me warmly. In 1997, Jim?nez made history by being elected the first openly lesbian member of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. Representing the Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT), which was in an alliance with the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), Jim?nez was also the first openly lesbian candidate to be elected in Latin America. She is standing again within a coalition, Salvemos a M?xico (We Will Save Mexico), for the July 2009 federal elections. She remains a member of the PRT. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #2 -- Convince, not impose [This is the second in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta HarneckerPopular movements and, more generally, the different social protagonists who today are engaged in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation both at the international and national levels reject, with good reason, attitudes that aim to impose hegemony or control on movements. They don't accept the steamroller policy that some political and social organisations tended to use that, taking advantage of their position of strength and monopolising political positions, attempt to manipulate the movement. They don't accept the authoritarian imposition of a leadership from above; they don't accept attempts made to lead movements by simply giving orders, no matter how correct they are. * Read more * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ATTENTION: Sign up for regular ``what's new'' announcement emails at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 Follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090603/8f1f7b06/attachment.html From papadop at peak.org Wed Jun 3 10:35:51 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Wed Jun 3 10:37:14 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Obama's pragmatism will backfire Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/29/barack-obama-politics-agenda The Guardian (London) Wednesday 3 June 2009 18.00 BST by Michael Lerner President Barack Obama's very non-ideological pragmatism, which has received so much praise inside the Beltway and which has given him public support in his few months in office, will ultimately be the downfall of his presidency. This approach and the free pass it generates from the media may indeed allow him to push through programmes that here and there make significant advances toward a more generous and caring society. But it guarantees that he will not be able to gain mass support for a coherent worldview that can form the basis for an alternative to "let the marketplace decide", which has been the guiding principle for American domestic politics, and "let our power shape the world", which has been our primary approach to foreign policy. The non-ideological approach implicitly encourages us to believe in Obama himself -- he will be our saviour, our refuge, our deliverer from the bad times of the Bush administration. And indeed he may. I believe that we've never had a more brilliant, decent and spiritually grounded president. Yet by failing to educate people on a fundamentally different way of thinking, by eschewing articulation of the spiritual and ethical principles that ought to guide us as a society and showing how his programmes flow from those principles, Obama is disempowering those who will have to continue the fight when he is no longer president. Hillary Clinton once told me, when I met with her in the White House, that when FDR met with labour leaders in 1934, after four hours of talks, he said the following: "You've convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there and force me to do it." What he meant, Hillary explained to me, was that the pressures on a president to stay with the status quo and the forces of the economic and political elites of the country are enormous, so that even when a president wishes to move in a different direction, he needs to be able to point to forces from the progressive world that are equally vociferous and pushing him in the direction he wishes to go. So, those who say "Don't criticise Obama, because he is such a decent person, so smart, and obviously wants the right things" are missing the ad point. Obama needs to be pushed by the progressive world in order to be able to be who he wants to be. He needs our support in this way. Contrast this with the political right, which has consistently articulated its views that the capitalist market is the ultimate arbiter and stabiliser of our society and that all good things will flow from empowering it to work its magic. And that homeland security can best be achieved by dominating other countries around the world and insisting that they follow our leadership. Even when their policies fail or are repudiated by the public, they stay on message, and hence have managed to persuade a solid 30% of the country to follow irrational policies and to oppose any serious change. While I despise the content of their politics, their ideological consistency and willingness to educate the public to their worldview has given them a great advantage over liberals who fear to put forward a coherent alternative lest they be labelled "ideologues". With that committed base that they've fostered, they push the media in ways that make them far more powerful than their numbers would justify. In fact, at this very moment, and despite the outcome of the 2008 election, they are able to put the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress on the defensive, because the Democrats are unable to mobilise their own base around "pragmatism" and a non-ideological "lets be realistic" politics. I watched how the non-ideological perspective of the Clinton White House played out in winning short-term victories by embracing the pro-market and pro-power ideologies of the right. Sure, the Clintons were "pragmatic" and got lots of their legislation passed. But since they avoided a commitment to an alternative worldview, they failed to build an American constituency that would reject the retrograde policies of the Reagan-Bush I-Bush II years. The result: Even at the moment of greatest economic success, in the year 2000, the Democrats could not hold onto the White House or win back control of Congress, and soon all that had been legislated was dismantled. The same will happen to the Obama Democrats, unless they are capable of shaping a new worldview and showing how their specific policies flow from it. In the politics of meaning that I first articulated to the Clinton White House -- much to the annoyance of Rahm Emanuel and others who were religiously anti-ideological -- I spoke about America's hunger for a new ethos that would transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace. America needs a new bottom line so that corporations, government policies, social institutions and even personal behaviour are judged rational, productive or efficient not only to the extent that they maximise money and power (the old bottom line) but also to the extent that they maximise love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, as well as enhance our capacity to go beyond a utilitarian approach to nature so that we can respond with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. The US and UK need a new approach to foreign policy based on the recognition that in the 21st century, our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of everyone else on the planet, and hence that a strategy of generosity should replace the strategy of domination (such as by launching a global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate healthcare and to repair the global environment). We need a national bank that can provide interest-free loans to help individuals and small businesses, in accordance with the biblical mandate. Underlying all this is a worldview that gives priority to love, generosity and caring as the central values that must shape domestic and foreign policy. I know from my personal encounters with him that Obama actually shares those values, but until he consistently articulates them as the basis for a new politics and, equally important, uses those values as the criteria by which he encourages others to judge his and all other social policies, he will increasingly find himself falling back on the dominant paradigms of the past. The more that happens, the more the people who momentarily allowed themselves to hope that something new was really going to happen in politics will fall back into cynicism and despair. And as they do so, there will be no force capable of resisting a rightwing backlash that will ultimately undo all the good that Obama is trying to do. From papadop at peak.org Thu Jun 4 10:39:00 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Thu Jun 4 10:42:32 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Obama's Mid-East balancing act Message-ID: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8082567.stm BBC NEWS Thursday, 4 June 2009 As US President Barack Obama gives a keynote speech on the future of US relations with the Muslim world at Cairo University, Christian Fraser considers the difficulties the president faces in trying to please everyone. There are no end of term exams at Cairo University today. In fact normal student life has been suspended for almost a week. The buildings have been spruced up, the roads repaved and the giant dome above the great hall where he is speaking has been buffed to a bronze sheen. All this effort. But then President Obama is no ordinary visitor. Remember the US aid package to Egypt is the largest to any country in the Middle East with the exception of Israel. For the US administration the venue was carefully considered. Egypt is a weighty Arab, majority Muslim country, a trendsetter in the region and now an important counterweight to the perceived threat from Iran. The population is young. Sixty percent of the region's people are under the age of 25, so where better for the president to speak? Many of the young people the president is addressing want 'change', and they are waiting anxiously for someone to deliver it He wants to change the tone, to change the way people think of the United States. He has lived in Indonesia. He has a Muslim father. The polls suggest the Arabs already recognise the change in style. In the ancient souks of the city, they are even selling Obama souvenirs. But in coming to Egypt, President Obama must contend with an unavoidable truth, that for the past 28 years this country has been ruled with the blunt edge of emergency power. Fundamental freedoms are suspended. Many of the young people the president is addressing want "change," and they are waiting anxiously for someone to deliver it. POLITICAL BACKLASH Ahead of the president's visit I sat with the lawyer Ayman Nour. Mr Nour was recently attacked with a flammable liquid while sitting in his car In 2005 he dared to challenge the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the first multi-candidate presidential election encouraged by the Americans. He took just 6% of the vote. Hardly a threat, but the backlash was unforgiving. Nour was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and convicted of forgery charges, many considered politically inspired. He suffered a stroke during three and half years in jail and in August last year, in desperation, wrote an impassioned letter to the then Senator Obama, pleading for his intervention. He was finally released in February, within weeks of the US president's inauguration. Ayman Nour's fate is the blunt warning to others who might show the same temerity in taking on the president Nour's supporters were euphoric, but since then there has been little to celebrate. He is banned from practising law. He is not allowed to work in politics or even to open a bank account. He is estranged from his wife Gamila who campaigned tirelessly for his freedom. A result, he said, of the impossible strain. BLUNT WARNING We chatted in his scruffy apartment above a supermarket in Zamalek, an island in the middle of the Nile in Cairo's diplomatic quarter. After three and a half years of neglect, the rooftop pool is empty, the chairs around it are broken, the billiard table is a forgotten relic. "While in jail I lived under the worst conditions any political prisoner could face," he told me. "Violence, torture and revenge. Irrational revenge without any reason. " But of course there was one very good reason. Ayman Nour's fate is the blunt warning to others who might show the same temerity in taking on the president. The goal is to break their resolve, to crush the spirit, and yet Nour still wants to run again in 2011. Even though last week, the day after he told me of his decision to run, he was attacked while sitting in his car, by a man on a motorcycle. The biker sprayed a flammable liquid through the window, setting fire to his head. ENDORSEMENT CONCERNS This kind of political repression extends far beyond Ayman Nour. The outlawed Islamist group - the Muslim Brotherhood - who many believe would win if there was a free and fair election, say more than 300 of their members have been rounded up and arrested in the past six months alone. Many without charge. "America has been supporting these autocracies in the Arab world for 60 years," said Nour. "When will they realise that the price of that policy is resentment, extremism and terrorism?" Many here suggest the silent opposition in this country is enormous, under-estimated and the problem for President Obama, regardless of the bold intentions of his speech, is that his visit will be seen by many as an endorsement of Mubarak's rule. "It is a disaster," said Wael Abbas a renowned journalist and blogger. "He shouldn't be coming to Egypt. It's not a free Muslim country. "He should speak in a Muslim country where they respect the rule of law." But a quarter of the Arabic world lives in Egypt - a big audience - and this country is now a crucial strategic partner. The president, in his first interview with the BBC this week, described his Egyptian counterpart as a stalwart ally, a force for stability. The language in this speech will point to a new strategy, one that neither neglects concerns for human rights, nor pursues them in isolation from the other major priorities. But can he be all things to all people? Even for a skilled orator like Barack Obama it is a very difficult game to play. From McPogo at aol.com Fri Jun 5 10:52:40 2009 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Fri Jun 5 10:54:09 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Will Buchenwald Persuade Obama to Pursue Justice for the Tortured? Message-ID: Skipped content of type multipart/related From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Fri Jun 5 20:25:08 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Fri Jun 5 20:25:51 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Will Buchenwald Persuade Obama to Pursue Justice for the Tortured? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20090606032509.D06B512B37@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090606/ed43132e/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 581ed6.gif Type: image/gif Size: 6995 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090606/ed43132e/581ed6.gif -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 581f82.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5043 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090606/ed43132e/581f82.jpg From duanebehrens at cox.net Sat Jun 6 08:47:31 2009 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (Duane Behrens) Date: Sat Jun 6 08:47:50 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Meet the New Boss - Same as . . . Message-ID: <20090606114731.R5JZO.257644.imail@fed1rmwml45> "We're now seeing the final phases of the Republican dance macabre. The Limbaugh-Gingrich anti-Latino campaign is so dangerous that some Republican senators, including right wing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), are moving away from the slanders against Sotomayor. John McCain (R-AZ) also sees the implications for his party. He's signed up to attend the National Council of La Raza conference this summer to counter the anti Latino rhetoric spread by other Republican leaders." "[But] Congressional Democrats voted in the majority to authorize the Iraq invasion. They voted in the majority to fund the Iraq adventure long after the lies leading to war were well known. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for the Patriot Act. A Democratic controlled Senate allowed further government spying on personal communication (FISA Amendments) in 2008 and a third of Senate Democrats supported the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gutted habeas corpus. " "Democrats voted for the initial Wall Street welfare bill; also know as the bailout. Right now, the Obama administration is responsible for doubling the Bush administrations cash transfer form the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street and the banks. Democrats failed to pass the only major bill to ease rampant foreclosures. This left 1.7 million families likely to lose their homes. Democrats did pass a credit card reform bill but forgot to cap those 29% interest limits that the banks arbitrarily assign." "There was an announced policy to leave Iraq. To date, all we've seen are plans to open up a new phase of the Afghan war with tens of thousands of troops simply switching job assignments from Iraq to an even more treacherous landscape. Ominously, we now have plans for super embassy in Pakistan to rival the fortress constructed in Iraq." Michael Collins 6/05/09 -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7218920724339766288 From duanebehrens at cox.net Sat Jun 6 09:00:42 2009 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (Duane Behrens) Date: Sat Jun 6 09:01:13 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Meet the New Boss, Part 2 Message-ID: <20090606120042.IGS2H.257811.imail@fed1rmwml45> " Democrats don't want people to see pictures of Bush-Cheney torture from the prison at Guantanamo, probably because it occurred with funding that they helped provide. They don't want to close that facility if it means housing prisoners in the United States. This forced their president into the extraordinary and troubling position of maintaining current prisoners in Cuba. As the Democratic Senators participated in the 90 to 6 vote to refuse President Obama funds to close Guantanamo, they were resolute in failing to mention that only10 of over 400 prisoners there are charged with a violent crime. To borrow an appropriate response, 'You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, at long last?' Apparently not." "Democrats won't even talk about the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians due to civil strife caused by the war that they funded. Failing to talk about it means it never happened, they hope." "Despite all of the alleged but obvious crimes of Bush-Cheney against people here and around the world, the Democrats want to 'look forward' and bypass prosecutions of any sort against the Bush administration." Michael Collins -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7218920724339766288 From thinker at thelakebc.ca Sat Jun 6 09:35:55 2009 From: thinker at thelakebc.ca (Ed Deak) Date: Sat Jun 6 09:33:26 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fiat lux 233 Message-ID: <200906061633.n56GWx7T024195@karma.reboot.ca> To: record@cablerocket.com Subject: Fiat lux # 233 Fiat lux # 233 May 29, 2009. Interesting that, in spite of their rosy predictions about this so called "recession only lasting a few months", the politicians now are forced to admit that it is far deeper than what they were predicting not too long ago. Which means that they either have no idea about what's going on, or what to do, or are lying their teeth out to pacify the public, while filling more taxpayers money into the pockets of the crooks who caused it, so they can keep on selling the idea of World government under corporate dictatorship. In the European Union the politicians are waiting and hoping for the Irish public to vote for and accept the Lisbon Treaty, so they can implement the EU Constitution, which was rejected by the French and Dutch voters. The plan is to reduce all participant countries to the level of provinces, ruled over by the bureaucrats in Brussels, controlling everything they make, eat and think. In good Soviet fashion, in the name of "freedom" and "democracy", of course. More about this in the next few weeks. With the global economy rapidly going downhill, without any end in sight, let's return to my last column on survival, based on our own personal experiences. Perhaps it will be of help to some people who were born and grew up in the age of glorified, pushbutton waste, falsely called "economic boom". Although we never had much as children, even we weren't prepared for what we had to go through after the war as refugees, starving and running around in old military uniform pieces and boots, and in coats made of army blankets. Of course, being Hungarians, some of the most negative people on Earth, always looking backwards, we went through the customary moaning and groaning sessions, but we also had enough survival instincts to realize that people who had a piece of land to grow things on, a few chickens, some tools and the knowhow of how to use them, were the best off, even under the most dismal conditions. As we could never trust any political or economic system again, we have been working for the rest of our lives, preparing ourselves for the greatest degree of freedom of action, collecting property, tools and knowledge to become self sufficient, as much as possible. We saw a lot of Canada, when we crossed the country on our motorcycle in May 1955 Later I crossed five more times on backroads during the Shell 4000 Car Rallies in the '60s. But it was in 1960 when first saw the Cariboo, on a car rally and realized that it was the land I have seen in my dreams since childhood, and finally I came home. We came up for a week of camping in 1963 and Marta felt the same. After that all we could think about was how to get out of Vancouver and live in the land of our dreams. It took 16 years, but finally we made it and never regretted it for a single minute. We always had electric lights in our childhoods, but our mothers never had any electric kitchen appliances, fridges, or washing machines. They did everything by hand, washing clothes, cooking on wood and coal stoves. Yes, they were the so called "kitchen slaves" in today's propaganda terms, who also had time to go visiting, make the most intricate and beautiful crafts and clothes, and to dress up their families for the weekly promenades, when whole communities went to walk, talk and enjoy the company of their friends. What do the "career women" of have today, except commuting long distances to slave behind computers in dreary offices, or flinging hamburgers in hash joints at lousy wages, stressed out, running their heads of, without a minute of rest. Yes, the main benefit of all our "labour saving devices" and the travel hysteria, wasting lives and time on planes, is that people have no time for anything. We used to have a large custom furniture and woodworking shop in Richmond, where we prefabricated two cabins, one of them 12'x8', the other 8'x8' for our son, to tie us over while we were building our house, which was supposed to be habitable by late 1979. But when we realized that we won't get paid for our shop, we built another 12' x 8' cabin, divided into halves as office/studio for me and work room, with her treadle sewing machine, for Marta. As we had no electricity, we were using kerosene lamps at first, then wired up for 12V lights with batteries charged by solar panels and a small generator, a 4' x8 ' kitchen with Propane heating and cooking stove, but no fridge, running water, or phone. We grew up without refrigeration and including the eight and half years in the cabins, we didn't have any for close to 40 years, or almost half of our lives. I was 52, when we moved up here, Marta a year younger. Completely ignorant greenhorns for life in the Cariboo, as far gardening and the looking after animals were concerned. But we were determined to succeed. We built a well insulated house for our chickens, bought a cow to milk, pigs to butcher, tilled the sod up for market gardens and with the help of our books and advice of our neighbours we learned how to do things. When we had the first vegetables from our garden, we recognized the tastes of our childhood, having grown up with organic produce, grown without chemicals. We were making butter, cheese, under the most primitive conditions, butchered and plucked by hand hundreds of meatbirds for sale, built custom furniture with a small generator, painted pictures and did any odd job we could find to survive. Meanwhile we bought more tools, equipment and materials, literally dollar by dollar, to finish our house and moved in on Christmas day 1987, soon after we first had electricity and phone, but still no running water for another 7 or 8 years. Yes, all difficulties can be overcome if and when people start thinking for themselves and dare to shed the chains of brainwash, while waiting for handouts from their "betters". From papadop at peak.org Sat Jun 6 14:29:17 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sat Jun 6 14:30:31 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] ON A TIGHTROPE WITHOUT A NET Message-ID: http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/01/on-a-tightrope-without-a-net/ Sharon Astyk's Ruminations on an Ambiguous Future Sharon June 1st, 2009 The sum total of today's news adds up to the continuing story of the destruction of our protective safety nets. GM's bankruptcy is the lead, of course, one that constitutes an utter disaster for millions of people - unemployed workers who are unlikely to find new manufacturing jobs before their benefits run out, states swamped with benefits claims, elderly pensioners facing disaster, and the oridinary fall-out for towns, cities and states that will lead, later to deeper cuts of the nets that were designed to catch people when they fall. Then there's California - among its major cuts, California stands to cut the poison control hotline, benefits for the disabled, school funding, health care for working class people and children, access to state parks, and almost everything else you can imagine. The cuts will fall heavily on the backs of the elderly, the already poor, the disabled and children, as always - people with minimal political constituencies will bear the brunt of this. And again, there's more to come - California is already threatening to take money out of towns and cities - areas already hurting, already failing to sell municipal bonds. For the 47 states facing budget shortfalls, the trajectory is pretty clear - the federal government screws the states (by pouring its money into Wall Street, not helping people meet basic needs), the states sue the towns, and you get screwed all three ways - with fewer services, higher tax burdens and life on a tightrope without a net to catch you when you fall. California is the beginning, but not, unfortunately, the end. So far, most of us have no idea what life without a net is like - what happens when the federal government can no longer subsidize the stripped unemployment funds? What happens in the cold parts of the country when low income heating programs are stripped? What happens to the elderly, the disabled and the sick? What happens as public resources are stripped, damaged and destroyed? One thing I think it is important to observe is that we have chosen our present situation in large measure. As of this point, the US has actually spent 4 trillion on bailouts, almost all of it to large corporations, and committed another 10 billion. That money could have supported the people directly - now we are asking how will we fund national health care? Well, we spent the money, folks - and not on you. If the concern was lending, the government could have loaned. If the concern was keeping auto workers working, the government could have provided work and enough income to get along, or incentives for them to make new businesses. No matter what your feelings about big government, we've got it - and at every level we could have spent less and done more without pouring money into the coffers of people who were skimming most of it for themselves - legalized skimming, but skimming nonetheless. It is the culmination of the insane rising-tide-lifts-all-boats- notion under which globalization was born - if we just make the rich richer, maybe a tiny bit will leak down to those who aren't rich. And as we keep finding, not much leaks down. What'ss facing us is a tidal wave of suffering - and the anger, and political conflict that accompanies it. The UN is warning that unrest is brewing all over the world - the BBC reports that we're facing massive repression, as human rights at all levels hit the backburners, and the anger that repressive and destructive governments agenda. The unrest that accompanies this worldwide may well change things beyond recognition. The project for all of us is to maintain what we can, to meet needs that we can, and to triage our safety nets and provide what resources we can. That's why I was so pleased to read about Rob Hopkins and Richard Heinberg's nascent discussion of using Transition to provide some kind of resources for people dealing with the present crisis. I think that as a basic principle, we can't talk about addressing peak oil and climate change unless we actually have something to offer the victims of peak oil and climate change - placing these events always-already in the future, as though we had time and leisure is, I think, alienating, and being unable to respond immediately to realities risks tarring adaptive movements as irrelevant. I keep saying it, and will keep saying it - the things that we need to prioritize in responding to our collective crisis are precisely the things that people already care about most - any movement that does not focus on the human priorities of meeting basic needs will not succeed. At the neighborhood and community level, we need each other more than we ever have. The safety nets that are gone are going to have to be replaced with us. In an essay I wrote a while back, I observed that the public safety nets were still holding, but that eventually they would crumble - and in many states, they are doing so now. What I wrote then now has to be put into practice, Think of poverty as a fall out of a window. Right now, there is a layer of safety net that catches a majority of people, although by no means all. But what's under those? What happens if the traditional nets break? We need those nets not only because protecting others from hunger, cold and suffering is the ethical thing to do, and not only because, as they say, the life you save may soon be your own, but because all of our personal security depends on our community security. In hard times, crime rates go up, and people get angry. Brooks is right to anticipate a movement of angry and frightened people, and when people are angry and frightened, we re all vulnerable. In a rational society, there are more layers to break your fall, and we're going to need them. First, there are formal structures at the community level - if your town never needed a food pantry because people could drive to the neighboring city, now is the time to propose it at your church, school or other possible site. Think about ways you could adapt existing infrastructure - could the schools start distributing extra school lunches to the needy after the day is over? Could your school establish a backpack program, sending food home for the weekend with the neediest kids? Could you start a local gleaning program, or a senior lunch program? If you have these structures, but they are struggling, what can you do to reinforce them? Can you make another donation? Start a fund drive? What about setting up a bulletin-board system to bring families struggling to keep their homes together with people who need housing. There are a thousand good ideas - yours is probably one of them. The next layer is the neighbor and community layer. I know we all worry about looking like busybodies, but now is the time to start looking in on your neighbors, and offering to help. The way to do this is to talk to people, even before it looks like they need anything. That way you ll know if your elderly neighbor can no longer afford to drive to get her medication and you can offer to pick it up, or if a neighbor is out of work and might be glad to get a day's pay helping a friend of yours winterize her house. Being neighborly, and also gentle and unjudgemental is how you are going to know if someone in your neighborhood has no food in the pantry. For every person who signs up for aid and accepts help, there are several who will rather go hungry than take institutional charity - but who will gladly come over and share a meal with their neighbor, or do you a favor and take that loaf of bread that you ve got no where to store. One of the most important things we can do is when we do spend money these days, spend it in our communities if at all possible. I know most of us aren'tt going to be buying a lot of holiday gifts, but every dollar you can pass on to a neighbor, a local farmer or a local business that enriches your community is one that makes everyone more secure. So maybe hire the out of work neighbor to plant and tend a garden for your sister, or give your best friend a farmstand gift certificate. Finally, there s family, or the people who function like one. Those are the people who are standing there with their arms out at the base of your fall, and are prepared to risk something to catch you. These are the people you can depend on when you have no place to go or no food in the pantry. And as long as you have food and a place to sleep, try hard to be that person for close friends and extended family. In fact, try hard to extend out the circle if you can a bit - there are a lot of vulnerable people out there who could use a hand up. You don t have to take in everyone, or treat everyone like family, but if each of us expands the category of people we will not allow to fall to the ground by one or two, well, there s hope for us yet. Today, June 1, 2009, is the day the nets broke. Let's get to securing the lower levels, because they will be desperately needed, and we each of us depend upon them. Sharon From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Fri Jun 5 21:40:31 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Sat Jun 6 19:33:09 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [SouthSidersForPeace] Tell Secy Gates: Stop rewarding Halliburton for killing US Soldiers Message-ID: <016b01c9e718$2ce1d9c0$02ad57ca@jfos> Tell Defense Secretary Gates to hold Halliburton war profiteers accountable Dear SSFP Friends, The Department of Defense just gave $80 million in bonuses to KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, for electrical wiring contracts in Iraq. But in a dramatic Senate hearing, the DoD's own documents revealed that U.S. soldiers have died via electrocution as a direct result of KBR's shoddy and substandard work. Evidence revealed this week has shown that eighteen U.S. soldiers have died as a result of KBR's work -- including a decorated Green Beret whose death was classified by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division as a "negligent homicide." I just signed a petition asking Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to rescind the KBR bonuses, pursue criminal charges against the officials responsible for the electrocution deaths of U,S. soldiers, and stop awarding defense contracts to KBR & Halliburton. I hope you will, too. Please have a look and take action. http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/kbr/?r_by=4150-1960171-UpOFICx&rc=confemail MaryBeth Ingberg; MDiv, MSOD Welcome Change Organization & Leadership Development info@welcome-change.com __._,_.___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090606/740b5f96/attachment.html From duanebehrens at cox.net Sun Jun 7 07:25:20 2009 From: duanebehrens at cox.net (Duane Behrens) Date: Sun Jun 7 07:25:34 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Meet the New Boss - Conclusion Message-ID: <20090607102520.V549E.268994.imail@fed1rmwml39> "If both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look nothing like the current two political parties." Michael Collins The Binary Fallacy and the End of Both Political Parties "One party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed -- wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive fantasies of empire through war. "The two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other. "When you're broke, you know it. "When you're out of work, you know it. "When there are no jobs, you know it. "And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it. "The game is up. The party is over. The people have a fundamental right to survive, at the very least. "If both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look nothing like the current two political parties. "The binary fallacy and the two parties that fail to address our crises will be no more. Relying solely on the failures of the opposing party while embracing their programs will soon be defunct. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Collins is a writer who focuses on clean elections and voting rights. He is the publisher of the web site ElectionFraudNews.com. From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Tue Jun 9 22:18:14 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Tue Jun 9 22:39:29 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] What's new at Links: GM, Marta Harnecker, El Salvador, Racism in Australia, Via Campesina, Venezuela nationalisations, Philippines, Malaysia, Tiananmen massacre, Nigeria Message-ID: <4A2F4216.3030408@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: GM, Marta Harnecker, El Salvador, Racism in Australia, Via Campesina, Venezuela nationalisations, Philippines, Malaysia, Tiananmen massacre, Nigeria * * * Subscribe free to Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal - at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to links@dsp.org.au *Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in /Links/. * * * Rick Wolff: GM -- The system strikes back; Michael Moore: `Convert the factories to build trains, buses, windmills' By Rick Wolff June 5, 2009 -- The greatest tragedies among many in the collapse and bankruptcy of General Motors (GM) concern what is not happening. There are those solutions to GM's problems not being considered by Obama's administration. There are the solutions not being demanded by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW). There are all the solutions not even being discussed by most left commentators on the disaster. Finally there are crucial aspects of GM's demise not getting the attention they deserve. * Read more El Salvador: New FMLN president declares: `Change begins now!' Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, June 3, 2009 -- On June 1, Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Cer?n were sworn in as president and vice-president of El Salvador at the Feria Internacional Convention Center in San Salvador. It was a magical day for the Salvadoran people, social movement organisations, and the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which Funes and Sanchez Cer?n represent. * Read more World farmers' alliance V?a Campesina challenges food profiteers (excerpt from new pamphlet) The following review is an excerpt from a new pamphlet, La V?a Campesina: Farmers North and South Confront Agribusiness, by John Riddell and Adriana Paz, published by Socialist Voice in Canada. Review by John Riddell La V?a Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants by Annette Aur?lie Desmarais. Fernwood Publishing, 2007. May 31, 2009 -- The neoliberal assault that has driven labour into retreat over the last two decades has also sparked the emergence of a peasants' international, La V?a Campesina. Based in 56 countries across five continents, this alliance has mounted a sustained and spirited defence of peasant cultivation, community and control of food production. * Read more (or download pamphlet) Nationalisations and workers' control in Venezuela: 'When the working class roars, capitalists tremble' By Federico Fuentes June 1, 2009 -- Addressing the 400-strong May 21 workshop with workers from the industrial heartland of Guayana, dedicated to the "socialist transformation of basic industry", Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez noted with satisfaction the outcomes of discussions: "I can see, sense and feel the roar of the working class." "When the working class roars, the capitalists tremble", he said. Chavez announced plans to implement a series of radical measures, largely drawn from proposals coming from the workers' discussion that day. The workers greeted each of Chavez's announcements with roars of approval, chanting "This is how you govern!" Chavez said: "The proposals made have emerged from the depths of the working class. I did not come here to tell you what to do! It is you who are proposing this." * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #5 -- Minorities can be right [This is the fifth in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker Democratic centralism implies not only the subordination of the minority to the majority, but also the respect of the majority towards the minority. * Read more Philippines: `Let us now begin the Revolution for Change' Opening talk by Sonny Melencio to the "Pagbabago! No More Trapos in 2010!" forum June 1, 2009 -- On behalf of Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Labouring Masses), I would like to extend our thanks to our two guests here who will be speaking together with me in this forum. One has already symbolised the struggle against the trapo [elite politicians], and I refer to Among Ed. Among Ed has in fact defeated not only the three Gs that have come to symbolise the ``guns, goons and gold'' wielded by the trapos. In Pampanga, Among Ed has beaten the five Gs - which includes two more Gs representing Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the gambling lords. The other one symbolised the call for change, in fact the call for the ouster of the Arroyo regime, during the Manila Peninsula rebellion on November 29, 2007. He is not with us today, because he's still in detention, but he is represented by his lawyer Attorney Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who's going to give us the message from Brigadier General Danilo Lim. * Read more Assaults on Indians in Australia: Globalisation, recession and renewed racism By the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation June 4, 2009 -- The continuing spate of attacks and violence against Indians and Indian students in particular in Australia has once again exploded the much-touted myth that globalisation promotes and respects pluralism and multiculturalism. The response of the Australian government has been shockingly muted, trying to cover up and even deny the racist dimensions of the attacks, terming them as just routine robberies and muggings. If so, why do Indians constitute a disproportionate share of the victims -- 30% in Melbourne? * Read more China: Looking back on the 1989 democracy movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre To mark the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reproduces an excerpt from an analysis by an eyewitness to the 1989 democratic upsurge that preceded the brutal attack. The writer was an Australian socialist who was studying in China at the time. It first appeared in Green Left Weekly on June 26, 1996. By Liang Guosheng On June 4, 1989, troops, armoured personnel carriers and tanks of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) forced their way through human and constructed barricades into central Beijing, taking control of Tiananmen Square. In the process, according to an estimate by Amnesty International soon afterwards, approximately 1000 unarmed protesters were gunned down or otherwise killed. * Read more New pamphlet: The Tamil Freedom Struggle in Sri Lanka The Tamil Freedom Struggle in Sri Lanka By Chris Slee, Brian Senewiratne, Vickramabahu Karunarathne Published by Resistance Books 2009, 40pages Click HERE to order. Nigeria: The video Shell does not want you to see June 1, 2009 -- A pre-trial conference scheduled in the potentially landmark lawsuit brought by Nigerian plaintiffs against oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has been delayed until June 3. The conference was announced following the decision by the presiding judge in the US Southern District Court in New York to delay indefinitely the actual trial. Jury selection in the trial itself had been meant to start April 27, but was put off the day before. No new date was set. Shell is accused of complicity in the 1995 hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a renowned writer and activist, and other leaders of a movement protesting alleged environmental destruction and other abuses by Shell against the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta. * Read more Malaysian socialists call for communist veteran Chin Peng to be allowed home May 31, 2009 -- The Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM, Parti Sosialis Malaysia) became the latest party to urge the government to allow former Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) chief Chin Peng to return home for good. The PSM said the government must honour the peace accord that it signed with the Communist Party of Malaya in 1989 and allow former CPM leader Chin Peng to return. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #4 -- Should we reject bureaucratic centralism and simply use consensus? [This is the fourth in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker, translated by Federico Fuentes For a long time, left-wing parties operated along authoritarian lines. The usual practice was that of bureaucratic centralism, influenced by the experiences of Soviet socialism. All decisions regarding criterion, tasks, initiatives, and the course of political action to take were restricted to the party elite, without the participation or debate of the membership, who were limited to following orders that they never got to discuss and in many cases did not understand. For most people, such practices are increasing intolerable. * Read more * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ATTENTION: Sign up for regular ``what's new'' announcement emails at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 Follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090610/69c68e4f/attachment.html From thinker at xplornet.com Thu Jun 11 19:09:38 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Thu Jun 11 19:07:16 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] test Message-ID: <20090612020652.82B818E0959@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> I've changed my email address today to thinker@Xplornet.com and this is a test. Cheers, Ed. From d_a_d at telusplanet.net Thu Jun 11 19:12:11 2009 From: d_a_d at telusplanet.net (David A Davidson) Date: Thu Jun 11 19:12:32 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] test In-Reply-To: <20090612020652.82B818E0959@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> References: <20090612020652.82B818E0959@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> Message-ID: Re test: Your message received AOK David -----Original Message----- From: mai-not-bounces@globalproblematique.net [mailto:mai-not-bounces@globalproblematique.net] On Behalf Of Ed Deak Sent: June 11, 2009 8:10 PM To: mai-not@globalproblematique.net Subject: [Mai-not] test I've changed my email address today to thinker@Xplornet.com and this is a test. Cheers, Ed. _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Thu Jun 11 19:16:47 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu Jun 11 19:17:12 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Big Pharma assault on children alleged Message-ID: <20090612021649.2EBDD127CE@fep04.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Caught this one on another list. Dunno how valid it is. Dion Giles http://www.naturalnews.com/026429_heroin_drugs_Bayer.html? >FDA Approval of Antipsychotics for Children Mirrors Bayer, AMA >Approvals of Heroin as Cough Medicine for Children by Mike Adams > >Today an FDA advisory panel approved the prescribing of powerful >mind-altering chemicals for children. Seroquel, Zyprexa and Goedon >have now been approved by the advisory panel to be prescribed to >children as young as 10 years old to treat a fictitious disease >invented by psychiatrists and given the name "bipolar disorder." >(There is no such thing as a bipolar disorder disease. It is merely >a name assigned to children demonstrating the predictable side >effects of correctable dietary imbalances.) > >In light of this disturbing decision, it is instructive to remember >the history of pharmaceutical medicine and children. One hundred and >ten years ago, Bayer marketed heroin to children as a non-addictive >alternative to morphine. Did I say "non-addictive?" Yes, it's right >from the company's own marketing materials. It just goes to show you >that drug companies?have been lying to the public (and poisoning the >children) for well over one hundred years. > >Much like the FDA's present-day endorsement of antipsychotic drugs >for children, the American Medical Association endorsed Bayer Heroin >for kids, touting its ability to ease coughs. Heroin definitely >eases coughs. And so does smoking meth! In offering this >endorsement, the AMA apparently borrowed some of the FDA's screwy >logic, which claims "The benefits outweigh the risks." > >This means, of course, that the benefits to the drug companies >outweigh the risks to the children! > >During all this, of course, the AMA utterly failed to inform parents >that heroin was a highly addictive narcotic drug. So parents were >dosing their babies with heroin -- all with the full approval of the >American Medical Association! > >Today, the FDA spearheads the promotion of drugs to children, doing >its best to promote toxic synthetic chemicals that artificially >alter brain chemistry while outlawing any mention of natural >remedies that work much better (like omega-3 oils, which are natural >brain chemistry stabilizers). The FDA also utterly fails to ban >toxic chemical food ingredients known to destroy healthy brain >chemistry (like MSG and artificial food coloring). > >Thus, in one hundred and ten years, western medicine has learned >nothing! It still poisons the children with the full approval of >"health authorities" all while enriching the powerful drug companies > >Full article: >http://www.naturalnews.com/026429_heroin_drugs_Bayer.html? From creuss at bluewin.ch Mon Jun 15 06:19:51 2009 From: creuss at bluewin.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Mon Jun 15 06:20:32 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Students perform "symbolic bank-robberies" Message-ID: Students perform "symbolic bank-robberies" German students striking against Merkel's downsizing & privatization of education for 5 days have announced to perform "symbolic bank-robberies" and sit-ins in banks, to protest against Merkel giving hundreds of billions to banksters while "saving"-to-death the education system. Article in German at http://www.20min.ch/news/ausland/story/Streiken-statt-studieren-22633666 (sorry I couldn't find a similar article in English -- the press doesn't seem keen on reporting this!) Cheers, Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Mon Jun 15 23:39:28 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Tue Jun 16 00:00:12 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] What's new at Links: European election & left unity, Nepal, New Zealand & left unity, DSP & Tamils, Ireland, Marta Harnecker, left unity in Australia, Steve Early, US health Message-ID: <4A373E20.5090806@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: European election & left unity, Nepal, New Zealand & left unity, DSP & Tamils, Ireland, Marta Harnecker, left unity in Australia, Steve Early, US health * * * Subscribe free to Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal - at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to links@dsp.org.au *Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in /Links/. * * * European election: `An alarm is ringing' -- time `to build the broadest possible left unity' Statement by Socialist Resistance (Britain) ... The dog which hardly barked in Britain was the radical left, which paid the price for years of division.... The radical left have to see these elections as a massive wake-up call for reorganisation and unity in advance of the general election. It's clear enough what the agenda of a Tory government will be if it gets a clear mandate... The task now, therefore, is to build the broadest possible unity for the general election. This will not be easy after the events of recent years but it is an imperative of the first order. * Read more Nepal: Maoist student leader -- `It is still a fight to establish a democratic republic, for establishing a socialist system' Ben Peterson interviewed Manushi Bhattarai. She is part of the Maoist team that won student elections at Tribhuvan University -- Nepal's largest university. Q: The All Nepal National Independent Student Union (Revolutionary) (ANNISU(R)) won the student elections at Tribhuvan University. What did the campaign involve, and what are some of your policies as a revolutionary student union? * Read more European election: 60% abstain; gains for the right; revolutionary left wins seats in Portugal and Ireland There was a broad popular abstention in the European elections. Nearly 60% of voters did not vote. Because of this, only a deformed vision of the real relationship of forces in Europe is possible. But it confirms the crisis of legitimacy of the European Union and of the governing parties that implement their policies within this framework, writes Fran?ois Sabado. Other tendencies emerge, initially a rise of the right across Europe. * Read more European election: British left discusses urgent need for left unity By Phil Hearse The outcome of the county council and European parliament elections means that the British left -- the left to the left of New Labour -- has to wake up and break out of its dire sectarian, bureaucratic and factional mindsets. Nothing is more shameful than the lack of of united left slate, around a minimal set of demands in the interets of the working class, in these elections. The near absence of the left from the electoral field was one important reason -- though far from the only one -- that such a large number of the protest votes against the main parties went to the hard-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the fascist British National Party (BNP). It is shameful that the left abandons so much of the electoral field to the far right because of nothing more than hardened, bone-headed, factional idiocy -- topped off by bureaucratic exclusions and anathemas. * Read more New Zealand: Responding to the crisis -- Broad left unity to mobilise masses of people By Vaughan Gunson Unity, May 2009 -- Facing the left today are incredible challenges. The global economic meltdown, combined with the nightmare scenarios of runaway climate change and resource depletion, looms as a human disaster of an unimaginable scale. The question we are all asking ourselves: is how can we organise ourselves and grassroots people into a movement that has the strength and vision to set the world on a different course? Over the last decade Socialist Worker-New Zealand, a small Marxist organisation, has moved towards the realisation that we need to be building alongside other activists a broad left party which has the breadth and reach to give leadership to masses of people. And that we need to begin now, not later. * Read more DSP reiterates support for the right of self-determination for the Tamil people Democratic Socialist Perspective (Australia) statement in response to the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on Sri Lanka June 12, 2009 -- The Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP) -- a Marxist organisation affiliated to the Socialist Alliance of Australia -- supports the right of Tamils to self-determination. We have campaigned in solidarity with the Tamil people for several decades. For example, at the time of the 1983 massacre the DSP worked with the Tamil community in Australia to organise protests. This year too, the DSP, Socialist Alliance and Resistance worked closely with Tamil communities, including helping organise rallies, to highlight the calls for a ceasefire and for self-determination. * Read more Ireland: Socialist Workers Party calls for a `broad radical left party' By the Socialist Workers Party (Ireland) June 11, 2009 -- The election of Joe Higgins as MEP and the defeat of Fianna Fail in Dublin indicates that the political landscape is changing. The recent elections represent a seismic shift in Irish politics. Ever since 1927, Fianna Fail has dominated the working-class vote but this has now changed -- most probably forever. * Read more Uniting the socialist left: the Australian experience Peter Boyle is national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance in Australia. He was interviewed by Socialist Voice (Canada) co-editor Roger Annis. Socialist Voice: The Australian left founded a project of left unity and activism in 2001. Can you describe the early years of that project and what it achieved? Peter Boyle: The Socialist Alliance was formed in 2001 on the back of great optimism about the prospects for left revival in the wake of the rise of a movement at that time against capitalist globalisation. Some 20,000 people had participated in a three-day long blockade of a summit of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne the previous year. That was Australia's "Seattle" and it was followed up on May 1, 2001 with mass blockades of the stock exchanges in all the capital cities of the country. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #7 -- Reasons for popular scepticism concerning politics and politicians [This is the seventh in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker 1. In one of my previous articles, I stated that in order to wage an effective struggle against neoliberalism, it is necessary to unite all those suffering its consequences, and to achieve this objective we must start with the left itself, which in our countries tends to be very dispersed. But, there are many obstacles that impede this task. The first step to overcoming them is to be aware of them and be prepared to face them. 2. One of these obstacles is the growing popular scepticism regarding politics and politicians. 3. This has to do, among other things, with the great constraints that exist today in our democratic systems, which are very different to those that existed prior to the military dictatorships. * Read more United States: Solidarity sometimes (exclusive excerpt from Steve Early's new book, Embedded With Organized Labor) [With the permission of Monthly Review Press, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing an exclusive excerpt from Steve Early's new book, Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home. Embedded With Organized Labor describes how trade union members in the United States have organised successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past. Steve Early has produced a provocative series of essays -- an unusual exercise in "participatory labor journalism" useful to any reader concerned about social and economic justice. As workers struggle to survive and the labour movements try to revive during the current economic crisis, this book provides ideas and inspiration for trade union activists and friends of labour alike. * Read more Swine flu and the case for a single-payer healthcare system in the United States By Billy Wharton June 3, 2009 -- On April 13, 2009, 39-year-old Adela Mar?a Guti?rrez Cruz became the first victim of a new virus that would become known as the swine flu (H1N1). By the time Cruz arrived at a local hospital on April 9, she had already entered acute respiratory distress due to an "atypical pneumonia". Further investigations led to a town outside of a factory farm, run by a subsidiary of the US meat conglomerate Smithfield Foods, in the neighbouring state of Vera Cruz. Causalities began to mount. Yet, nearly two weeks after the first deaths, none of the families of the dead had received anti-viral medications.(1) Mexican health officials claimed to not have the resources to visit the families. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #6 -- The need to unite the party left and the social left By Marta Harnecker 1. The rejection by a majority of the people of the globalisation model imposed on our continent intensifies each day given its inability to solve the most pressing problems of our people. Neoliberal policies implemented by large transnational financial capital, which is backed by a large military and media power, and whose hegemonic headquarters can be found in the United States, have not only been unable to resolve these problems but, on the contrary, have dramatically increased misery and social exclusion, while concentrating wealth in increasingly fewer hands. * Read more * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ATTENTION: Sign up for regular ``what's new'' announcement emails at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 Follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090616/59a98d78/attachment.html From McPogo at aol.com Tue Jun 16 08:13:39 2009 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Tue Jun 16 08:14:22 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] =?iso-8859-1?q?Torture_Continues_at_Guant=E1namo_Bay?= Message-ID: Unbelievable, morally reprehensible torture and internationally recognized crimes against humanity and war crimes are still going on at Guant?namo Bay by Fascist Black-Shirt Squads! MC ============================================================================ _Torture Continues at Guant?namo Bay_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y) Friday 15 May 2009 _by: Jeremy Scahill | Visit article original @ AlterNet_ (http://www.alternet.org/story/140022/) A fence lined with razor wire surrounds the Camp 4 detention facility at Guant?namo Bay, where torture persists. (Photo: Brennan Linsley / AP) The "Black Shirts" of Guant?namo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and "dousing" them with chemicals. As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guant?namo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals. More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guant?namo. The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guant?namo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture - and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions illegal - IRFs remain very much active at Guant?namo. IRF: An Extrajudicial Terror Squad The existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of Guant?namo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to respond to emergencies. "The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guant?namo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually "Gitmoizing" Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs." Gen. Miller ran Guant?namo from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004. When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader" suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg. According to the SOP memo, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before storming the cell: "Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist. Regardless of his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into account in determining the validity of his answer."The IRF team is authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before entering the cell. According to Gen. Miller's memo: "The physical security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount. Use the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be used as a method of punishment." But human rights lawyers, former prisoners and former IRF team members with extensive experience at Guant?namo paint a very different picture of the role these teams played. "They are the Black Shirts of Guant?namo," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented the most Guant?namo prisoners. "IRFs can't be separated from torture. They are a part of the brutalization of humans treated as less than human." Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 50 Guant?namo prisoners, including 31 still imprisoned there, has seen the IRF teams up close. "They're goons," he says. "They've played a huge role." While much of the "torture debate" has emphasized the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" defined by the twisted legal framework of the Office of Legal Council memos, IRF teams in effect operate at Guant?namo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them - sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end. The IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings. So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: IRF-ing prisoners or to be IRF-ed. Former Guant?namo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described "the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke." Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners' "private areas" and Korans to "rile the detainees," saying it "seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed." "I'll put it like this," Stafford Smith says. "My clients are afraid of them." "Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation. Combined with other documentation, including prisoner testimony and legal memos, the IRF teams appear to be one of the most significant forces in the abuse of prisoners at Guant?namo, worthy of an investigation by U.S. prosecutors in and of themselves. The IRF-ing of Omar Deghayes Perhaps the worst abuses in the Spanish case involve Omar Deghayes, whose torture began long before he reached Guant?namo, and intensified upon his arrival. A Libyan citizen who had lived in Britain since 1986, in the late 1990s, Deghayes was a law student when he traveled to Afghanistan, "for the simple reason that he is a Muslim and he wanted to see what it was like," according to his lawyer, Stafford Smith. While there, he met and married an Afghan woman with whom he had a son. After 9/11, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan, for a month, where he allegedly was subjected to "systematic beatings" and "electric shocks done with a tool that looked like a small gun." He was then transferred to Islamabad, Pakistan,where he claims he was interrogated by both U.S. and British personnel. There, the torture continued; in a March 2005 memo written by a lawyer who later visited Deghayes at Guant?namo, he described a particularly ghoulish incident: "One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room was all painted black-and-white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave me there and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to me, as there were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made." Deghayes was eventually moved to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was beaten and "kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his religion." U.S. personnel placed Deghayes "inside a closed box with a lock and limited air." He also described seeing U.S. guards sodomize an African prisoner and alleged guards "forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of the prisoners." "The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films," Deghayes said. When Deghayes finally arrived at Guant?namo in September 2002, he found himself the target of the feared IRF teams. "The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face ? " according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a "sexual attack." In March 2004, after being "sprayed in the eyes with mace," Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the incident: "They brought their pepper spray and held him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes. "Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye. "He's totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky - he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guant?namo." In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes' eye. The Spanish investigation into Deghayes' torture draws much from the March 2005 memo, which described several acts of abuse of Deghayes at the hands of the IRF teams. (The memo refers to IRF by its alternative acronym ERF): ERF-ing Omar - The Feces Incident On one of the ERF-ing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners [sic] and smeared it onto Omar's face. While some prisoners had thrown feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to sink to this level. The experience was one of the most disgusting in Omar's life. ERF-ing Omar - The Toilet Incident In April or May 2004, when the Guant?namo administration insisted on taking Omar's English-language Quran, he objected. The ERF team came into Omar's cell and put him in shackles. He was not resisting. They then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it. ERF-ing Omar - The Beating In one ERF-ing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms. The first was going to punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose, trying to break it. The third queried this, and the second said, "If his nose is broken, that's good. We want to break his ******* nose." The third soldier then took him to hospital. ERF-ing Omar - The Drowning The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was one nurse who "had been very beautiful and kind" to him to [sic] took part in the process. This happened three times. ERF-ing Omar - Tango Block Omar was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns. They grabbed him (and others) and sprayed him. They then pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete. They had someone from the hospital there, and she just watched. She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK. He was taken off to isolation after that. A medical examination cited in the Spanish investigation confirmed that Deghayes suffered from blindness of the right eye, fracture of the nasal bone and fracture of the right index finger, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and "profound" depression. Evidence Destroyed? At the Pentagon, an official paper trail should exist that documents the IRF-ing of Deghayes. What's more, according to Gen. Miller's SOP memo, all of the actions of the IRF teams were to be videotaped as well. After a prisoner was IRF-ed, "The medical personnel on site will conduct a medical evaluation of the detainee to check for any injuries sustained during the IRF," and, "all IRF Team members are required to submit sworn statements." These statements, reports and video were "to be kept as evidence." As of early 2005, there were reportedly 500 hours of video; the ACLU attempted to force their release, but they never have been produced. "Where are those tapes?" asks CCR President Michael Ratner. In some cases, the answer may well be that they never existed or no longer do. "When an IRFing took place a camera was supposed to be present to capture the IRFing," said Army Spec. Brandon Neely, who was on one of the first IRF teams at Guant?namo. "Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground." Neeley recently gave testimony to the University of California, Davis' Guant?namo Testimonials Project. He also described one IRF-ing where the video of the incident was destroyed. Regarding the videos, Stafford Smith says, "There are some things I can't talk about, but I will confirm there is photographic evidence. I am absolutely confident that if all of the photographs were revealed to the world, they would provide irrefutable physical evidence that the prisoners had been" abused by the IRFs. As for the "sworn statements" by IRF team members, a review of hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports reveals an almost robotic uniformity in the handwritten accounts, overwhelmingly composed of succinct portrayals of operations that went off without a hitch. Almost all of them contain the phrases "minimum amount of force necessary" and the prisoner "received medical attention and evaluation" before being returned. "All internal investigations of Gitmo so far have completely whitewashed the IRF process," says Horton. "They did so for obvious reasons." "The IRF program was supported by advice secured from the Justice Department suggesting that insubordinate behavior could be cited to justify a departure from guidelines against physical force. It has a conspiratorial odor to it," says Horton. "In fact the use of IRFs was illegal, a violation of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention] and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids the use of unnecessary force against prisoners." While Spain will probably pursue the role the IRF teams played in the torture of its citizens or residents, its scope goes far beyond those specific incidents. "I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication." Deghayes' treatment at the hands of the feared IRF teams mirrors that of several other released Guant?namo prisoners. David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guant?namo, said in a sworn affidavit, "I have witnessed the activities of the [IRF], which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog ... I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF'ed. I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication." Binyam Mohamed, released in February, has also described an IRF assault: "They nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guys on my legs the other. They marched me out of the cell to the fingerprint room, still cuffed. I clenched my fists behind me so they couldn't take [finger]prints, so they tried to take them by force. The guy at my head sticks his fingers up my nose and wrenches my head back, jerking it around by the nostrils. Then he put his fingers in my eyes. It felt as if he was trying to gouge them out. Another guy was punching my ribs, and another was squeezing my testicles. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. I let them take the prints." A report prepared by British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, documents the alleged abuse of a Bahraini citizen, Jumah al Dousari by an IRF team. Before being taken to Guant?namo, al Dousari was widely known to be "mentally ill." On one occasion, the IRF Team was called into his cell after al Dousari allegedly insulted a female soldier. Another prisoner who witnessed the incident described what happened: "There were usually five people on an ERF team. On this occasion there were eight of them. When Jumah saw them coming, he realized something was wrong and was lying on the floor with his head in his hands. If you're on the floor with your hands on your head, then you would hope that all they would do would be to come in and put the chains on you. That is what they're supposed to do. "The first man is meant to go in with a shield. On this occasion, the man with the shield threw the shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah's back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight. He must have been about 240 pounds in weight. His name was Smith. He was a sergeant E-5. Once he had done that, the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah. While they were doing that the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach. Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation. "The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was punching him. He grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out, they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it." Force Feeding As a Form of Torture The IRF teams were also used to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at Guant?namo, including in August 2005. Deghayes was among the hunger strikers, writing in a letter, "I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell, I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?" While the U.S. government portrayed a situation where the hunger strikers were being given medical attention, lawyers for some of the men claim that the tubes used to force feed them were "the thickness of a finger" and "were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture." According to attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube inserted with "one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the tube in his nose and down his throat" and into his stomach. "No anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of the procedure." Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to vomit "substantial amounts of blood." This was painful enough, but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as "unbearable," causing him to pass out from the pain. According to Tarver, "Nasal gastric (NG) tubes [were removed] by placing a foot on one end of the tube and yanking the detainee's head back by his hair, causing the tube to be painfully ejected from the detainee's nose. Then, in front of the Guantanamo physicians ... the guards took NG tubes from one detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee. When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from the other detainees remaining on the tubes." Medical staff, according to Tarver, made no effort to intervene. This was one of many incidents where IRF teams facilitated such force-feeding. Aside from hunger strikes, other forms of resistance were met with brutal reprisal. Tarek Dergoul, a prisoner interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described how IRF teams beat him because he "often refused to cooperate with cell searches during prayer time. One reason was that they would abuse the Quran. Another was that the guards deliberately felt up my private parts under the guise of searching me." Dergoul said, "If I refused a cell search, MPs would call the Extreme Reaction Force, who came in riot gear with plastic shields and pepper spray. The Extreme Reaction Force entered the cell, ran in and pinned me down after spraying me with pepper spray and attacked me. The pepper spray caused me to vomit on several occasions. They poked their fingers in my eyes, banged my head on the floor and kicked and punched me and tied me up like a beast. They often forced my head into the toilet." Jamal al-Harith claims he was beaten by a five-man IRF team for refusing an injection: "I was terrified of what they were going to do. I had seen victims of [IRF] being paraded in front of my cell. They were battered and bruised into submission. It was a horrible sight and a frequent sight.... They were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive. One of them attacked me really hard and left me with a deep red mark from my backbone down to my knee. I thought I was bleeding, but it was just really bad bruising." The IRF-ing of Army Sgt. 1st Class Sean Baker Ironically, perhaps the most well-publicized case of abuse by this force was not inflicted on a Guantanamo prisoner, but on an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran. In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guant?namo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell out the code word "red" if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop. According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described: They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' ... That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' Sgt. Baker said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S. soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like ... he was telling the other guy to stop." According to CBS: Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,'" recalls Baker. "'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape." Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape." The New York Times later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident." Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day. "This was just one typical incident, and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton. "But it gives a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was generally worse." IRF-ing Continues Under Obama On Jan. 7, 2009, a prisoner named Yasin Ismael threw a shoe in frustration at the inside of a cage to which he had been confined. The guards accused Ismael of attacking them and called in an IRF team. According to his attorneys, "The team shackled him, and he put up no resistance. They then beat him. They blocked his nose and mouth until he felt that he would suffocate and hit him repeatedly in the ribs and head. They then took him back to his cell. As he was being taken back, a guard urinated on his head. Mr. Ismael was badly injured, and his ear started to bleed, leaving a large stain on his pillow." Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guant?namo within a year and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring "humane standards of confinement" in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guant?namo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike," according to Reuters. "Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration," Ghappour said. While the dominant media coverage of the U.S. torture apparatus has portrayed these tactics as part of a "Bush era" system that Obama has now ended, when it comes to the IRF teams, that is simply not true. "[D]etainees live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation," according to CCR. In early February 2009, at least 16 men were on hunger strike at Guantanamo's Camp 6 and refused to leave their cells for "force feeding." IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the "men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers twisted painfully." Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one prisoner described as "torture, torture, torture." In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guant?namo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: "This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've been subjected to it almost every day," he said. "Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change." Al-Jazeera reported: Describing a specific incident, which took place after change in the U.S. administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because they were "not granting me my rights," such as being able to walk around, interact with other inmates and have "normal food." A group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear gas, he said. "They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with. They emptied out about two canisters of tear gas on me," he told Al-Jazeera. "After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe. "They then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it against the ground. I started screaming to his senior 'see what he's doing, see what he's doing' [but] his senior started laughing and said 'he's doing his job.'" In another incident after Obama's inauguration, prisoner Khan Tumani began smearing excrement on the walls of his cell to protest his treatment. According to his lawyer, when he "did not clean up the excrement, a large IRF team of 10 guards was ordered to his cell and beat him severely. The guards sprayed so much tear gas or other noxious substance after the beating that it made at least one of the guards vomit. Mr. Khan Tumani's skin was still red and burning from the gas days later." The CCR has called on the Obama administration to immediately end the use of the IRF teams at Guant?namo. Horton, meanwhile, says "detainees should be entitled to compensation for injuries they suffered." As the abuse continues at Guant?namo, and powerful congressional leaders from both parties and the White House fiercely resist the appointment of an independent special prosecutor, the sad fact is that the best chance for justice for the victims of U.S. torture may well be an ocean away in Madrid, Spain. "The Obama administration should not need pressure from abroad to uphold our own laws and initiate a criminal investigation in the U.S.," says Vince Warren, CCR's executive director. "I hope the Spanish cases will impress on the president and Attorney General Eric Holder how seriously the rest of the world takes these crimes and show them the issue will not go away." ------------ Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." His writing and reporting is available at _Rebel Reports_ (http://www.truthout.org/rebelreports.com) . _?_ (http://www.truthout.org/articles/by-author/external/Jeremy+Scahill) ____________________________________ IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THIS MATERIAL IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. TRUTHOUT HAS NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER WITH THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS ARTICLE NOR IS TRUTHOUT ENDORSED OR SPONSORED BY THE ORIGINATOR. "VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS ARE PROVIDED AS A CONVENIENCE TO OUR READERS AND ALLOW FOR VERIFICATION OF AUTHENTICITY. HOWEVER, AS ORIGINATING PAGES ARE OFTEN UPDATED BY THEIR ORIGINATING HOST SITES, THE VERSIONS POSTED ON TO MAY NOT MATCH THE VERSIONS OUR READERS VIEW WHEN CLICKING THE "VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS. Comments This is a moderated forum. It may take a little while for comments to go live. Be civil and on-topic, don't threaten or advocate violence, please keep it under 300 words. Thanks for participating. _If Obama allows the torture_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-56217) Wed, 05/27/2009 - 17:36 ? Savage Rhymes (not verified) If Obama allows the torture to continue, then he is no better the soldiers in the pictures torturing middle eastern people...Real Talk * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=56217) _Imagine: 50 years of_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-55482) Sat, 05/23/2009 - 04:35 ? David Brookbank (not verified) Imagine: 50 years of persecuting, embargoing, attacking, and slandering Cuba. And who does it turn out is committing gross crimes against humanity in what in 2005 Amnesty International called a "Soviet-style gulag" at the U.S torture chamber at Guantanamo. The grand hypocritical and imperial United States of America. We are complicit in atrocities for which the international community is obligated by international law to hold us accountable. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=55482) _What seems to be under_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-55097) Wed, 05/20/2009 - 20:37 ? dale Headley (not verified) What seems to be under reported in all this back and forth is the salient fact that most of these prisoners are not and have never been terrorists. Some were caught on the battlefield protecting their country against invaders; some were arrested in other countries for expressing anti-American views; and many were turned over to the U.S. military - no questions asked - by warlords in exchange for 5000 dollar bounties. Most serious investigators believe that these were nothing more than hapless shepherds, farmers, and peasants who were easily kidnapped by the drug-smuggling warlords. These "IRF" thugs mostly know that, but they delight in torturing men who are "different" from them. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=55097) _Something else is going on_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54909) Tue, 05/19/2009 - 17:13 ? Anonymous (not verified) Something else is going on here that we do not know. Why is Obama allowing what is repulsive on so many levels? Someone else is pulling the strings. This wouldn't be happening unless, for some reason, Obama wants it to happen. Does anyone out there have an answer? Everyone knows that sooner or later what we give out is what will return to us. We will be tortured. Who is the malevolent, silent manipulator behind the horror? Only a financial deceiver would feel so protected, because his money controls both political parties. The people of the US and the rest of the world are being taken over and over again. It makes no sense any other way. Who stands to profit from continued conflicts? Those who produce war machinery and those who finance them. The young soldiers, not the bankers, are the ones who will be tortured. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54909) _It is really very simple,_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54902) Tue, 05/19/2009 - 16:15 ? Anonymous (not verified) It is really very simple, the only reason for the continuation of this prison camp is to enable the US to be free to torture the prisoners without interference from the courts. I'm waiting for Obama to honer his campaign pledge to close the place. All the edicts against torture are meaningless as long as Gitmo exists. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54902) _It is difficult to believe_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54881) Tue, 05/19/2009 - 14:19 ? Anonymous (not verified) It is difficult to believe that anyone could consider calling to account those who perpetrate this unconscionable abuse to be 'criminalizing policy differences.' It is even more difficult to understand why Mr. Obama seems uninterested in actually doing any of the things he promised, like ending torture and getting out of Iraq. It is most difficult to understand how that same nation horrified by Nazi atrocities 65 years ago could now do the same kinds of things, and not care one bit. Once again, ashamed to be an American. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54881) _This is an economic issue_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54808) Mon, 05/18/2009 - 21:23 ? Holly Berkowitz (not verified) This is an economic issue because other nations are looking to our new President to restore trust in the United States. A healthy economic system needs trust to function. President Obama needs to demonstrate to other nations of the world that the US is trustworthy to follow the Rule of Law, our US Constitution, international laws and treaties and moral laws of reciprocity that transcend all boundaries. Only then can we gain leadership in this world. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54808) _Are photos of this behaviour_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54718) Mon, 05/18/2009 - 05:54 ? Frank (not verified) Are photos of this behaviour what Obama is refusing to release? If so, they aren't of less offensive behaviour than the Abu Ghraib pictures. If Obama is aware of IRF/ERFing, and hasn't stopped it instantly, just what is the "change" he seeks? * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54718) _This is unspeakably vile._ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54698) Mon, 05/18/2009 - 01:33 ? Margo (not verified) This is unspeakably vile. This outdoes the Nazis. These people should be rounded up and tried in a world court, since our own country won't prosecute them. Obama has betrayed us all if he knows about this. This is evil personified. I had trouble reading it. How in the world is someone trained to participate in this? It makes me ashamed to be an American. And I thought that would end with the election. No conduct calls for this kind of response. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54698) _Obama part of the problem,_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54649) Sun, 05/17/2009 - 16:33 ? Dr. K (not verified) Obama part of the problem, not the much-heralded solution-giver. He preaches salvation on the campaign trail but practices bone-crushing policies once in office. Aside from that, he just doesn't run the show: Wall Street and the Pentagon do. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54649) _I am horrified and ashamed_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54590) Sun, 05/17/2009 - 01:33 ? Anonymous (not verified) I am horrified and ashamed as well as VERY angry. If Obama knows about this and I feel he must if this article has come out then I really was deceived by him. I do think that the one who wrote that they are all bipartisan and years ago I was told they are all members of the Trilaterals (of which I was shocked to hear Obama is) then we have no where to turn, maybe we will have to have a mutiny against the evil who run this country. I had to stop reading some of the vile things that they did to the prisoners so I know that NO ONE could ever make me do these things to a human being. What kind of world are we leaving for our children? It sickens me. More must be written and discussed about this. Is this the reason Obama won? because the evil doers were supporting him? I could cry I am so saddened by this. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54590) _My God, I am so horrified!_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54578) Sun, 05/17/2009 - 00:21 ? Bill Atkinson (not verified) My God, I am so horrified! Can this all be true? This is much worse than the earlier reports we heard! Even worse than Abu Ghraib! These are pure smears on our honor! Do we have any honor left? This has to be made public and stopped! * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54578) _AMERICANS WILL BE SHAMED FOR_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54576) Sun, 05/17/2009 - 00:20 ? AlwaysAskWHY (not verified) AMERICANS WILL BE SHAMED FOR GENERATIONS, AS THE GERMANS HAVE BEEN. The torturers, themselves, will be horrifically damaged, probably pursued as the Nazis were, and this nation of indifferent, self-involved, ignorant Ameri cans will be forever ashamed, humiliated and mocked into history, as were "Good Germans" who looked away in silence. This affected the German children of that age, who refused to or were emotionally unable to marry or have children. It's all documented, and we're all going to be documented, as well. OFF YOUR KNEES AND INTO THE STREETS, AMERICANS! * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54576) _This sent to President_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54564) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 22:54 ? Anonymous (not verified) This sent to President Obama: The IRF or ERF extreme abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo is immoral, illegal, and destroy our national moral fiber. They must be stopped immediately, and the soldiers in the IRF squads tried for war crimes. It would be better to set all the Guantanamo prisoners free than to continue these horrific practices. If President Obama knows about this and is looking the other way, he has profoundly betrayed the trust of the American people who elected him. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54564) _We're stupidly and viciously_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54548) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 21:19 ? Jenna (not verified) We're stupidly and viciously spawning the next generation of those who will give their lives in suicide missions to destroy this country. And we will have had it coming for not living up to our ideals. Why won't Obama listen? * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54548) _why not send this horrific_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54547) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 21:16 ? Anonymous (not verified) why not send this horrific account to Obama himself? or perhaps better, to Michelle? sadly, Obama is already swept up in the military vortex and will prosecute wars with as much gusto as the last administration. Bill Moyers interviewed two Pakistani experts this past Friday and once again we learn that the administration is exaggerating and hyping the Pak/Talliban/Afghan dangers. It is profoundly depressing. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54547) _I feel disgust beyond_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54544) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 21:09 ? Anonymous (not verified) I feel disgust beyond expression. Someone on this blog said that we need to stop this because we are good people. NO WE ARE NOT!! Look at what we've allowed our leaders to do. I certainly do hope that some brave country will and can indict and imprison from Bush on down the line. President Obama needs to do one of his lovely speeches and tell us why all this horror hasn't stopped. Could it be that all the same characters are still in charge of military operations. He needs to clean house. I feel putrid with shame. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54544) _a staggering account, one_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54540) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 20:27 ? Anonymous (not verified) a staggering account, one that demands our attention, awareness, and commitment to spread the word on such 21st Century horrors. To what end? For what purpose? Just think what would be 'America's response' if it were done to one of our own? * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54540) _Give Guantanamo back to_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54539) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 20:18 ? Rowland (not verified) Give Guantanamo back to Cuba, apologize, and get out. That is the only way out of the hell we have created. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.t ruthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54539) _This should be publicized_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54536) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 20:06 ? Mary (not verified) This should be publicized WIDELY... like in Time or Newsweek... one wonders how the torturers can go on to lead any kind of normal life. Their family members and friends should beware... they are truly sadistic, psychotic. What has always concerned me greatly is that the vast majority of those who were scooped up and sent to Guantanomo and other places for torture are most likely innocent of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time... or they were "sold" to the Americans by people who held a grudge or wanted to profit. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54536) _Obama needs to go to Gitmo_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54534) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:58 ? Anonymous (not verified) Obama needs to go to Gitmo to personally put an end to this operation. We don't need a Spanish judge to do it for us: we need the President of the United States to stand up for due process and the rule of law. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54534) _It is time for President_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54531) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:49 ? Anonymous (not verified) It is time for President Obama to set firm limits, for each of us to stand up and say THIS HAS TO STOP, NOW!!! I am absolutely appalled that these violent behaviors continue. I want to believe in my government again. The only way that can happen is if we are told the truth and if the behaviors of our representatives match the values we are based on. We need to stand firm and hold all accountable for their actions, past and present. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54531) _War Crimes must be punished._ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54530) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:41 ? Jefferson (not verified) War Crimes must be punished. No matter who or what the rationale is these crimes must be punished even if Bush and Cheney have to be rendered from Uruguay. This is a crime against humanity and every participant and their superiors up to and including Condi and Rumsfeld must be imprisoned after trial by every peace loving nation on earth. Not only the Eichmanns but the creators of the policies must be locked up for the sake of our society. The acts and laws pushed upon the American people by these criminals must be voided if found to be created by these madmen and their henchmen. Stop them before they unleash another horror upon humanity. For the sake of the entire world stop these warmongers and their corporate shills. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54530) _I am beginning to believe_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54529) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:40 ? Anonymous (not verified) I am beginning to believe there has been or we are on the edge of a military coup. Obama is certainly appearing to comply with all their wishes, counter to all his previous history and promises. Hopefully he is just entranced with all their primitive macho toys and talk and will recover the will of the people. I just can't understand why the values and what is so obvious to now the majority of the people is being ignored. The best gift Germany ever received was Nuremberg. We need one now, not affirmation by perpetuation and cover up. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54529) _This is utterly horrifying_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54527) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:33 ? Natalie Rosen (not verified) This is utterly horrifying and IF TRUE well I just do not know what to say it is beyond anything I have ever heard of and much like if not exactly like anything one would find in the Nazi era. God help us if this is true. In one paragraph though it said one prisoner managed to call Al Jezera. How did he manage that in that prison? Just a question that is bugging me. I can't accept anything unless evidence shows it. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54527) _Sick, horrifying,_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54526) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:25 ? J. M. Biesche (not verified) Sick, horrifying, unbelievable! President Obama, stop this immediately! * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54526) _Horrific as this might be,_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54522) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:09 ? Anonymous (not verified) Horrific as this might be, this is what is happening at a US prisoner camp on what might be called US territory; what is happening in the "wilds" of Iraq and Afghanistan? Folks, we are in trouble, but as these are still the "good old days" that is to say the world still looks "normal", the maps have not changed, the coming war(s) still in the rumor stage and we are still projecting power globally. Well, nothing much will be done about this, accept that. Obama wants to look forward, after all. So, then, in the aftermath we'll have plenty of time to second guess our silence and complicity but have little to say to those who mete out the justice we will deserve. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54522) _One can only hope that at_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54521) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 19:01 ? Anonymous (not verified) One can only hope that at some point these soldiers will learn that they were taking orders from the people who really did design and have 9-11 carried out on their own people. Let them then live with the horrendous guilt. They must know they can't escape their actions. Some day they will also die, and it will just look like another governmental suicide. We must clean our government house. NO RE-ELECTIONS FOR ANYONE. It is ALL bipartisan, it is only made to look like there are two parties. It is a one party ruling elite. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54521) _How sickening is this_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54515) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 18:29 ? Anonymous (not verified) How sickening is this activity in Gitmo. If Obama is still allowing it then all our work to get him elected is certainly a sham How can we force the truth to come out and be widely disseminated? * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54515) _As I read this article, not_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54511) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 17:54 ? prodemdss (not verified) As I read this article, not only am I mortified for our own behavior and for the prisoners, my thoughts turn to the comments made by others that reflect such anger and blame towards a new President, and our U. S. A. Humans have within them, all of us, the ability to do good, strive to promote peace, and work on self-evolvement. All the anger and hate toward us as a nation is not helping. There are better ways. Each and every soul on this planet that is intelligent enough to know our government for the past 8 years has been a nightmare also should be able to find constructive, helpful criticism. WE are not evil. Those that carried out, or had knowledge of, the horrors forementioned, will be meeting their fate: trial and prison. God will handle the ever-after. Send letters and emails to Obama. Tell your friends, there are many, many of us that want justice. Peace. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54511) _Glad to see that the crying_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54509) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 17:52 ? Anonymous (not verified) Glad to see that the crying continues..yet these are the same people that were asking immediately after 9/11, why isn't our intelligence agencies doing more? Make up your mind people, you can't have it both ways. Wake up people Rome is burning, yet you stand around watching. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54509) _Yeah, but we're the Good_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54504) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 17:31 ? peterjkraus (not verified) Yeah, but we're the Good Guys doing it to the Bad Guys, so it can't be wrong. And if Obama approves, which he evidently does, then all's well. How nice to live in a country that lets itself be soothed into accepting any behavior at all, as long as the flag is wrapped around it. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54504) _Horrifying article. Any_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54492) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 16:09 ? Anonymous (not verified) Horrifying article. Any person who treats another inhumanely must be construed as being inhuman. Rest assured that these IRF team members will become our future hair-trigger sociopaths, suicide gunmen and wife beaters. What a sad state this nation is in. * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54492) _Paramount to understanding_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54487) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 15:48 ? Anonarcmous (not verified) Paramount to understanding why Gtmo has to be off-US-so 'torture abuses donot happen on US soil' justified. How can a well-contained inmate population be a threat to the country?Certainly a few inmates cannot pose such an unsurmountable threat to the US? * _Email this comment_ (http://www.truthout.org/forward?path=node/47804&cid=54487) _The US government and_ (http://www.truthout.org/051609Y#comment-54477) Sat, 05/16/2009 - 15:01 ? Anonymous (not verified) The US government and military is the very incarnation of pure EVIL!!!! It is simply horrendous to think that we have illegally invaded their country and murdered and tortured all these people, most of them completely innocent....especially the children that have been murdered and raped!!! I have nothing left but contempt for the US. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090616/a0cda731/attachment-0001.html From McPogo at aol.com Wed Jun 17 10:32:51 2009 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Wed Jun 17 10:32:43 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] The US Healthcare War Is Now Official Message-ID: Calling on Americans to stand up for their rights! _The Healthcare War Is Now Official_ (http://www.truthout.org/061409A) Thursday 11 June 2009 _by: Robert Reich | Visit article original @ Robert Reich's Blog_ (http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/healthcare-war-is-now-official.html) (Photo: Getty Images) Yesterday the American Medical Association came out against a public option for health care. And yesterday the President reaffirmed his support for it. The next weeks will show what Obama is made of - whether he's willing and able to take on the most formidable lobbying coalition he has faced so far on an issue that will define his presidency. And make no mistake: A public option large enough to have bargaining leverage to drive down drug prices and private-insurance premiums is the defining issue of universal health care. It's the only way to make health care affordable. It's the only way to prevent Medicare and Medicaid from eating up future federal budgets. An ersatz public option - whether Kent Conrad's non-profit cooperatives, Olympia Snowe's "trigger," or regulated state-run plans - won't do squat. The last president to successfully take on the giant health care lobbies was LBJ. He got Medicare and Medicaid enacted because he weighed into the details, twisted congressional arms, threatened and cajoled, drew lines in the sand, and went to war against the AMA and the other giant lobbyists standing in the way. The question now is how much LBJ is in Barack Obama. The big guns are out and they're firing. All major lobbying firms in Washington - many of them brimming with ex-members of Congress - are now crawling all over the Hill. Lots of money is on the table. AMA's political action committee has contributed $9.8 million to congressional candidates since 2000, and its lobbying arm is one of the most formidable on the Hill. Meanwhile, Big Insurance and Big Pharma are increasing their firepower. The five largest private insurers and their trade group America's Health Insurance Plans spent a total of $6.4 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year, up more than $1 million from the first quarter last year, and are spending even more now. United Health Group spent $1.5 million in the first quarter, up 34 percent from the $1.1 million it spent in the first quarter last year. Aetna spent $809,793 between January and the end of March, up 41 percent from last year. Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, spent more than $6.1 million on lobbying between January and March, more than double what it spent last year. It also spent nearly $3.3 million lobbying in the fourth quarter of 2008. Every one of them is upping their spending. Some congressional Democrats are willing and able to stand up to this barrage. Many are not. They need cover from the White House. The President can't do this alone. You must weigh in and get everyone you know to weigh in, too. Bombard your senators and representatives. Organize and mobilize others. And let the White House know how strongly you feel. This is one of those battles that define a presidency. But more importantly, it's one of those battles that define the state of American democracy. _?_ (http://www.truthout.org/articles/by-author/external/Robert+Reich) ____________________________________ IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THIS MATERIAL IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. TRUTHOUT HAS NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER WITH THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS ARTICLE NOR IS TRUTHOUT ENDORSED OR SPONSORED BY THE ORIGINATOR. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090617/ce664664/attachment.html From McPogo at aol.com Wed Jun 17 10:42:36 2009 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Wed Jun 17 10:42:43 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Gonzales's Advice to Bush on How to Avoid War Crimes Message-ID: (http://www.truthout.org/) truthout.com Truthout Original _Gonzales's Advice to Bush on How to Avoid War Crimes_ (http://www.truthout.org/061709A) Wednesday 17 June 2009_ by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report_ () (http://www.truthout.org/061709A) President George W. Bush with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. (Photo: Christopher Morris / TIME) On January 25, 2002, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales advised George W. Bush in a memo to deny al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions because doing so would "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" and "provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." Two weeks later, Bush signed an action memorandum dated February 7, 2002, addressed to Vice President Dick Cheney, which denied baseline protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners under the Third Geneva Convention. That memo, according to a recently released bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened the door to "considering aggressive techniques," which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other senior Bush officials. "The President's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees," says the committee's December 11 report. "While the President's order stated that, as 'a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,' the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in US custody." The Supreme Court held in 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the prisoners were entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions. Many of the classified policy directives, such as Gonzales's memo to Bush, are now part of the public record thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush administration, which has so far resulted in the release of more than 100,000 pages of documents that shows how Bush officials twisted the law in order to build a legal framework for torture. These documents have been posted on the ACLU's web site. But several hundred of the most explosive records were republished in the book "Administration of Torture" along with hard-hitting commentary by the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, who heads the group's National Security Project, and Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the organization. Rumsfeld Wanted a "Product" On February 14, 2002, just one week after Bush signed the action memo, Maj. Gen. Mike Dunlavey was contacted by Rumsfeld, who asked him to attend a Defense Department meeting with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others on February 21 or 22. At the meeting, Rumsfeld told Dunlavey he wanted him to oversee interrogations at the Guantanamo Bay naval facility in Cuba. Prisoners captured by US military personnel had first arrived at Guantanamo a month earlier. Dunlavey was a family court judge in Erie County, Pennsylvania, when he got the call from Rumsfeld and was placed in charge of interrogations at Guantanamo. Rumsfeld told Dunlavey, according to a witness statement he made on March 17, 2005, to US Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who was investigating FBI complaints about abuse at Guantanamo, that the Department of Defense had rounded up "a number of bad guys" and the secretary of defense "wanted a product and wanted intelligence now." Rumsfeld "wanted to set up interrogation operations and to identify the senior Taliban and senior operatives and to obtain information on what they were going to do regarding their operations and structure," Dunlavey said, according to a copy of his witness statement. "Initially, I was told that I would answer to SECDEF (Secretary of Defense) and [US Southern Command]. The directions changed and I got my marching orders from the President of the United States. I was told by the SECDEF that he wanted me back in Washington, DC every week to brief him.... The mission was to get intelligence to prevent another 9/11." Dunlavey did not explain what he meant by "I got my marching orders from the president." But his comments suggest that Bush may have played a much larger role in the interrogation of prisoners than he has let on. Moreover, Dunlavey's witness statement indicates that harsh interrogations, such as waterboarding, may have taken place earlier than previously known and may have preceded an August 1, 2002, legal opinion issued by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel authorizing specific interrogation techniques to use against prisoners. As early as December 2001, according to the documents obtained by the ACLU, high-ranking military officials began to implement an Army and Air Force survival-training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which were meant to prepare US soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime. In June 2004, Gen. James Hill of Southern Command, the Defense Department's command unit responsible for military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, held a press briefing and confirmed that interrogation techniques specifically authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo were derived from the SERE school. In October 2002, Dunlavey wrote to Hill to seek authorization that interrogators be granted the authority to use methods that strayed from the Army Field Manual in order to extract information from prisoners. Dunlavey, in making his case to Hill for authority to use more aggressive techniques, attached a copy of Bush's then classified February 7, 2002, action memo along with an analysis that said, "since the detainees are not [Enemy Prisoners of War] the Geneva Conventions limitations that ordinarily would govern captured enemy personnel interrogations are not binding on US personnel." Hill sent Dunlavey's request to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers discussed it with William Haynes II, the Defense Department's general counsel, who briefed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. The request ultimately ended up on Rumsfeld's desk and he approved it, according to the documents. "The documents establish that senior officials in Washington, including White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, constructed a legal framework that would permit the abuse and torture of prisoners," the ACLU's Jaffer and Singh wrote in "Administration of Torture." "They establish that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, relying on this legal framework, expressly authorized the use of interrogation methods - including SERE methods - that went far beyond those endorsed by the Army Field Manual. They establish that Rumsfeld and Gen. Geoffrey Miller oversaw the implementation of the newly authorized interrogation methods and closely supervised the interrogation of prisoners thought to be especially valuable." FBI Objects In early December 2002, FBI officials who had participated in some interrogations at Guantanamo complained to Miller that the methods used against prisoners at Guantanamo were unlawful. But Miller was not receptive. That led FBI officials to conclude that senior Bush administration officials and Rumsfeld were making decisions about interrogations in particular. A December 16, 2002, email written by an FBI official expressed frustration that the Defense Department refused to budge from its controversial interrogation methods. "Looks like we are stuck in the mud with the interview approach of the military vs. law enforcement," the email said. In May 2004, Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he briefed Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone about his plan to "Gitmo-ize" the Abu Ghraib prison. That month, an email written by a senior FBI agent in Iraq in 2004 specifically stated that President George W. Bush had signed an executive order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation, and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees. The FBI email, dated May 22, 2004, followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the US military's harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards, but fit within the guidelines of a presidential executive order. According to the email, Bush's executive order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, "stress positions," sleep "management," loud music and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." to extract information from detainees in Iraq. The May 2004, FBI email stated that the FBI interrogation team in Iraq understood that despite revisions in the executive order that occurred after the furor over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the presidential sanctioning of harsh interrogation tactics had not been rescinded. "I have been told that all interrogation techniques previously authorized by the Executive Order are still on the table but that certain techniques can only be used if very high-level authority is granted," the author of the FBI email said. "We have also instructed our personnel not to participate in interrogations by military personnel which might include techniques authorized by Executive Order but beyond the bounds of FBI practices." The White House had emphatically denied that any such presidential executive order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the email "mistaken." Prior to the May 22, 2004, email several others written by FBI agents that month were sent to Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, about detainees being tortured before the unnamed agent sent Caproni the email citing Bush's alleged executive order. On July 9, 2004, the FBI's Office of Inspections distributed an email asking its agents who were stationed at Guantanamo whether they had witnessed, "Aggressive treatment, interrogations or interview techniques ... which were not consistent with FBI interview policy/guidelines." More than two-dozen agents responded that they observed numerous instances of detainee abuse. One FBI agent wrote that, despite Rumsfeld's public statements to the contrary, the interrogation methods "were approved at high levels w/in DoD." In addition to Rumsfeld, the FBI emails said Paul Wolfowitz, one Bush administration official who has largely escaped scrutiny in the torture debate, approved the methods at Guantanamo. In 2006, Miller received a Distinguished Service Medal for "exceptionally meritorious service." Dunlavey is an Erie County judge. ____________________________________ Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, _www.pubrecord.org_ (http://www.pubrecord.org/) . ? 2009 truthout -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090617/22116f2f/attachment.html From McPogo at aol.com Wed Jun 17 10:48:40 2009 From: McPogo at aol.com (McPogo@aol.com) Date: Wed Jun 17 10:48:32 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Cheney Led Lawmaker Briefings to Defend Torture Message-ID: _http://www.truthout.org_ (http://www.truthout.org) Subject:Cheney Led Lawmaker Briefings to Defend Torture Date:6/3/2009 1:21:47 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time From:messenger@truthout.org In 2005, Cheney led defense of torture in four briefings to Congressional leaders; Jeremy Scahill on the increasing number of mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan; Robert Reich on the future of manufacturing in the US; Tom Engelhardt lays out his message to graduating classes; Chinese Uighurs protest continued detention in Guantanamo; Jacques Attali looks at threats we ignore; and more ... Browse our continually updating front page at http://www.truthout.org t r u t h o u t | 06.03 Cheney Led Lawmaker Briefings to Defend Torture http://www.truthout.org/060309A Paul Kane and Joby Warrick, The Washington Post: "Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees. The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials." Jeremy Scahill | Military Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan Increase http://www.truthout.org/060309B Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports: "A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. 'There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,' Schmitz said. 'And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.' When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right. Robert Reich | The Future of Manufacturing, GM and American Workers (Part III) http://www.truthout.org/060309C Robert Reich: "Middle-class taxpayers worry they cannot afford to bail out companies like GM. Yet they worry they cannot afford to lose their jobs. Wilson's edict, too, has been turned upside down: in many ways, what has been bad for GM has been bad for much of America. The answer is not to bail out GM. It is to smooth the way to a new, post-manufacturing economy." Tom Engelhardt | Redefining the World http://www.truthout.org/060309D Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com: "Graduates of the Bush years, initiates of the Obama era, if you think of a commencement address as a kind of sermon, then every sermon needs its text. Here's the one I've chosen for today, suitably obscure and yet somehow ringing: 'The idea that somehow counterterrorism is a homeland security issue doesn't make sense when you recognize the fact that terror around the world doesn't recognize borders. There is no right-hand, left-hand anymore.'" Stuck at Guantanamo, Uighurs Demand Freedom http://www.truthout.org/060309E Carol Rosenberg, The Miami Herald: "The US government has for months been seeking a nation to offer asylum to some 17 Uighurs with Chinese citizenship who fear persecution and perhaps torture if they are returned to their communist-controlled homeland. Attorney General Eric Holder has said he was willing to resettle some in the United States. But some members of Congress have rebelled, casting them as terrorists and creating a deadlock on the future of the men whom a federal judge ordered released from these remote prison camps in October 2008." Go directly to our home page: http://www.truthout.org Click to SUBSCRIBE -> http://www.truthout.org/content/subscribe Our Privacy Policy -> http://www.truthout.org/privacy From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Thu Jun 18 18:58:34 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Thu Jun 18 18:59:13 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] The Corporate State Message-ID: <020c01c9f081$74771b20$5fad57ca@jfos> http://www.calresco.org/lucas/state.htm ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Fri Jun 19 18:57:04 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Sat Jun 20 22:36:55 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: New Battlefront Against Water Privatization in the Global South Message-ID: <001f01c9f232$363b1ca0$32ad57ca@jfos> A New Battlefront Against Water Privatization in the Global South by Richard Girard - Polaris Institute June 8, 2009 - Recent industry analysis shows that countries in the Global South have the best potential for future growth in bottled water sales. Market reports predict that over the next four years sales of bottle water will grow most quickly in Asia and Latin America due to 'the poor quality of potable water' in many countries. Africa is also highlighted as a having strong potential for bottled water sales for the same reason. In addition to limited access to clean tap water, reports mention the rising number of people with disposable incomes as a driver for growth in the industry. read more: http://www.polarisinstitute.org/ a_new_battlefront_against_water_privatization_in_the_global_south TEXT & LINKS CONTINUES... This is all very positive for bottled water companies, but signals a wrong turn in the struggle to bring publicly managed municipal water service to communities and will have severe impacts on how populations view the delivery of this basic human right. This opportunity for the bottled water industry is leading to widespread privatization of drinking water delivery in countries where access to clean tap water is limited. Bottled water sold for huge profits may bring water to people who need it, but the side effect is the commodification of this basic human right. When populations come to accept that the only way to find drinking water is buy it in a packaged form, people will come to accept that water, whether from a tap or from a bottle, is something that can be bought and sold on the open market. A system is emerging where only those who can afford it will have access to water. The privatization of drinking water is already well under way in many urban centres in the Global South. In areas where clean tap water is either not available or not safe (or perceived to not be safe) people are already consuming packaged water supplied by for-profit producers at an alarming rate. Beverage corporations are seeing this phenomenon as a future growth engine. In April of this year at the company?s Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Coca Cola?s CEO, Muhtar Kent (click here and go to 30:00 of the webcast http://webcast.streamlogics.com/audience/index.asp?eventid=12728518 ), repeated the company mantra that future growth will come from a combination of rapid urbanization and a growing middle class. Kent spoke of the ?conversion? from un-packaged beverages to packaged beverages that occurs when people attain ?middle class?. The natural ?conversion? as Kent sees it, is for people to move away from public tap water towards his company?s bottled beverages. Luckily for Kent his company has set up a global bottling system that is poised to jump on this opportunity. The other three global bottled water giants, Groupe Danone, Nestl? and PepsiCo also have the capital and existing global infrastructure to exploit the bottled water boom in the Global South. The following examples from India, Vietnam, Nigeria and M?xico, demonstrate how the rapid growth of bottled water sales is already forging the path towards privatization and is creating risks to health and livelihood along the way. These examples do not touch the severe impact the bottled water industry has on the environment in the Global South caused by water takings and the disposal of plastic bottles. India The first example is from Hyderabad (pop 8.8 million), the capital of Andrha Pradesh, where The Hindu recently reported that ?unscrupulous elements are making mega bucks out of human suffering? by selling 20 litre cans of well water for 31 cents (the price goes up to $2.80 USD with the can included). http://www.thehindu.com/2009/05/03/stories/2009050358890300.htm According to The Hindu the areas where business is swiftest have major problems with public water infrastructure. Long lines at public taps and limited public water service to many homes results in a daily struggle for people to find water. Many are resorting to buying their drinking water from local vendors who package well water and sell it at hugely inflated prices. In a country where, according to United Nations data, over 36 percent of urban dwellers survive on less than $1.25 (USD) per day purchasing packaged water is a major expense. However, without access to free and clean public drinking water, and with a convenient packaged alternative readily available, many residents will inevitably accept the option of privatized, for-profit water. Recent industry figures from India indicate that sales of bottled water grew from $189 million (USD) in 2003 to $599 million in 2008 ? a growth rate of 216 percent. With this figure projected to double in the next five years India is being touted as one of the fastest growing bottled water markets in the world. The growth of the Indian market is being attributed to people having more disposable income coupled with poor public water infrastructure. These are the kind of market forecasts on which bottled water companies base future business plans. True to form, PepsiCo announced earlier this month that it will double investments in its Indian beverage business in 2009. http://www.pepsiindia.co.in/press_pressreleases.html The company?s Indian beverage investments will now total $220 million. Vietnam In April, Vietnamese health inspectors discovered that close to 30 percent of bottled water producers nationwide did not meet health and safety standards. In Ho Chi Minh City, where according to the Thai News Service more than 1,000 bottled water businesses are in operation, the Health Department has already shut down five bottled water plants this year and fined 360 plants for violating food safety and hygiene standards. News reports said that test samples were tainted with disease-causing bacteria, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, E.Coli and Coliform. Vietnam is another case where urban residents are ?converting? to packaged beverages. Industry reports see Vietnam as a place where people are gradually replacing boiled tap water with bottled water. Between 2003 and 2008, the sales of bottled water in Vietnam grew by over 80 percent to a total of $43.8 million (USD). This total is projected to climb a further 75 percent by 2013. This trend away from public water sources is obviously being exploited by bottled water sellers. However the rapid expansion in the number of bottled water producers is putting peoples? health at risk. Nigeria A recent article pointed out that the informal bottled water industry has grown so quickly in Nigeria that bottled water companies now represent about 10 to 15 per cent of the total manufacturing output from the country?s small and medium enterprises (SMEs). http://www.234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5419526-146/story.csp The article blames government?s inability to provide water to Nigerians as the ?springboard? for the thriving water business. Industry reports echo this position and show that bottled water sales have grown by 90 percent since 2003 and are projected to grow another 43 percent by 2013. The rapid expansion of this sector has left the regulatory body NAFDAC (National Agency for Foods Drugs Administration and Control) unable to monitor the safety of the products. A NAFDAC official was quoted saying that her agency has no record of the total number of registered water producers in the country. The lack of quality municipal infrastructure is fuelling the privatization of Nigeria?s drinking water while the packaged water that is filling the gap in the public system remains unregulated and potentially unsafe for consumption. M?xico M?xico is the biggest consumer of bottled water per capita in the world with sales totaling a whopping $5.4 billion in 2008 (almost 3 times the 2008 sales figures for Canada). This figure is predicted to reach $7.6 billion by 2013. Unlike many other regions in the Global South where local producers represent a large portion of sales, M?xico?s bottled water market is dominated by the big four global water producers who fiercely compete for customers through blanket advertising. These companies are exploiting what has been called the ?savage urbanization? of the country?s large cities, which is characterized by poor access to water infrastructure See this article for more information http://www.polarisinstitute.org/coke_s_annual_meeting_of_contradictions This is a major opportunity for the big four who are making large profits through the sale of their products in M?xico. Water delivery in the country has been widely privatized by the dismantling of publicly managed municipal water infrastructure and the reliance on packaged water as the only safe source of drinking water. The fact that most purchases of bottled water in M?xico are in large 20 litre jugs for use at home confirms that tap water has been substituted for the privatized packaged variety. New battlefront The privatization of public water services in the Global South is widely viewed by public sector unions and community activists as a failed project. However international institutions under the influence of for-profit water services companies, continue to push the private management model as a solution to the challenge of providing water and sanitation in the Global South. see Public Services International for more information http://www.world-psi.org/TemplateEn.cfm?Section=Water&Template=/ TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=32&ContentID=2516 Meanwhile, bottled water companies, from the big four to local entrepreneurs are already successfully privatizing the delivery of drinking water. As we have seen from the examples in this article, this is only going to deepen. ?Unscrupulous elements? are indeed making mega bucks out of human suffering by exploiting the inability of municipalities, governments and institutions to find the correct and most sustainable way of delivering water services that is safe and managed publicly. Meanwhile, the groundwork of privatization is being done by the bottled water industry by converting people to privately delivered packaged water sold for profit. Many people in the Global South are entrapped between poor quality tap water and buying bottled water at great expense and risk to their health. Once people are forced to pay for their drinking water, the commodification and privatization of water becomes a deadly bygone conclusion. Because of this, bottled water is a new front in the battle against privatized water in the Global South. Related Link: http://www.polarisinstitute.org/ a_new_battlefront_against_water_privatization_in_the_global_south Water Our Water Progam aims to develop citizen capacities for education and action on water justice issues in communities. This includes issues like the privatization of water services, bulk water exports, water takings, water security and bottled water. Currently, a major focus of our work is on bottled water, through our Inside the Bottle campaign. Our program has developed a comprehensive report on the bottled water industry, the major corporate players, the key social, environmental and health isues at stake, along with a campaign tool kit for community-based action. We also seek to build connections through solidarity work with communities and workers all over the world to strengthen the global water justice movement and fortify our local struggles, while also working towards building social alternatives for water management. From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Mon Jun 22 23:00:40 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Mon Jun 22 23:21:23 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] What's new at Links: Iran & the left, Marta Harnecker, New Zealand, Indigenous women in L. America, S. Korea, Adam Smith & Karl Marx, biofuels, S. Africa, IWW Message-ID: <4A406F88.1090301@greenleft.org.au> What's new at Links: Iran & the left, Marta Harnecker, New Zealand, Indigenous women in L. America, S. Korea, Adam Smith & Karl Marx, biofuels, S. Africa, IWW *** Subscribe free to Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal - at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to links@dsp.org.au *Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in /Links/. * * * Iran: Government neoliberalism, repression fuel mass discontent By Tony Iltis and Stuart Munckton June 20, 2009 -- Since the June 12 Iranian presidential election, and the almost immediate announcement of a landslide victory for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran has been convulsed by mass protests alleging electoral fraud. The protests are occurring despite both Ahmedinejad and Mousavi emerging from within the same undemocratic regime and holding similar positions on many issues. Mousavi is presented in the Western media as a "reformer", however he was prime minister during the 1980s when the regime committed some of its worst atrocities. * Read more Comment: A question to the left on Iran: Can the people make history or not? By Mike Ely June 19, 2009 -- There is a self-deceptive politics (among some leftists) that seeks to prettify all kinds of reactionary forces that (for one reason or another) are in opposition to US imperialism -- including Islamic reactionaries, Kim Jung Il, "hardline" revisionists of the Li Peng and Eric Honecker type and so on. And in the process they have a real, almost startling, hostility toward sections of the people who rise up in important if still-inarticulate ways. * Read more Trade unions and New Zealand's economic crisis By Grant Brookes Unity, May 2009 -- Comparisons now abound between the global economic crisis of 2009 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Naturally, there are similarities and differences. * Read more Latin America: Manifesto of the First Continental Summit of Indigenous Women Puno, Peru -- May 27-28, 2009 -- We, indigenous women gathered in the sacred lands of Lake Titicaca, after two days of discussions and deliberation raise our voices in these times when Abya Yala's[1] womb is once more with childbirth pains, to give birth to the new Pachakutik [2] for a better life on our planet. We, indigenous women, have had a direct input into the historical process of transformation of our peoples through our proposals and actions in the various struggles taking place and engendered from the indigenous movements. We are the carriers, conduits of our cultural and genetic make-up; we gestate and brood life; together with men, we are the axis of the family unit and society. We join our wombs to our mother earth's womb to give birth to new times in this Latin American continent where in many countries millions of people, impoverished by the neoliberal system, raise their voices to say ENOUGH to oppression, exploitation and the looting of our wealth. We therefore join in the liberation struggles taking place throughout our continent. * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #9 -- Respect differences and be flexible in regards to activism [This is the ninth in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker 1. Among the left, there continues to be a difficulty to work together while respecting differences. In the past, the tendency of political organisations, especially parties that self-declare themselves as parties of the working class, was always towards homogenising the social base within which they carried out political work. If this attitude was once justified due to the past identity and homogeneity of the working class, today it is anachronistic when confronted with a working class that is quite differentiated, and with the emergence of a diversity of new social actors. Today, we increasingly have to deal with a unity based on diversity, on respect for ethnic and cultural differences, for gender and for the sense of belonging of specific collectives. * Read more South Korea's rollback of democracy By George Katsiaficas May 25, 2009 -- The suicide of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun on May 23, 2009, left South Korea in shock. All over the country, tens of thousands of tearful people sought to eulogise and memorialise Roh -- to find ways to express their grief and anger. Conservative government politicians were blocked by local residents from joining tens of thousands people who made the journey to Roh's small hometown the day he died. Not only were they refused admittance, many people splashed them with water and chanted that they should get out -- shaming them into leaving. Opposition party spokesperson Kim Yu-jeong expressed what is in many people's hearts when he blamed Roh's tragic death on the conservative government's relentless and disrespectful offensive against him: "The people and history know what made the former president do something so tragic." * Read more Adam Smith was closer to Karl Marx than those showering praise on Smith today By Eric Toussaint In the following citations, we discover that what Adam Smith wrote in the 1770s is not so distant from what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would write 70 years later in the famous Communist Manifesto. * Read more Biofuels and sustainable transport -- Can biofuels be produced and used responsibly? By Renfrey Clarke June 16, 2009 -- For governments and vehicle corporations, the charm of biofuels used to be the promise they held out of a ready-made solution to transport-related greenhouse gas emissions -- a solution that might simply be dropped in, while changing almost nothing else. Freeways, suburban sprawl, four-wheel-drive family cars -- everything could remain. Only the fuel on sale at service stations would be different. * Read more South Africa: Political balance shifts left -- though not enough to quell grassroots' anger By Patrick Bond June 13, 2009 -- With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township ``service delivery'' protests, rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa. The big splits in society are clearer now. Distracting internecine rivalries within the main left bloc have subsided. From 2005-09, the ruling African National Congress' huge wedge between camps allied to Thabo Mbeki and to the new president, Jacob Zuma, cleaved the ANC in two, but Zuma's troops have mostly flushed out the former's from the state and party. * Read more The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia: achievements and limitations [This talk was presented at the Laborism and the radical alternative: Lessons for today conference, held in Melbourne, Australia, on May 30, 2009. It was organised by Socialist Alliance] By Verity Burgmann * Read more New book preview: Global Fight for Climate Justice "Essential reading for everyone who is serious about confronting the climate emergency." -- Emma Murphy, co-editor, Green Left Weekly * Read more Marta Harnecker: Ideas for the struggle #8 -- The left must attempt to set the agenda for struggle [This is the eighth in a series of regular articles. Click HERE for other articles in the series . Please return to Links regularly read the next articles in the series.] By Marta Harnecker 1. In the previous article, we stated that a large section of the party left has found it very difficult to work with social movements and develop ties with the new social forces in recent decades. This has been due to several factors. * Read more * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ATTENTION: Sign up for regular ``what's new'' announcement emails at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 Follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090623/4e1e53f0/attachment.html From thinker at xplornet.com Tue Jun 23 08:51:41 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue Jun 23 08:49:20 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] European Futurists Conference. Message-ID: <20090623154849.84C2F167261A@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> From: editor@european-futurists.org [mailto:editor@european-futurists.org] Sent: June 23, 2009 9:04 AM To: Reception Subject: 5th European Futurists Conference Lucerne: Early booking with discount! EUROPEAN FUTURISTS CONFERENCE LUCERNE October 14 - 16, 2009 Newsletter News 5th European Futurists Conference Lucerne October 14 - 16, 2009 Culture and Convention Center KKL Lucerne, Switzerland Understanding the Transformation * How far does the transformation reach beyond this worst crisis since the Great Depression? * What does the new architecture of a robust global financial system look like? * How do society?s values change? * How will customers make decisions in the future? * What is the future relationship between state and economy? * How does the transformation affect the sustainable development? * Which new technologies are driving tomorrow?s growth? Conquering New Opportunities * What do the megatrends mean for small and medium-sized businesses? * Are the companies equipped for the future? * Where do corporate futurists see future opportunities? * How do companies combine insights about the future with their strategies? Get answers to these questions! At the 5th European Futurists Conference in Lucerne Register now and profit from 20% early booking discount! Ready for the Future? New Survey for SME in Switzerland European Futurists Conference Lucerne launched a pilot survey on future readiness of small and midsize enterprises in Switzerland. How well done are a company's forsight activities? What do others do with a similar future horizon and a similar complex general environment? SME (KMU) in Switzerland are invited to participate: It only takes 15 minute. You will get a free copy of the results. If required, a customized assessment of the future readiness is available. Go here. News from our partners How the world changes through the economic crisis The global recession is a historic break, sensationally and extraordinary - not true, says futurist Matthias Horx (Zukunftsinstitut, advisory board of the European Futurists Conference Lucerne) in a study called 'The Matrix of Change'. His point: The crisis is a cleaning storm. Read the Spiegel online article in german here. Futures of the world economy By Sohail Inayatullah Political scientist and futurists Dr Sohail Inayatullah looks at possible futures for a world tranformed by a global economic crisis. Watch the speech here. New Publications of Future Studies SMEs Respond to Threat of Scarce Resources Third Major Credit Suisse Survey of SMEs on Megatrends ?Opportunities and Risks for SMEs The economists at Credit Suisse have surveyed nearly 1,800 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) about their views on selected megatrends for the third time. The main focus of this year's survey was the scarcity of resources. This is the only megatrend that is viewed as negative by the majority of the respondents, although the rating i mproved compared to the previous year. SMEs expect the cost of resources to increase over the next three years and this is influencing their approach to capital expenditure. Most SMEs have already taken measures to counter this trend or are planning appropriate steps. Entrepreneurs are convinced that investments in resource efficiency are beneficial. In terms of the other megatrends, it is particularly noticeable that SMEs in all regions of Switzerland regard globalization as positive. When all six megatrends are taken into account, SMEs even have a slightly more optimistic outlook for the future than in the previous year, despite the downturn in the economy. Read the article here. Best regards Georges T. Roos, Managing Director Claudia Willi, Head of Organisation roos@european-futurists.org willi@european-futurists.org From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Tue Jun 23 19:09:47 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue Jun 23 19:10:17 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] European Futurists Conference. In-Reply-To: <20090623154849.84C2F167261A@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> References: <20090623154849.84C2F167261A@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> Message-ID: <20090624020947.F3AB6F7AF@fep01.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> This sounds like a most interesting conference and let's hope the proceedings will later be gathered in an accessible publication. Since the economic world has generated a snowstorm of short-lived tipping points, let's also hope there will be some attention to how different policies and actions, ranging from local to global, now will affect the future. Dion Giles Western Australia At 23:51 23/06/2009, you wrote: >From: editor@european-futurists.org [mailto:editor@european-futurists.org] >Sent: June 23, 2009 9:04 AM >To: Reception >Subject: 5th European Futurists Conference >Lucerne: Early booking with discount! > > > > > EUROPEAN FUTURISTS CONFERENCE LUCERNE > October 14 - 16, 2009 > > > >Newsletter > > >News > >5th European Futurists Conference Lucerne > > >October 14 - 16, 2009 >Culture and Convention Center KKL Lucerne, Switzerland > >Understanding the Transformation > * How far does the transformation reach > beyond this worst crisis since the Great Depression? > * What does the new architecture of a robust > global financial system look like? > * How do society?s values change? > * How will customers make decisions in the future? > * What is the future relationship between state and economy? > * How does the transformation affect the sustainable development? > * Which new technologies are driving tomorrow?s growth? > >Conquering New Opportunities > * What do the megatrends mean for small and medium-sized businesses? > * Are the companies equipped for the future? > * Where do corporate futurists see future opportunities? > * How do companies combine insights about > the future with their strategies? > > >Get answers to these questions! At the >5th European Futurists Conference in Lucerne > >Register >now and profit from 20% early booking discount! > >Ready for the Future? >New Survey for SME in Switzerland > >European Futurists Conference Lucerne launched a >pilot survey on future readiness of small and >midsize enterprises in Switzerland. How well >done are a company's forsight activities? What >do others do with a similar future horizon and a >similar complex general environment? SME (KMU) >in Switzerland are invited to participate: It >only takes 15 minute. You will get a free copy >of the results. If required, a customized >assessment of the future readiness is available. >Go here. >News from our partners > > >How the world changes through the economic crisis >The global recession is a historic break, >sensationally and extraordinary - not true, says >futurist Matthias Horx (Zukunftsinstitut, >advisory board of the European Futurists >Conference Lucerne) in a study called 'The >Matrix of Change'. His point: The crisis is a cleaning storm. >Read the Spiegel online article in german >here. > > >Futures of the world economy >By Sohail Inayatullah > >Political scientist and futurists Dr Sohail >Inayatullah looks at possible futures for a >world tranformed by a global economic crisis. >Watch the speech here. > > > >New Publications of Future Studies > >SMEs Respond to Threat of Scarce Resources >Third Major Credit Suisse Survey of SMEs on Megatrends ?Opportunities and >Risks for SMEs > >The economists at Credit Suisse have surveyed >nearly 1,800 small and medium-sized enterprises >(SMEs) about their views on selected megatrends for the third time. >The main focus of this year's survey was the >scarcity of resources. This is the only >megatrend that is viewed as negative by the >majority of the respondents, although the rating >i mproved compared to the previous year. SMEs >expect the cost of resources to increase over >the next three years and this is influencing >their approach to capital expenditure. Most SMEs >have already taken measures to counter this >trend or are planning appropriate steps. >Entrepreneurs are convinced that investments in >resource efficiency are beneficial. In terms of >the other megatrends, it is particularly >noticeable that SMEs in all regions of >Switzerland regard globalization as positive. >When all six megatrends are taken into account, >SMEs even have a slightly more optimistic >outlook for the future than in the previous >year, despite the downturn in the economy. > >Read the article >here. > > > >Best regards >Georges T. Roos, Managing >Director Claudia Willi, Head of Organisation >roos@european-futurists.org >willi@european-futurists.org > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 23 18:58:38 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 23 19:16:33 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] Democracy Now Report: Goldman Sachs Record Bonuses this Year + "Red neck" view of the obamarama Message-ID: <010601c9f471$bad87700$33ad57ca@jfos> The Guardian newspaper reports staff at Goldman Sachs can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm?s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms. We speak to Nomi Prins, a former managing director for Goldman Sachs in New York, about the possible record bonuses, President Obama?s proposed reforms of the financial regulatory system and the ?The Big Bank Bailout Payback Bamboozle.? http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/22/report_goldman_sachs_on_pace_to Nomi Prins, Economist, journalist and senior fellow at Demos. Her latest book, coming this fall, is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. She has worked for Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns, and her earlier books include Other People?s Money and Jacked: How Conservatives are Picking Your Pocket. more: "Suck on our yachts" This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money. http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140806/ %22suck_on_our_yachts%22%3A_goldman_sachs_issues_non- apology_for_destroying_the_world_economy/ http://www.alternet.org/story/140770/ obama%27s_new_economic_plan%3A_the_good%2C_the_bad_and_the_weak/ HOW UNIONS GAVE MY REDNECK FAMILY A CHANCE I'm not going into the current brouhaha about the Employee Free Choice Act or the "card check" bullshit here. Because what it's gonna take to restore dignity to laboring America ain't gonna be more legislative wrangling. What it takes won't be pretty, maybe not even legal in this new police state, and sure as hell won't be "within the system." Because the system is the problem. So it will be up to us, just like it always has been ? the writer, the Nicaraguan janitor, the 40-year-old family man forced to bag groceries at Wal-Mart, the pizza delivery guy, the welder and the certified nurse ? the long-haul trucker and the short-order cook. And they will snicker at us from their gilded roosts on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Some people are bound to get hurt in the necessary fight. In fact, people need to be willing to get hurt in the fight. That's the way we once gained worker rights, and that's the way we will get them back. The only way to get rid of the robbers' roost is to burn the fucker down. Anyone got a match? http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140797/ how_unions_gave_my_redneck_family_a_chance_at_the_american_dream/? page=entire Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site. http://www.joebageant.com/ http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/05/a-redneck-view-of-the- obamarama.html From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 23 19:08:27 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 23 19:16:46 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: Wells Fargo Bank roadblock to recovery - UE Members Need Our Support Message-ID: <010901c9f471$be8615b0$33ad57ca@jfos> United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America From: UE Activist Net Date: 22 June 2009 10:20:20 AM To: ueactionnet@ranknfile-ue.org Subject: [UE Action Net] UE Members Need Our Support Reply-To: activistnet@ranknfile-ue.org, ueactionnet@ranknfile-ue.org UE members need our help.... WELLS FARGO BANK - ROADBLOCK TO RECOVERY Please take action to assist the sisters and brothers of UE Local 1174 now battling to save their jobs at Quad City Die Casting company in Moline, Illinois. The giant Wells Fargo bank has cut off the line of credit to the company, despite taking more than $25 billion in taxpayer bailout monies. As a result, after more than 60 years of operation, the company may be forced to liquidate. Please take a moment to visit the web pages at www.ueillinois.org and www.ueunion.org which contain background information and updates. On Tuesday, June 23rd, demonstrations and actions in support of these UE members will take place in these and other cities across the country...Baltimore, Boston, Cedar Rapids, Charleston, Chicago, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Costa Mesa, as well as Atlanta, Denver, Erie, LaCrosse, Orlando, Portland, and Washington, DC. See the full list with contact information at http://www.ueillinois.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=2 Send a message to Congress in support of the Local 1174 members at http://www.ueunion.org/ue_qc_main.html Thanks for your support, and please visit the web page for updates and news of this important struggle to break through the Wells Fargo Roadblock to Recovery. The United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. VISIT UE on the web at http://www.ueunion.org (our new address) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090624/f7140fde/attachment.html From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 23 19:03:38 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 23 19:16:57 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] =?windows-1252?q?Fw=3A_=5BS=5D_The_Nation=92s_man_in_T?= =?windows-1252?q?ehran=3A_Who_is_Robert_Dreyfuss=3F?= Message-ID: <010701c9f471$bbc45da0$33ad57ca@jfos> Political Research Associates, a think tank that specializes in tracking the activities of the extreme right, wrote of Dreyfuss?s former employer: ?The LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.? The Nation?s man in Tehran: Who is Robert Dreyfuss? By Bill Van Auken 22 June 2009 In its coverage of the recent political upheavals in Iran, the position of the Nation magazine, the self-styled voice of progressive politics, has become increasingly indistinguishable from that of the US political establishment. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/drey-j22.shtml Robert Dreyfuss, the magazine?s principal correspondent on the Iranian events?and on ?politics and national security? generally?has parroted the unverified charge of a stolen election and characterized the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as his supporters, as a ?virtual fascist movement.? In a June 17 column entitled: ?Battle Lines in Iran,? Dreyfuss, who had just returned from covering the election in Tehran, speculated on the trajectory of the Iranian ?showdown.? He wrote: ?Thirty years ago, it was the decision of the Shah of Iran not to confront the revolutionaries with violence that allowed the anti-Shah movement to grow strong enough to oust the Shah. Then, as now, a relatively small number of deaths??martyrs??triggered a traditional, Shiite forty-day cycle of memorial marches and ceremonial protests and led to a crescendo of protest by the end of 1978.? This is an astonishing statement. While the number killed by the Shah?s troops and the notorious SAVAK secret police is disputed?the government today puts it at 60,000, while its opponents claim only about 3,000?there is no question that virtually every one of the demonstrations that erupted in 1978-79 saw scores, if not hundreds, of workers and students mowed down by automatic weapons fire in cities across the country. SAVAK, trained by the CIA, was among the most sadistic secret police forces in the world, known for its systematic and hideous torture of anyone suspected of being an opponent of the monarchial regime. Its victims numbered in the tens of thousands. How is one to account for this whitewashing of a brutal dictatorship by a journalist now posing as a champion of democracy? Who is this man? Iran is not a new subject of inquiry for Robert Dreyfuss. He authored a book in the wake of the Iranian Revolution entitled ?Hostage to Khomeini.? The book?s foreword, addressed ?to the American people,? describes it as ?an indictment of President Carter?s role in contributing to the downfall of the Shah and Khomeini?s seizure of power.? It speaks favorably of the ?incoming government of Ronald Reagan,? presenting the change in administrations as an opportunity ?for the entire Khomeini regime to be swept away during 1981 and replaced with a government of sanity.? Dreyfuss exhorts his readers: ?Let the officials in Washington know that the American people will not tolerate our government treating the Khomeini regime as anything but the outlaw dictatorship that it is.? The book presents the Iranian Revolution not as a movement of millions against a hated dictatorship, but rather as a vast conspiracy orchestrated from within the Carter administration, in collaboration with British, Israeli and even Soviet intelligence. ?The Carter administration?with deliberate malice aforethought?had given aid to the movement that organized the overthrow of the Shah of Iran,? he wrote. The White House, he continued, ?was involved every step of the way ... from behind-the-scenes deals with traitors in the Shah?s military to the final ultimatum to the beaten leader in 1979 to leave Iran. Perhaps no other chapter in American history is so replete with treachery to the ideals upon which the nation was founded.? Precisely what ?ideals? were violated by Washington?s failure?not for want of trying?to keep the Shah on his Peacock Throne, Dreyfuss did not spell out. The book was put out by New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Co., which had produced other volumes that year, including ?What every Conservative Should Know about Communism,? written by Lyndon LaRouche. Dreyfuss held the title of ?Middle East Intelligence Director? for LaRouche?s Executive Intelligence Review, the flagship publication of what the Washington Post described in 1985 as a network which ?had more than 100 intelligence operatives working for it at times, and copies the government in its information-gathering operation.? Political Research Associates, a think tank that specializes in tracking the activities of the extreme right, wrote of Dreyfuss?s former employer: ?The LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology.? The PRA added that the organization had built: ?an international network for spying and propaganda, with links to the upper levels of government, business, and organized crime. The LaRouchites traded information with intelligence agencies in the United States? as well as in other countries. According to published reports, one of the agencies with which it traded information was SAVAK, during the period in which it was carrying out its most murderous repression in Iran, while hunting down student opponents of the regime abroad. After being driven into exile by the revolution, Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, the Shah's widow, told the West German magazine Bunte: ?To understand what has gone on in Iran, one must read what Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the Executive Intelligence Review.? The magazine used the quote in its promotional advertising, aimed principally at corporate executives and right-wing politicians. The Nation describes Dreyfuss merely as ?an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security.? Nowhere does it inform its readers that its principal correspondent on Iran is a former member of a fascistic organization who publicly defended the Shah?s dictatorship. These credentials should have disqualified Dreyfuss from saying anything about the events in Iran. Nothing this man writes has any credibility. The real question is: how has an individual of this character surfaced as the Nation?s correspondent in Tehran and its principal commentator on international affairs? COMMENTS " The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a series of ?color revolutions? that bore no relationship to any real popular movement for democratic rights. The ?Bulldozer Revolution? of 2000 that toppled the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was the forerunner to the ?Rose Revolution? in Georgia in 2003 that brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power, the ?Orange Revolution? in the Ukraine in 2004 and the pink and yellow ?Tulip Revolution? in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Over the past three years, more color revolutions failed?for instance, in Azerbaijan and Belarus?than were successful. A new face was needed to mask reactionary aims. The characteristics of all these ?revolutions? were similar. Dissident pro-Western sections of the ruling elites mounted a carefully-managed and well-financed campaign to topple their rivals that drew in frustrated sections of the middle classes and youth. Various non-government organisations, in some cases with direct connections to American think tanks and foundations, prepared the ground, establishing connections with student groups, trade unions, the local media and other groups and laying out the marketing plan. In every case, the opposition parties lost an election, which then became the pretext for a frenzied bid for power on the basis of unsubstantiated ballot rigging?all with the backing of the international media. The outcome has been pro-US regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union that are no more democratic than their predecessors. The guiding principle of these ?revolutions? has not been the needs and aspirations of working people, but the aims of US imperialism to extend its domination, particularly in the former Soviet republics in the energy-rich Caucasus and Central Asia. Reestablishing a dominant influence in Iran, which lies at the intersection of these regions with the Middle East, has been a longstanding American ambition. Those who claim that the current ?Green Revolution? in Iran is any different are either deluding themselves or have ulterior motives...." From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 23 19:26:03 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 23 19:26:30 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] letter to the bank Message-ID: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> > 86-year-old American woman's letter to her bank - enjoy! > > > Below is an actual letter an 86-year-old American woman sent to a bank. > The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in the > 'New York Times'. > > Dear Sir: > > I am writing to thank you for bouncing my check with which I > endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. > > By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his > presenting the check and the arrival in my account of the funds needed > to honor it. > > I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my entire > pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only > eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of > opportunity, and also for debiting my account $30 by way of penalty for > the inconvenience caused to your bank. > > My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has > caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. > > I noticed that whereas I personally answer your telephone calls and > letters, --- when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the > impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank > has become. > > From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood > person. My mortgage and loan repayments will therefore and hereafter no > longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank, by check, addressed > personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must > nominate. > > Be aware that it is an offense under the Postal Act for any other > person to open such an envelope. Please find attached an Application > Contact which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it > runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her > as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that > all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a > Notary Public, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation > (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by > documented proof. In due course, at MY convenience, I will issue your > employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. > > I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have > modeled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my > account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is > the sincerest form of flattery. > > Let me level the playing field even further. > When you call me, press buttons as follows: > > IMMEDIATELY AFTER DIALING, PRESS THE STAR (*) BUTTON FOR ENGLISH > > #1. To make an appointment to see me > > #2. To query a missing payment. > > #3. To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there. > > #4. To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping > > #5. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature. > > #6. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home > > #7. To leave a message on my computer, a password to access my computer > is required. Password will be communicated to you at a later date to > that Authorized Contact mentioned earlier . > > #8. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 7 > > #9. To make a general complaint or inquiry. The contact will then be > put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. > > #10. This is a second reminder to press for English. While this may, on > occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the > duration of the call.. > > Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an > establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement. > May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous New Year? > > Your Humble Client From thinker at xplornet.com Tue Jun 23 20:12:03 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Tue Jun 23 20:09:51 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] European Futurists Conference. In-Reply-To: <20090624020947.F3AB6F7AF@fep01.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> References: <20090623154849.84C2F167261A@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> <20090624020947.F3AB6F7AF@fep01.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Message-ID: <20090624030912.EAB0323ABAD8@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> If these guys are real "futurists", how is it that they couldn't predict the collapse at one of their previous meetings.? I'm no futurist, or an intellectual, but have been warning about it for 20 years. Cheers, Ed. At 07:09 PM 23/06/2009, you wrote: >This sounds like a most interesting conference >and let's hope the proceedings will later be >gathered in an accessible publication. Since >the economic world has generated a snowstorm of >short-lived tipping points, let's also hope >there will be some attention to how different >policies and actions, ranging from local to global, now will affect the future. > >Dion Giles >Western Australia > > >At 23:51 23/06/2009, you wrote: > > > >>From: editor@european-futurists.org [mailto:editor@european-futurists.org] >>Sent: June 23, 2009 9:04 AM >>To: Reception >>Subject: 5th European Futurists Conference >>Lucerne: Early booking with discount! >> >> >> >> >> EUROPEAN FUTURISTS CONFERENCE LUCERNE >> October 14 - 16, 2009 >> >> >> >>Newsletter >> >> >>News >> >>5th European Futurists Conference Lucerne >> >> >>October 14 - 16, 2009 >>Culture and Convention Center KKL Lucerne, Switzerland >> >>Understanding the Transformation >> * How far does the transformation reach >> beyond this worst crisis since the Great Depression? >> * What does the new architecture of a >> robust global financial system look like? >> * How do society?s values change? >> * How will customers make decisions in the future? >> * What is the future relationship between state and economy? >> * How does the transformation affect the sustainable development? >> * Which new technologies are driving tomorrow?s growth? >> >>Conquering New Opportunities >> * What do the megatrends mean for small and medium-sized businesses? >> * Are the companies equipped for the future? >> * Where do corporate futurists see future opportunities? >> * How do companies combine insights about >> the future with their strategies? >> >> >>Get answers to these questions! At the >>5th European Futurists Conference in Lucerne >> >>Register >>now and profit from 20% early booking discount! >> >>Ready for the Future? >>New Survey for SME in Switzerland >> >>European Futurists Conference Lucerne launched >>a pilot survey on future readiness of small and >>midsize enterprises in Switzerland. How well >>done are a company's forsight activities? What >>do others do with a similar future horizon and >>a similar complex general environment? SME >>(KMU) in Switzerland are invited to >>participate: It only takes 15 minute. You will >>get a free copy of the results. If required, a >>customized assessment of the future readiness is available. >>Go here. >>News from our partners >> >> >>How the world changes through the economic crisis >>The global recession is a historic break, >>sensationally and extraordinary - not true, >>says futurist Matthias Horx (Zukunftsinstitut, >>advisory board of the European Futurists >>Conference Lucerne) in a study called 'The >>Matrix of Change'. His point: The crisis is a cleaning storm. >>Read the Spiegel online article in german >>here. >> >> >>Futures of the world economy >>By Sohail Inayatullah >> >>Political scientist and futurists Dr Sohail >>Inayatullah looks at possible futures for a >>world tranformed by a global economic crisis. >>Watch the speech here. >> >> >> >>New Publications of Future Studies >> >>SMEs Respond to Threat of Scarce Resources >>Third Major Credit Suisse Survey of SMEs on Megatrends ?Opportunities and >>Risks for SMEs >> >>The economists at Credit Suisse have surveyed >>nearly 1,800 small and medium-sized enterprises >>(SMEs) about their views on selected megatrends for the third time. >>The main focus of this year's survey was the >>scarcity of resources. This is the only >>megatrend that is viewed as negative by the >>majority of the respondents, although the >>rating i mproved compared to the previous year. >>SMEs expect the cost of resources to increase >>over the next three years and this is >>influencing their approach to capital >>expenditure. Most SMEs have already taken >>measures to counter this trend or are planning >>appropriate steps. Entrepreneurs are convinced >>that investments in resource efficiency are >>beneficial. In terms of the other megatrends, >>it is particularly noticeable that SMEs in all >>regions of Switzerland regard globalization as >>positive. When all six megatrends are taken >>into account, SMEs even have a slightly more >>optimistic outlook for the future than in the >>previous year, despite the downturn in the economy. >> >>Read the article >>here. >> >> >> >>Best regards >>Georges T. Roos, Managing >>Director Claudia Willi, Head of Organisation >>roos@european-futurists.org >>willi@european-futurists.org >> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Mai-not mailing list >>Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >>http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > > >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG - www.avg.com >Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: >270.12.90/2198 - Release Date: 06/23/09 17:54:00 From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Tue Jun 23 21:54:27 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Tue Jun 23 21:54:52 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] letter to the bank In-Reply-To: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> References: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> Message-ID: <20090624045427.EDCBA12F38@fep06.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Much more elegant than my own response to a bank back in the days when Australia used the old currency (12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, one pound pone shilling to a guinea). Doctors' bills were in guineas, and it became common for people to send cheques in pounds instead, shaving off the extra shilling. A letter in the papers from a patient recounted that her cheque had been returned with the comment: "I count in guineas". She returned it unchanged with the words "I count in pounds". My own experience was a little different. One day a cheque had been presented for payment on the same day that my salary was paid in. There was a gap of 4/8 (four shillings and eightpence) and I found in my statement that I had been charged a three guinea "Overdraft service fee". In my letter cancelling my account with that bank I pointed out that if I wanted to borrow 4/8 for an hour or two I'd go to my mates. They would charge me only a shilling a day interest which was a hell of a lot better than the bank's three guineas for part of a day. The bank was the National Bank of Australia. The bank I transferred to was the Commonwealth Bank, then owned by the nation and the most popular and successful of all the banks. Later Paul Keating, dubbed by Mr Greed "the world's greatest Treasurer", privatised and foreignised the Commonwealth Bank along with several other major successful Australian national assets. Dion Giles At 10:26 24/06/2009, John foster wrote: >>86-year-old American woman's letter to her bank - enjoy! >> >>Below is an actual letter an 86-year-old American woman sent to a bank. >>The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in >>the 'New York Times'. [snip] From ptuffley at xtra.co.nz Wed Jun 24 00:19:16 2009 From: ptuffley at xtra.co.nz (Peter Tuffley) Date: Wed Jun 24 00:20:17 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] letter to the bank In-Reply-To: <20090624045427.EDCBA12F38@fep06.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> References: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> <20090624045427.EDCBA12F38@fep06.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Message-ID: On 24/06/2009, at 4:54 PM, Dion Giles wrote: > The bank I transferred to was the Commonwealth Bank, then owned by > the nation and the most popular and successful of all the banks. > Later Paul Keating, dubbed by Mr Greed "the world's greatest > Treasurer", privatised and foreignised the Commonwealth Bank along > with several other major successful Australian national assets. ...and now the Commonwealth Bank is one of the Australian banks that collectively own most of New Zealand's banking system. Sic transit pecunia... Peter From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Wed Jun 24 00:48:05 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Wed Jun 24 00:48:39 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] letter to the bank In-Reply-To: References: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> <20090624045427.EDCBA12F38@fep06.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Message-ID: <20090624074806.1E2A61336B@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Wonder which will get to be 51st State - Australia or New Zealand? My bet is the State of Australasia. Dion At 15:19 24/06/2009, Peter Tuffley wrote: >On 24/06/2009, at 4:54 PM, Dion Giles wrote: > >>The bank I transferred to was the Commonwealth Bank, then owned by >>the nation and the most popular and successful of all the banks. >>Later Paul Keating, dubbed by Mr Greed "the world's greatest >>Treasurer", privatised and foreignised the Commonwealth Bank along >>with several other major successful Australian national assets. > > >...and now the Commonwealth Bank is one of the Australian banks that >collectively own most of New Zealand's banking system. Sic transit >pecunia... > >Peter > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From creuss at bluewin.ch Wed Jun 24 04:51:31 2009 From: creuss at bluewin.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Wed Jun 24 04:52:25 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] European Futurists Conference. Message-ID: Ed asked: > If these guys are real "futurists", how is it > that they couldn't predict the collapse at one of > their previous meetings.? This question can be answered by taking a closer look at this key figure, mentioned in the forward at the beginning of this thread: > How the world changes through the economic crisis > The global recession is a historic break, > sensationally and extraordinary - not true, says > futurist Matthias Horx (Zukunftsinstitut, > advisory board of the European Futurists > Conference Lucerne) in a study called 'The Matrix > of Change'. His point: The crisis is a cleaning storm. Horx is a journo who maintains a "leading" neo-con think-tank in Frankfurt, Vienna and London. It is no surprise that he works hard to put a positive spin on the mega-rip-off, painting the neocon-made "crisis" as a "cleaning storm"! (Well, it surely swept CLEAN the savings accounts of the middle class, flushing the billions into the deep pockets of the super-rich, and in the second step, it swept CLEAN the countries' tax accounts, to pay hundreds of billions again to the banksters!) Instead of debunking it as the theft and fraud that it is, like a journo ought to do. It will be a bleak future indeed if we trust in "futurists" like these! A neo-con self-fulfilling prophecy is what they sell as "future". Cheers, Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From thinker at xplornet.com Wed Jun 24 08:32:45 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Wed Jun 24 08:30:09 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] European Futurists Conference. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20090624152952.3BD7D742D0A@smtprelay01.hostedemail.com> This reminds me of a cartoon in the Daily Mirror , well over 50 years ago: "What is your scientific specialty professor ? "I'm an expert on Mars" "Have you ever been to Mars ?" "No, but neither has anybody else" Cheers, Ed. At 04:51 AM 24/06/2009, you wrote: >Ed asked: > > If these guys are real "futurists", how is it > > that they couldn't predict the collapse at one of > > their previous meetings.? > >This question can be answered by taking a closer look at this key figure, >mentioned in the forward at the beginning of this thread: > > > How the world changes through the economic crisis > > The global recession is a historic break, > > sensationally and extraordinary - not true, says > > futurist Matthias Horx (Zukunftsinstitut, > > advisory board of the European Futurists > > Conference Lucerne) in a study called 'The Matrix > > of Change'. His point: The crisis is a cleaning storm. > >Horx is a journo who maintains a "leading" neo-con think-tank in >Frankfurt, Vienna and London. It is no surprise that he works hard >to put a positive spin on the mega-rip-off, painting the neocon-made >"crisis" as a "cleaning storm"! (Well, it surely swept CLEAN the >savings accounts of the middle class, flushing the billions into the >deep pockets of the super-rich, and in the second step, it swept CLEAN >the countries' tax accounts, to pay hundreds of billions again to the >banksters!) Instead of debunking it as the theft and fraud that it is, >like a journo ought to do. > >It will be a bleak future indeed if we trust in "futurists" like these! >A neo-con self-fulfilling prophecy is what they sell as "future". > >Cheers, >Chris > > > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword >"igve". > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG - www.avg.com >Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.90/2198 - Release Date: >06/23/09 17:54:00 From siamdave at yahoo.ca Wed Jun 24 09:09:42 2009 From: siamdave at yahoo.ca (Dave Patterson) Date: Wed Jun 24 09:10:17 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: [S] letter to the bank In-Reply-To: <20090624074806.1E2A61336B@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> References: <014401c9f473$1fd97090$33ad57ca@jfos> <20090624045427.EDCBA12F38@fep06.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> <20090624074806.1E2A61336B@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Message-ID: <200906242309420906.00438B52@smtp.totisp.net> You guys are completely out of the running - Canadastan has had that title locked up for years, decades even, since the Canada-hating neocons took over in the 80s.... *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 09-06-24 at 3:48 PM Dion Giles wrote: Wonder which will get to be 51st State - Australia or New Zealand? My bet is the State of Australasia. Dion At 15:19 24/06/2009, Peter Tuffley wrote: >On 24/06/2009, at 4:54 PM, Dion Giles wrote: > >>The bank I transferred to was the Commonwealth Bank, then owned by >>the nation and the most popular and successful of all the banks. >>Later Paul Keating, dubbed by Mr Greed "the world's greatest >>Treasurer", privatised and foreignised the Commonwealth Bank along >>with several other major successful Australian national assets. > > >...and now the Commonwealth Bank is one of the Australian banks that >collectively own most of New Zealand's banking system. Sic transit >pecunia... > >Peter > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not _______________________________________________ Mai-not mailing list Mai-not@globalproblematique.net http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.90/2198 - Release Date: 06/23/09 17:54:00 From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Wed Jun 24 22:16:07 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Wed Jun 24 22:16:36 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: New US commander in Afghanistan assembles team of assassins Message-ID: <01b401c9f554$0c3556d0$05ad57ca@jfos> Excerpt: "In its escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, and its increasing extension across the border into Pakistan, the Obama administration has chosen as its senior commander an officer who is among those most deeply implicated in the criminal operations carried out under Bush and Cheney. This appointment, and its confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate, is a clear warning that the ruling establishment in Washington is pursuing a consensus policy that will involve even greater war crimes against the Afghan people, as Washington continues its attempt to assert hegemony in Central Asia by military means." Full article at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/mcch-j12.shtml ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Wed Jun 24 23:17:08 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Wed Jun 24 23:17:43 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: Beijing cautions US over Iran Message-ID: <02b601c9f55c$927e31f0$05ad57ca@jfos> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF20Ak03.html China has broken silence on the developing situation in Iran. This comes against the backdrop of a discernible shift in Washington's posturing toward political developments in Iran. The government-owned China Daily featured its main editorial comment on Thursday titled "For Peace in Iran". It comes amid reports in the Western media that the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is rallying the Qom clergy to put pressure on the Guardians Council - and, in turn, on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - to annul last Friday's presidential election that gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad another four-year term. Beijing fears a confrontation looming and counsels Obama to keep the pledge in his Cairo speech not to repeat such errors in the US's Middle East policy as the overthrow of the elected government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953. Beijing also warns about letting the genie of popular unrest get out of the bottle in a highly volatile region that is waiting to explode. Tehran on Friday saw its sixth day of massive protests by supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom they say was cheated out of victory. A parallel with Thailand Meanwhile, China's special envoy on Middle East, Wu Sike, is setting out on an extensive fortnight-long regional tour on Saturday (which, significantly, will be rounded off with consultations in Moscow) to fathom the political temperature in capitals as varied as Cairo and Tel Aviv, Amman and Damascus, and Beirut and Ramallah. Beijing also made a political statement when a substantive bilateral was scheduled between President Hu Jintao and Ahmadinejad on Tuesday on the sidelines of the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Conceivably, Hu would have discussed the Iran situation with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev during his official visit to Moscow that followed the SCO summit. Earlier, Moscow welcomed Ahmadinejad's re-election. Both China and Russia abhor "color" revolutions, especially something as intriguing as Twitter, which Moscow came across a few months ago in Moldova and raises hackles about the US's interventionist global strategy. China anticipated the backlash against Ahmadinejad's victory. On Monday, The Global Times newspaper quoted the former Chinese ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, that the Iranian situation would get back to normalcy only if a negotiated agreement was reached among the "major centers of political power ... But, if not, the recent turmoil in Thailand will possibly be repeated". It is quite revealing that the veteran Chinese diplomat drew a parallel with Thailand. However, Hua underscored that Ahmadinejad does enjoy popularity and has "lots of support in this nationalist country because he has the courage to state his own opinion and dares to carry out his policies". The consensus opinion of Chinese academic community is also that Ahmadinejad's re-election will "test" Obama. Thus, Thursday's China Daily editorial is broadly in the nature of an appeal to the Obama administration not to spoil its new Middle East policy, which is shaping well, through impetuous actions. Significantly, the editorial upheld the authenticity of Ahmadinejad's election victory: "Win and loss are two sides of an election coin. Some candidates are less inclined to accept defeat." The daily pointed out that a pre-election public opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post newspaper showed Ahmadinejad having a 2-1 lead over his nearest rival and some opinion polls in Iran also indicated more or less the same, whereas, actually, "he won the election on a lower margin. Thus, the opposition's allegations against Ahmadinejad come as a trifle surprising". The editorial warns: "Attempts to push the so-called color revolution toward chaos will prove very dangerous. A destabilized Iran is in nobody's interest if we want to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East, and the world beyond." It pointedly recalled that the US's "Cold War intervention in Iran" made US-Iran relationship a troubled one, "with US presidents trying to stick their nose into Iran's internal business". Theocracy versus republicanism Beijing understands Iran's revolutionary politics very well. China was one of the few countries that warmly hosted former supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini (in 1981 and 1989). In contrast, India, which professes "civilizational" ties with Iran, was much too confused about Iran's revolutionary legacy to be able to correctly estimate Khamenei's political instincts favoring republicanism. Most of the Indian elites aren't even aware that Khamenei studied as a youth in Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University. Be that as it may, the Hu-Ahmadinejad meeting in Yekaterinburg on Tuesday once again shows Beijing has a very clear idea about the ebb and flow of Iran's politics. Hu demonstrably accorded to Ahmadinejad the full honor as Beijing's valued interlocutor. Chinese media have closely followed the trajectory of the US reaction to the situation in Iran, especially the "Twitter revolution", which puts Beijing on guard about US intentions. Indications are that the US establishment has begun meddling in Iranian politics. Rafsanjani's camp always keeps lines open to the West. All-in-all, a degree of synchronization is visible involving the US's "Twitter revolution" route, Rafsanjani's parleys with the conservative clergy in Qom and Mousavi's uncharacteristically defiant stance. Obama faces multiple challenges. On the one hand, as Helene Cooper of The New York Times reported on Thursday, the continuing street protests in Tehran are emboldening a corpus of (pro-Israel) conservatives in Washington to demand that Obama should take a "more visible stance in support of the protesters". But then, a regime change would inevitably delay the expected US-Iran direct engagement and upset Obama's tight calendar to ensure the negotiations gained traction by year's end, while Iran's centrifuges in its nuclear establishments keep spinning. Also, a fragmented power structure in Tehran will prove ineffectual in helping the US stabilize Afghanistan. However, top administration officials like Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like the US to "strike a stronger tone" on Iran's turmoil. Cooper reported they are piling pressure on Obama that he might run the risk of "coming across the wrong side of history at a potentially transformative moment in Iran". A Thermidorian reaction No doubt, the turmoil has an intellectual side to it. Obama being a rare politician gifted with intellectuality and a keen sense of history would know that what is at stake is a well-orchestrated attempt by the hardcore conservative clerical establishment to roll back the four-year-old painful, zig-zag process toward republicanism in Iran. Mousavi is the affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that another four years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested interests. Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the clergy from the sinecures of power and the honey pots of the Iranian economy, especially the oil industry. The struggle between the worldly mullahs (in alliance with the bazaar) and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian revolution, where the fedayeen of the proscribed Tudeh party (communist cadres) were the original foot soldiers of the revolution, but the clerics usurped the leadership. The highly contrived political passions let loose by the 444-day hostage crisis with the US helped the wily Shi'ite clerics to stage the Thermidorian reaction and isolate the progressive revolutionary leadership. Ironically, the US once again figures as a key protagonist in Iran's dialectics - not as a hostage, though. Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as an independent force to ensure the mullahs didn't hijack the revolution. Equally, his preference was that the government should be headed by non-clerics. In the early years of the revolution, the conspiracies hatched by the triumvirate of Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster of the secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Khomeini's protege), had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic state. These are vignettes of Iran's revolutionary history that might have eluded the intellectual grasp of George W Bush, but Obama must be au fait with the deviousness of Rafsanjani's politics. If Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would at best bear resemblance to a decadent outpost of the "pro-West" Persian Gulf. Would a dubious regime be durable? More important, is it what Obama wishes to see as the destiny of the Iranian people? The Arab street is also watching. Iran is an exception in the Muslim world where people have been empowered. Iran's multitudes of poor, who form Ahmadinejad's support base, detest the corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They don't even hide their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family. Alas, the political class in Washington is clueless about the Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli lobby, it is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will be to engineer a "color revolution". But the consequence will be far worse than what obtains in Ukraine. Iran is a regional power and the debris will fall all over. The US today has neither the clout nor the stamina to stem the lava flow of a volcanic eruption triggered by a color revolution that may spill over Iran's borders. Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany , Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey. ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 1797 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090625/99bb8446/attachment.gif From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Thu Jun 25 00:08:31 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Thu Jun 25 00:09:07 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: Beijing cautions US over Iran In-Reply-To: <02b601c9f55c$927e31f0$05ad57ca@jfos> References: <02b601c9f55c$927e31f0$05ad57ca@jfos> Message-ID: <20090625070834.085E9F75E@fep08.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> This looks like an example of "thug police states of the world unite". Thug rulers abhor justice and especially abhor democracy - prefer to plump for stability which (like calls for social peace) is code for surrender to the sirs. Note that the Zionist leaders, while hoping for the Ahmadinejad regime to retain power, came out publicly to praise the demonstrations - a surefire guarantee to lessen support for the demonstrations and consolidate the current theocratic regime. See http://tribes.tribe.net/mideastpolitics/thread/e04c28c5-6340-436a-a941-f2a19570da3fHe They were doing just what Obama rightly warned the US should not do. The Zionists would be well aware of the likely effect of commenting in favour of the demonstrations. The real contradiction is between the rights of the people and the power of the mullahs. Geopolitics is irrelevant to that. If the election was phoney then the people are right to do all they can to discredit and nullify it irrespective of the geopolitical power games of foreign governments and commentators.. There are not many ways foreigners can get the people out on the streets against their own wishes. (One way agents can interfere is to stuff ballot boxes so that cities deliver more votes than there are people - this kind of false flag operation might stir the pot.) The answer in the Middle East, as everywhere, is democracy. The last time the Iranians experienced it was in the secular regime of Dr Mossadeq (overthrown at the urging of the British and of the dangerously crooked John Foster Dulles.) Dion Giles At 14:17 25/06/2009, you wrote: >http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF20Ak03.html > >China has broken silence on the developing situation in Iran. This >comes against the backdrop of a discernible shift in Washington's >posturing toward political developments in Iran. > >The government-owned China Daily featured its main editorial comment >on Thursday titled "For Peace in Iran". It comes amid reports in the >Western media that the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is >rallying the Qom clergy to put pressure on the Guardians Council - >and, in turn, on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - to annul last >Friday's presidential election that gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad another >four-year term. > >Beijing fears a confrontation looming and counsels Obama to keep the >pledge in his Cairo speech not to repeat such errors in >the US's Middle East policy as the overthrow of the elected >government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953. Beijing also warns >about letting the genie of popular unrest get out of the bottle in a >highly volatile region that is waiting to explode. Tehran on Friday >saw its sixth day of massive protests by supporters of Mir Hossein >Mousavi, whom they say was cheated out of victory. > >A parallel with Thailand >Meanwhile, China's special envoy on Middle East, Wu Sike, is setting >out on an extensive fortnight-long regional tour on Saturday (which, >significantly, will be rounded off with consultations in Moscow) to >fathom the political temperature in capitals as varied as Cairo and >Tel Aviv, Amman and Damascus, and Beirut and Ramallah. > >Beijing also made a political statement when a substantive bilateral >was scheduled between President Hu Jintao and Ahmadinejad on Tuesday >on the sidelines of the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation >Organization (SCO) in Yekaterinburg, Russia. > >Conceivably, Hu would have discussed the Iran situation with his >Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev during his official visit to >Moscow that followed the SCO summit. Earlier, Moscow welcomed >Ahmadinejad's re-election. Both China and Russia abhor "color" >revolutions, especially something as intriguing as Twitter, which >Moscow came across a few months ago in Moldova and raises hackles >about the US's interventionist global strategy. > >China anticipated the backlash against Ahmadinejad's victory. On >Monday, The Global Times newspaper quoted the former Chinese >ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, that the Iranian situation would get >back to normalcy only if a negotiated agreement was reached among >the "major centers of political power ... But, if not, the recent >turmoil in Thailand will possibly be repeated". It is quite >revealing that the veteran Chinese diplomat drew a parallel with Thailand. > >However, Hua underscored that Ahmadinejad does enjoy popularity and >has "lots of support in this nationalist country because he has the >courage to state his own opinion and dares to carry out his >policies". The consensus opinion of Chinese academic community is >also that Ahmadinejad's re-election will "test" Obama. > >Thus, Thursday's China Daily editorial is broadly in the nature of >an appeal to the Obama administration not to spoil its new Middle >East policy, which is shaping well, through impetuous actions. >Significantly, the editorial upheld the authenticity of >Ahmadinejad's election victory: "Win and loss are two sides of an >election coin. Some candidates are less inclined to accept defeat." > >The daily pointed out that a pre-election public opinion poll >conducted by the Washington Post newspaper showed Ahmadinejad having >a 2-1 lead over his nearest rival and some opinion polls in Iran >also indicated more or less the same, whereas, actually, "he won the >election on a lower margin. Thus, the opposition's allegations >against Ahmadinejad come as a trifle surprising". > >The editorial warns: "Attempts to push the so-called color >revolution toward chaos will prove very dangerous. A destabilized >Iran is in nobody's interest if we want to maintain peace and >stability in the Middle East, and the world beyond." It pointedly >recalled that the US's "Cold War intervention in Iran" made US-Iran >relationship a troubled one, "with US presidents trying to stick >their nose into Iran's internal business". > >Theocracy versus republicanism >Beijing understands Iran's revolutionary politics very well. China >was one of the few countries that warmly hosted former supreme >leader Ruhollah Khomeini (in 1981 and 1989). In contrast, India, >which professes "civilizational" ties with Iran, was much too >confused about Iran's revolutionary legacy to be able to correctly >estimate Khamenei's political instincts favoring republicanism. Most >of the Indian elites aren't even aware that Khamenei studied as a >youth in Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University. > >Be that as it may, the Hu-Ahmadinejad meeting in Yekaterinburg on >Tuesday once again shows Beijing has a very clear idea about the ebb >and flow of Iran's politics. Hu demonstrably accorded to Ahmadinejad >the full honor as Beijing's valued interlocutor. > >Chinese media have closely followed the trajectory of the US >reaction to the situation in Iran, especially the "Twitter >revolution", which puts Beijing on guard about US intentions. >Indications are that the US establishment has begun meddling in >Iranian politics. Rafsanjani's camp always keeps lines open to the >West. All-in-all, a degree of synchronization is visible involving >the US's "Twitter revolution" route, Rafsanjani's parleys with the >conservative clergy in Qom and Mousavi's uncharacteristically defiant stance. > >Obama faces multiple challenges. On the one hand, as Helene Cooper >of The New York Times reported on Thursday, the continuing street >protests in Tehran are emboldening a corpus of (pro-Israel) >conservatives in Washington to demand that Obama should take a "more >visible stance in support of the protesters". But then, a regime >change would inevitably delay the expected US-Iran direct engagement >and upset Obama's tight calendar to ensure the negotiations gained >traction by year's end, while Iran's centrifuges in its nuclear >establishments keep spinning. > >Also, a fragmented power structure in Tehran will prove ineffectual >in helping the US stabilize Afghanistan. However, top administration >officials like Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State >Hillary Clinton would like the US to "strike a stronger tone" on >Iran's turmoil. Cooper reported they are piling pressure on Obama >that he might run the risk of "coming across the wrong side of >history at a potentially transformative moment in Iran". > >A Thermidorian reaction >No doubt, the turmoil has an intellectual side to it. Obama being a >rare politician gifted with intellectuality and a keen sense of >history would know that what is at stake is a well-orchestrated >attempt by the hardcore conservative clerical establishment to roll >back the four-year-old painful, zig-zag process toward republicanism in Iran. > >Mousavi is the affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that >another four years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested interests. >Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the clergy from the >sinecures of power and the honey pots of the Iranian economy, >especially the oil industry. > >The struggle between the worldly mullahs (in alliance with the >bazaar) and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian >revolution, where the fedayeen of the proscribed Tudeh party >(communist cadres) were the original foot soldiers of the >revolution, but the clerics usurped the leadership. The highly >contrived political passions let loose by the 444-day hostage crisis >with the US helped the wily Shi'ite clerics to stage the >Thermidorian reaction and isolate the progressive revolutionary >leadership. Ironically, the US once again figures as a key >protagonist in Iran's dialectics - not as a hostage, though. > >Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the >Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as an independent force to ensure >the mullahs didn't hijack the revolution. Equally, his preference >was that the government should be headed by non-clerics. In the >early years of the revolution, the conspiracies hatched by the >triumvirate of Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster >of the secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Khomeini's >protege), had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic state. >These are vignettes of Iran's revolutionary history that might have >eluded the intellectual grasp of George W Bush, but Obama must be au >fait with the deviousness of Rafsanjani's politics. > >If Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would at best bear resemblance >to a decadent outpost of the "pro-West" Persian Gulf. Would a >dubious regime be durable? More important, is it what Obama wishes >to see as the destiny of the Iranian people? The Arab street is also >watching. Iran is an exception in the Muslim world where people have >been empowered. Iran's multitudes of poor, who form Ahmadinejad's >support base, detest the corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They >don't even hide their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family. > >Alas, the political class in Washington is clueless about the >Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli lobby, it >is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will be to engineer >a "color revolution". But the consequence will be far worse than >what obtains in Ukraine. Iran is a regional power and the debris >will fall all over. The US today has neither the clout nor the >stamina to stem the lava flow of a volcanic eruption triggered by a >color revolution that may spill over Iran's borders. > >Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian >Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South >Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany , Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, >Kuwait and Turkey. > > > > > > >------------------------------------------------------ >Provided by Australis >http://www.australis.com.au/ > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Thu Jun 25 21:22:27 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Thu Jun 25 21:22:55 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Unregulated Corruption and hidden public handouts to huge U$ banks Message-ID: <009d01c9f615$b6f140e0$2ead57ca@jfos> Excerpt from: Goldman Sachs on Pace to Pay Out Record Bonuses this Year "JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I'd like to ask you about the-I guess the nuclear bomb of all this financial crisis, which was the question of all of these unregulated derivatives and credit default swaps that were occurring basically outside the banking system and that the Obama administration is now claiming that it will attempt to regulate. But you're a little skeptical about what you've seen so far of the proposal, right? NOMI PRINS: The proposal has said, quote, "it will regulate standardized OTC," which are over-the-counter, these types of derivatives-"standardized" meaning the ones that basically are so generic they're not actually that harmful. What was harmful in this particular saga were things called CDOs, which were collateralized debt obligations, which were packages of derivatives and all sorts of other things combined with loans and other types of securities. And two trillion of those were issued. But the leverage, or the amount that banks could borrow on the back of that, ranged from ten to thirty times. So a $2 trillion set of stuff became something like a $20 trillion to $60 trillion set of risk. Those are things that will not be under the Obama plan for regulation. And again, these are things that have been lobbied substantially by the banking industry. "Do not take the least generic things, the most complex things, that we can make the most amount of money out of, because neither the regulators nor our investors, frankly, really understand what we're doing in them. Do not take those away from us." And the administration was like, "OK, but we're going to create this sort of sweeping standardized regulatory system for some of the derivatives." Will it help a little bit? Yes. Will it help the real problem? No, it will not. AMY GOODMAN: You referred to this, Nomi, in discussing Goldman Sachs, but the bigger picture of what you call the "big bank bailout payback bamboozle"? NOMI PRINS: Well, this is part of the $13.6 trillion versus the $700 billion. A couple weeks ago, ten banks said-or were allowed by the Treasury Department to pay back all or a portion of the TARP money they had received. One was Goldman, that had $10 billion; one was JPMorgan Chase, that had $25 billion; and so forth. The collective money of those ten banks was $68 billion they would be paying back. They happen to owe $229 billion. The media didn't really mention that part. They only mentioned, "Oh, the banks are paying back this money. Things must be healthy. The financial system must be stabilizing. And all is sort of good." The reality is, they owe $229 billion just from the FDIC guarantees they were able to use and from the AIG money. That does not include the trillions of dollars-and this is the biggest problem in all of this-that are on the Fed's books that we do not know how it was divided out among these banks. So we know of $229 billion. We also know there are multiple trillions of dollars on the Fed's books that went out to these and other banks. We don't know how much, because they will not disclose that information.(snip) ... The Fed, at night, on a Sunday, without even waiting for the five-day mandatory antitrust period, decided "OK, fine." That enabled Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to become bank holding companies, to get under the public subsidy tent, and to get a lot of this money, the FDIC guarantees, the Fed backing and everything else. And that was the Fed's decision. They could have said no." full article at http://i1.democracynow.org/2009/6/22/report_goldman_sachs_on_pace_to ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From thinker at xplornet.com Fri Jun 26 11:51:23 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Fri Jun 26 11:48:58 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Breaking bonds with the Dollar. Message-ID: <20090626184831.6BCCB2350EFA@smtprelay01.hostedemail.com> MARKET INTELLIGENCE Breaking Bonds with the Dollar Breaking Bonds with the Dollar Washington and London are presently engaged in the most shortsighted and destructive friendly fire assault upon the future of their own government bonds and currencies in recorded history. It is all being done in a vain and hazardous bid to revive their faulted bubble-based economic models that massively crashed last fall. As in any friendly fire incident, they aren?t aiming to attack and destroy their own bonds and currencies, but rather they believe they are attacking what they see as the real the enemy, collapsed international confidence, with what they see as their most advanced weapon - colossal spending. But their weapon?s guidance system has gone haywire and it now has their own bonds and currencies in the crosshairs. What It Really Means By enacting their present shortsighted monetary and economic policies they are only working to seriously undercut, for the foreseeable future, international confidence in their own bonds and currencies. Confidence is very weak, and getting much weaker in the dollar as a safe store of wealth beyond the short term. In proof of this, the recent mere modest return of risk appetite has resulted in investors selling off the dollar for safer stores of wealth in the hard asset-oriented investment world. As a result the dollar has declined sharply, with the U.S. dollar index losing 11% since its 2009 high on March 9, the same day the ongoing Wall Street stock rally began. Thus, global investors are loath to hold too many dollars. This is the handwriting on the wall for Washington and London, and it is the hand of global investors, including the central banks across the globe, that is doing the writing. For the U.S. & Britain: If the dollar symbolizes the monetary policies of Washington and London, then the two are seriously risking irretrievably breaking the backs of their own government bonds with the dollar. This is occurring at a time when the two are more dependent than ever upon continued foreign lending for their present financial and economic stability and that in the foreseeable future. For the globe?s lenders: But the increasingly grim outlook for their government bonds and currencies is causing the globe?s key lenders to prudently begin to loosen and even break traditional bonds with the dollar for fear of suffering damage as the policies of Washington and London inevitably backfire. I have stated many times that a new global order in the spheres of monetary policies, finance, economy and trade is arising as the old order that revolved around the U.S., the dollar and the developed economies gives way to a new order that revolves instead around the emerging economies and their currencies. The mounting international short-to-medium-term predicament for the dollar and the pound and for U.S. and British government bonds opens the door to genuine transition to a new order that no longer revolves around these as the center, if it turns out that the emerging economies do find effective ways to circumvent their reliance upon the U.S. and the dollar by collectively establishing themselves as a new and vibrant core. A relative few observers can already see the emergence of such a new order-in-the-making, but many others cannot yet see their way around the outdated conventional wisdom and popular assumptions that are oriented around the notion that, despite present U.S. troubles, global finance, monetary policies and trade still extraordinarily revolve around it as the unchanged center. They also point out that, in their view, China and the other under-developed economies are at present, and will be for a long time in the future, inordinately dependent upon the U.S. and the dollar. These observers therefore conclude that talk of any transition to a new global order is therefore much over-stated. In this article I will address the popular notions that still blind many to the accelerating emergence of a new global order so the reader can see if they truly stand up to the scrutiny of rapidly unfolding developments on the global stage. If they do not stand up, then such observers will be faced with a decision ? will they be willing to change their view of where the global order is heading and how rapidly it will arrive at its destination, or will they refuse to see the handwriting on the wall? As an admonition to such ones, note carefully the June 12, 2009 statement of none other than Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and Chief Investment Advisor of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), the largest bond fund in the world, in addressing the accelerating rise of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, China & India) and other key emerging economies, and the simultaneous noteworthy decline in the global economic leadership and leverage of the developed economies: ?The rebalancing of relative economic power is not only alive but gaining momentum ? ?Average investors need to make sure that they are not hostage to an outdated conventional wisdom that underexposes them to this phenomenon.? [Bold italics added] In view of this statement emanating from such a highly-respected authority, the reader will do well to carefully consider all the facts relevant to this issue in the remainder of this article. Talk Begins to Turn into Action Especially since February of this year 2009 the safety and desirability of holding too many dollars and U.S. Treasury bonds has come under unprecedented verbal fire from a chorus of big foreign lenders to the U.S. Now, with the yield curve on Treasuries steepening to a record and the dollar declining ever faster as the U.S. Treasury floods the market with huge sums of new issuance, investors are starting to sell off dollars for hard asset-oriented investments in the emerging markets, which many see will be the first to emerge from this global crisis. Mounting fears over inflation and its power to ravage investors? holdings in the dollar and Treasury bonds are causing investors to do just as Bill Gross, founder of PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company), the world?s largest bond fund, recently warned them to do ? move now to diversify their dollar holdings before the world?s central banks soon begin to do so in earnest. We are now rapidly approaching the stage where the central banks really begin to put their money where their mouth has been. How so? Central banks have been talking a lot recently about the unacceptable risks of too great an exposure to the dollar and to the longer-dated Treasury bonds, but at the same time their rate of purchases of Treasuries has been quite high during this same period, though still below their record rate of purchases in 2008. However, their continued purchases mask a vitally important and new strategic shift on the part of central banks. Thus, when analyzed carefully, their continued buying of Treasuries turns out to be cold comfort for U.S. government bonds and for the dollar itself. What is the strategic shift? Almost without exception central banks have switched from buying the medium and long-dated bonds to buying short-dated bills instead. When the central banks do buy the long-dated bonds, it is in much smaller purchases than usual and it is obviously done as a minimal effort on their part to help keep the yield curve from steepening too far too fast and needlessly eroding the value of their holdings while they enact other policies aimed at decreasing their exposure to the dollar. Additionally, they have shifted out of a significant portion of their long-dated Agency (Freddie and Fannie) bonds and have purchased short-dated Treasuries instead. There are good reasons for this strategic shift to the short end. The short-dated assets (T-bills) are much less sensitive to yield escalations such as those we are now witnessing and to being eroded by inflation a little further down the road. Additionally, the T-bill market is presently very deep and liquid, thus affording investors the ability to sprint very quickly out of the market and into something else more appealing. The central banks are clearly readying themselves for potential fast action and they are also protecting their holdings from inflation risks all at the same time. They are also continuing to buy Treasuries for another important reason ? to hold their own currencies down against the rapidly declining dollar. Central bank governors don?t like risk, and they also don?t like rapid changes. In this global crisis they aren?t yet willing to let their own respective currencies appreciate too much or too quickly against the dollar, so they have been intervening, buying dollars to keep currency stability, thus protecting their exports from declining too much, as exports most certainly would if they let their currencies rise too much against the dollar. No sane central bank governor would retreat from a policy of keeping the local currency stable (low) against the dollar in an environment such as this crisis where trade levels have already collapsed ? such a retreat now would only doom trade further and risk collapsing the economy. But in their currency interventions the central banks aren?t any longer buying the medium or long-dated Treasuries in anything approaching the sums they used to. Instead they are largely buying the shorter-dated Treasuries. This is a very significant change ? they have collectively soured on further exposing themselves to the rapidly mounting risks associated with medium and long-dated bonds. In basically refusing to accumulate significantly more of such risky assets that are subject to the ravages of inflation they are signaling that they are actually positioning themselves to significantly divest of such risky assets. In view of all the factors and developments detailed above, the fact that the world?s central banks have until now kept buying Treasuries (mostly T-bills) is indeed cold comfort for the declining dollar and Treasury bonds. Yields on the medium and long-dated bonds are escalating fast as supply skyrockets and foreign demand fades. The latest data indicate that central bank demand for Treasuries is rapidly falling from its 2008 highs in spite of ongoing purchases. Domestic U.S. savers already account for more than half of all Treasury purchases as the U.S. savings rate spikes. Demand from central banks and other foreign investors isn?t nearly keeping up with the new issuance. That is also a very significant strategic shift. On June 10, 2009 yields on the 10-year Treasury notes reached 4% and response to the auction was quite disappointing. The next day, on June 11, response to the auction of $11 billion of 30-year Treasuries was much better, but the yields had escalated to 4.84% at one point before the auction, in which the bonds sold at 4.72%. These rapidly escalating yields on the longer-dated Treasuries signal that investors are demanding an ever-higher risk premium before they will lend to the U.S. government. As yields continue to escalate, as they almost certainly will in view of mounting fears over the U.S. monetary and fiscal position, the impetus will only increase for large foreign holders of such assets, like the central banks, to further slow their purchases of Treasuries and to begin to divest of the medium to long-dated bonds further and faster. But haven?t a few key central bank governors come out with very dollar-supportive public reassurances in the last few days, stating that the fundamentals of the dollar are still good and that no imminent replacement for the dollar is available? Yes, Russian, Chinese and Japanese officials have done so in the last few days. Does this mean that all the fears over the dollar and Treasuries detailed here are perhaps over-blown? Not if you judge by their actions rather than by their ostensibly reassuring words that always seem to suddenly appear when the dollar?s decline quickens on news that they are taking dollar-negative steps to limit their exposure, as is now the case. It must be remembered that these are central bank governors and finance ministers who have a vested interest in talking the dollar back up from its accelerating decline with the aim of protecting their holdings while they work mostly ?under the radar? to diversify their reserves. The fact that a number of key finance officials in Russia, China and Japan have suddenly rushed to make such reassurances betrays the depth of their underlying concerns about the stability of the dollar and their excessive exposure to it. By their public assurances they are attempting to paper-over the deeply worrying fundamentals of the dollar and Treasuries so that they can quicken their pace behind the fa?ade, working harder and faster to diversify. To summarize, two interrelated strategic shifts of major importance have already occurred in the sphere of international lending to the U.S.: First, foreign investors, including most notably central banks, have massively soured on buying and holding medium and long-term Treasuries and other dollar assets, making their purchases at the highly-liquid short end instead. Second, generally the same group (foreign investors) has refused to step up to buy satisfactory sums of all the new issuance now flooding the market. Instead, domestic U.S. savers along with some private foreign investors already represent at least 50% of demand, with that group accounting for a rapidly increasing share of demand, while central banks account for a rapidly decreasing share of demand, in spite of their ongoing purchases at the short end. As if this wasn?t dour enough for Treasuries and the dollar, other new and potent factors are arising to make Treasuries and the dollar even much less appealing for anything beyond the short term. The remainder of this article is available to subscribers only ? Copyright 2004-2009 Global Events Magazine, All Rights Reserved website by MOJO BrainWave From jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca Fri Jun 26 18:10:21 2009 From: jmeaton at ns.sympatico.ca (Janet M Eaton) Date: Fri Jun 26 18:10:50 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] SUPERPOWER New film Message-ID: <4A45474D.8965.3A8FFE22@jmeaton.ns.sympatico.ca> The heart of Superpower lies in the analysis produced from a re- examination of history through a series of interviews with historians, documentarians, and academians such as Bill Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Noble Peace Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski. Examining key moments in America's history elicits a more consistent and plausible set of motives for US foreign policy actions guided by global expansion and military dominance, rather than the hyperbolic calls for democracy and totalitarian regime change that we have become so accustomed to hearing. fyi-janet ============================= NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER THROUGH GLOBAL RESEARCH: SUPERPOWER A comprehensive film that asks tough questions and goes behind the scenes of America?s national security apparatus and military actions. View the trailer: Synopsis Superpower: Far from a conspiracy film about the dangers of government secrets and regime change, this well-balanced film straddles the philosophical divide and allows viewers to understand the US quest for global dominance through economic and military strategy that is exposed through review of historical events, personal interviews, and analysis of US foreign policy. The heart of Superpower lies in the analysis produced from a re- examination of history through a series of interviews with historians, documentarians, and academians such as Bill Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Noble Peace Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski. Examining key moments in America's history elicits a more consistent and plausible set of motives for US foreign policy actions guided by global expansion and military dominance, rather than the hyperbolic calls for democracy and totalitarian regime change that we have become so accustomed to hearing. Should citizens trust that their government will keep them safe, a government that keeps secrets, and lies, in the name of national security? Does the simple act of withholding information lead to a world of eroding civil liberties and corruption? Superpower presents a view of US foreign policy, which lies in stark contrast to that depicted by corporate media, popular pundits, and US heads of state. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has emerged as the preeminent superpower of the world. Superpower illustrates how the United States has chosen to leverage that position to pursue a grand strategy which will ensure itself unilateral world domination through absolute economic and military superiority. It shows a consistent pattern of government deception. The United States emerged from World War II with its industrial base still intact and the only nation with the atomic bomb. It was without question the most powerful country on earth. What was done with this unprecedented power, the effects it's had on our Republic and the rest of the world is the story of Superpower. TO ORDER (Special Introductory Offer of $22.00): Awards SUPERPOWER won the overall festival award, The Director's Selection Award, in the Twin Cities Arts Festival in Kernersville, North Carolina. SUPERPOWER has won Best Feature Documentary in the Moving Pictures Film Contest in Phoenix, Arizona. SUPERPOWER received an Honorable Mention in the program of the 2008 Route 66 International Film Festival, as one of the outstanding films that did not fit into the festival schedule, but deserved special recognition. This is the 7th annual festival for Route 66, and is held each year on the third weekend in September at the Hoogland Center for the Arts in Springfield, Illinois. Barbara-Anne Steegmuller, Director of Superpower, received the Director Award at the August Sun Film & Television's "World Peace Film Festival", promoting works that promote World Peace through Film and Television. SUPERPOWER was nominated for Best North American Documentary in The El Sawy International Film Festival Egypt. The festival took place in Cairo, Egypt at the El Sawy Culture Wheel. SUPERPOWER has been accepted to screen in the International South Africa Film Festival between November 2nd and November 8th 2009 FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.superpowerthemovie.com TO ORDER (Special Introductory Offer of $22.00): If you wish to combine your order with another purchase, click our online store ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To order by Mail: $22.00 plus $9.50 s and h. For Overseas airmail add $5.00. Send your cheque or money order made out to the "CRG" to the following address: Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) PO Box 55019 11 Ouest Notre-Dame, MONTREAL, Qc, H2Y 4A7 CANADA US money orders (payable outside of the US) Global Research Articles by Barbara-Anne Steegmuller From creuss at bluewin.ch Sat Jun 27 03:37:47 2009 From: creuss at bluewin.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Sat Jun 27 03:38:53 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Skyscraper Collapse *without* Explosives Message-ID: This is how a skyscraper collapse *without* explosives looks like. (Story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090627/wl_nm/us_china_building_1 ) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: collapse.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 31464 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090627/9dffa28a/collapse.jpg -------------- next part -------------- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From thinker at xplornet.com Sat Jun 27 07:32:24 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Sat Jun 27 07:30:11 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Skyscraper Collapse *without* Explosives In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20090627142925.98EB326132F4@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> The difference is that these building didn't collapse, but tipped over, by the looks of it. If the WTC towers had been hit at their bottoms and tipped over, that would have been acceptable explanation. But in vertical freefall, the huge inner cage breaking into small pieces in the process, is BS. Cheers, Ed. At 03:37 AM 27/06/2009, you wrote: From thinker at xplornet.com Sat Jun 27 07:38:45 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Sat Jun 27 07:36:25 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] SUPERPOWER New film In-Reply-To: <4A45474D.8965.3A8FFE22@jmeaton.ns.sympatico.ca> References: <4A45474D.8965.3A8FFE22@jmeaton.ns.sympatico.ca> Message-ID: <20090627143551.EEFCCEAB2D2@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> "Wealth is the temporary control of energy." "Wealth can not be created, only taken from other sectors, the environment and the future." "Costs can not be cut, only transferred on other sectors, the environment and the future" That's all there's to it. No need for intellectual books of hundreds of pages, that nobody can understand . All these are long standing historical facts, going back thousands of years and nothing has changed, only got worse. Cheers, Ed. At 06:10 PM 26/06/2009, you wrote: >The heart of Superpower lies in the analysis produced from a re- >examination of history through a series of interviews with >historians, documentarians, and academians such as Bill Blum, >Chalmers Johnson, Michael Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others >with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The >Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for >the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Noble Peace >Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski. >Examining key moments in America's history elicits a more consistent >and plausible set of motives for US foreign policy actions guided by >global expansion and military dominance, rather than the hyperbolic >calls for democracy and totalitarian regime change that we have >become so accustomed to hearing. > >fyi-janet > >============================= > > >NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER THROUGH GLOBAL RESEARCH: > >SUPERPOWER > >A comprehensive film that asks tough questions and goes behind the >scenes of America?s national security apparatus and military actions. > >View the trailer: > >Synopsis > >Superpower: Far from a conspiracy film about the dangers of >government secrets and regime change, this well-balanced film >straddles the philosophical divide and allows viewers to understand >the US quest for global dominance through economic and military >strategy that is exposed through review of historical events, >personal interviews, and analysis of US foreign policy. > >The heart of Superpower lies in the analysis produced from a re- >examination of history through a series of interviews with >historians, documentarians, and academians such as Bill Blum, >Chalmers Johnson, Michael Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others >with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The >Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for >the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Noble Peace >Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski. >Examining key moments in America's history elicits a more consistent >and plausible set of motives for US foreign policy actions guided by >global expansion and military dominance, rather than the hyperbolic >calls for democracy and totalitarian regime change that we have >become so accustomed to hearing. > >Should citizens trust that their government will keep them safe, a >government that keeps secrets, and lies, in the name of national >security? Does the simple act of withholding information lead to a >world of eroding civil liberties and corruption? Superpower presents >a view of US foreign policy, which lies in stark contrast to that >depicted by corporate media, popular pundits, and US heads of state. >With the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has emerged as the >preeminent superpower of the world. Superpower illustrates how the >United States has chosen to leverage that position to pursue a grand >strategy which will ensure itself unilateral world domination through >absolute economic and military superiority. It shows a consistent >pattern of government deception. > >The United States emerged from World War II with its industrial base >still intact and the only nation with the atomic bomb. It was without >question the most powerful country on earth. What was done with this >unprecedented power, the effects it's had on our Republic and the >rest of the world is the story of Superpower. > >TO ORDER (Special Introductory Offer of $22.00): > > >Awards > >SUPERPOWER won the overall festival award, The Director's Selection >Award, in the Twin Cities Arts Festival in Kernersville, North >Carolina. > > >SUPERPOWER has won Best Feature Documentary in the Moving Pictures >Film Contest in Phoenix, Arizona. > > >SUPERPOWER received an Honorable Mention in the program of the 2008 >Route 66 International Film Festival, as one of the outstanding films >that did not fit into the festival schedule, but deserved special >recognition. This is the 7th annual festival for Route 66, and is >held each year on the third weekend in September at the Hoogland >Center for the Arts in Springfield, Illinois. > > >Barbara-Anne Steegmuller, Director of Superpower, received the >Director Award at the August Sun Film & Television's "World Peace >Film Festival", promoting works that promote World Peace through Film >and Television. > > >SUPERPOWER was nominated for Best North American Documentary in The >El Sawy International Film Festival Egypt. The festival took place in >Cairo, Egypt at the El Sawy Culture Wheel. > > >SUPERPOWER has been accepted to screen in the International South >Africa Film Festival between November 2nd and November 8th 2009 > >FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.superpowerthemovie.com > >TO ORDER (Special Introductory Offer of $22.00): > > >If you wish to combine your order with another purchase, click our >online store > > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > >To order by Mail: $22.00 plus $9.50 s and h. For Overseas airmail add >$5.00. > >Send your cheque or money order made out to the "CRG" to the >following address: > >Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) >PO Box 55019 >11 Ouest Notre-Dame, >MONTREAL, Qc, H2Y 4A7 >CANADA > >US money orders (payable outside of the US) > > > > Global Research Articles by Barbara-Anne Steegmuller > > >_______________________________________________ >Mai-not mailing list >Mai-not@globalproblematique.net >http://www.globalproblematique.net/mailman/listinfo/mai-not > >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG - www.avg.com >Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: >270.12.93/2204 - Release Date: 06/26/09 18:00:00 From papadop at peak.org Sat Jun 27 10:32:38 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sat Jun 27 10:34:12 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Some Gitmo detainees may be held indefinitely Message-ID: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009390634_gitmo27.html AP saturday, june 27, 2009 at 12:00 am By lara jakes and pamela hess Stymied by congress so far, the white house is considering issuing an executive order to indefinitely imprison a small number of detainees at Guantanamo bay, cuba, considered too dangerous to prosecute or release, two administration officials said friday. No decisions have been made about the order, which would be the third major mandate by President Obama to deal with how the united states treats and prosecutes terrorism suspects and foreign fighters. One of the officials said the order, if issued, would not take effect until after the Oct. 1 start of Fiscal 2010. Already, congress has blocked the administration from spending any money this year to imprison the detainees in the united states, which in turn could slow or even halt obama's pledge to close the navy prison in cuba by jan. 21. The administration also is considering asking congress to pass new laws that would allow the indefinite detentions, the official said. Both officials spoke friday on condition of anonymity. The possibility of an executive order was first reported by propublica, an independent public-interest newsroom, and the washington post. "A number of options are being considered," one of the officials said. Asked if the detainees would be indefinitely held overseas or in the united states, the official said: "there's not really a lot of options overseas." Under one white house draft being discussed, the administration officials said, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. Soil but their detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. Citizens would not be held in the system. Such detainees would also have the right to legal representation during confinement and access to some of the information that is being used to keep them behind bars. Anyone detained under this order would have a right to challenge his detention before a judge. Christopher anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington office, said the organization strongly opposes any plans for indefinite detention of prisoners. "We're saying it shouldn't be done at all," he said Friday. Without legislative backing, an executive order is the only route obama has to get the needed authority. The order also would only apply to current detainees at guant?namo, not ones caught and held in future counterinsurgent battles. There are 229 detainees being held at Guantanamo. At least 11 are expected to be tried in military tribunals, and one has been transferred to united states for prosecution by civilian federal courts. Still others, including four chinese muslims known as uighurs who were transferred to bermuda this month, have been sent to other nations. The obama administration is trying to relocate up to 100 yemeni detainees to saudi arabia for rehabilitation. Obama said in may he was looking at continued imprisonment for a small number of guantanamo detainees whom he described as too dangerous to release. It's not clear how many detainees could fall into that category. Material from the washington post is included in this report. From creuss at bluewin.ch Sat Jun 27 14:58:31 2009 From: creuss at bluewin.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Sat Jun 27 14:59:17 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Skyscraper Collapse *without* Explosives Message-ID: > The difference is that these building didn't collapse, but tipped > over, by the looks of it. If the WTC towers had been hit at their > bottoms and tipped over, that would have been acceptable explanation. The planes hitting them at their TOPS gives much more leverage than at the bottoms... so indeed, they SHOULD have tipped over. But they didn't, and that was the point... Cheers, Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Sat Jun 27 18:17:07 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Sat Jun 27 18:17:33 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: "You furnish the tweets, we'll furnish the war." Iran and who/whats really behind it all) Message-ID: <013a01c9f78e$27afa910$73ad57ca@jfos> Excerpt: "A member of CNN's gushing Twitterati, Ali Velshi acknowledged that the biggest problem is getting the true story. In a nod to the power and problems of crowdsourcing he admitted, "We are as good as you are." Well, if that's the case then we're in trouble: CNN ought to keep its weekly program Reliable Sources, but refer to its other 167 week hours as Unreliable Sources. Witting or not, these news networks collectively retool the famous line allegedly telegraphed by William Randolph Hearst, updating it for the digital age: "You furnish the tweets, we'll furnish the war." Meanwhile, key actors in the Iran uprising remain obscured.(snip) ... In sum, the very basics of reporting (when, where, who, what?) have become unverifiable. However, the "why" seems relatively clear for pundits, anchors, and other infomancers. Lingering Cold War fantasies dominate their visions, now with a theocratic twist: People Power vs. Iron Fists, Democracy vs. Dictatorship, Freedom vs. Repression. Neglected is the soft control of information warfare. We could call this a Cyborg Fist in the Velvet Glove. Or maybe it's leather. Dr. Strangelove, anyone? full article at http://www.counterpunch.org/bratich ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Sat Jun 27 18:27:22 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Sat Jun 27 18:27:53 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] The "grave threat" of North Korea Message-ID: <018601c9f78f$98412540$73ad57ca@jfos> President Obama condemned North Korea's "belligerent provocative behavior" as posing a "grave threat." In June 2009, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a US-sponsored resolution ratcheting up the financial, trade, and military sanctions against the DPRK, a nation already hard hit by sanctions. In response to the Security Council's action, Kim Jong il's government announced it would no longer "even think about giving up its nuclear weapons" and would enlarge its efforts to produce more of them. In his earlier Cairo speech Obama stated, "No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons." But that is exactly what the United States is trying to do in regard to a benighted North Korea--and Iran. Physicist and political writer Manuel Garcia, Jr., observes that Washington's policy "is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--and renounce nuclear weapons--while exempting itself." Others must disarm so that Washington may more easily rule over them, Garcia concludes. US leaders still refuse to give any guarantee that they will not try to topple Pyongyang's communist government. There is talk of putting the DPRK back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Secretary Clinton admits that evidence is wanting to support such a designation." Full article at http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3904 ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From thinker at xplornet.com Sun Jun 28 08:06:28 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Sun Jun 28 08:04:01 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] My column Message-ID: <20090628150331.3C00411C400B@smtprelay03.hostedemail.com> To: record@cablerocket.com Subject: Fiat lux # 235 Fiat lux #235 June 27, 2009. Never made it a secret that I was a very poor, or even lousy student just barely passing from one class to another in the higher grades. Luckily, that was before the new computerized testing systems came into use sentencing and pigeonholing kids at an early age. Some of my teachers must have seen something in me, or were sorry for my mother, knowing that I wanted to become an artist and were merciful enough to give me passing grades. Meanwhile, I was devouring books by the hundreds, albeit never on school subjects. I can still hear my mother calling, as I was hiding in the loft, or even on the roof on good days: "Where are you? Are you reading again?" History has always been one of my favourite subjects, reading of long gone heroes who galloped into battles, conquering far away lands, beating their enemies with their flashing swords, and sometimes falling only to have their actions remembered and glorified for hundreds of years. WW1 was started by Austrian minister Leopold von Berchtold, who, with the help of the German Kaiser. then pushed the rest of their shaky empires into the conflict. Although the Hungarian government resigned in protest against the war, the country ended up the biggest loser, with about 750,000 men lost , just about half of the country's between the ages of 18 to 45, and then two thirds of the area was given to the adjacent countries by the Treaty of Versailles, one of the biggest and stupidest errors by ignorant politicians, causing WW2 twenty years later. Our childhood years were filled with brainwash, uncertainty, fear and hate. We were marching in platoon formation, even the girls, singing military songs, from Grade 1. The walls of our classrooms were covered with the paintings of battle scenes, mostly from the Turkish wars that went on in Hungary for 200 years, protecting the rest of Europe, depicting the flying of heads and heroes pushing Turks off the fortress walls, often going down with them. We were told that a man's ultimate purpose in life was to fight and even die in wars and of the girls to produce cannon fodder for the time when we attack our neighbours and kill them all. We feared and hated most of our teachers, and they treated us like dirt. Older kids on the street used to beat us up with impunity. On one occasion another boy hit me in the stomach so hard, just out of the blue, that my mother had to take me to a doctor and I was sick for a week. And we went along with all this, not knowing anything else. When I first went into combat, I felt that the purpose of my life has finally been fulfilled and never expected to survive. Then, one day in May 1945, a few days after my 18th birthday, I woke up in a makeshift German military hospital, located in a school, in Goisern, Austria. The first thing I saw was my right big toe sticking out of some wire cage contraption, tied up with miles of paper bandages, all the Germans had by that time, and then I fell asleep again, crying with joy that they didn't cut my leg off. After 3 months in bed in Goisern and Obertraun, I volunteered as an orderly, to allow some older guys go home and to prevent my being sent to a POW camp. I was doing the usual bedpan, wiping and carrying jobs for 11 months, but one of my duties was the holding of the legs of the patients as they were amputated and reamputated, sometimes months and even years after they've been wounded, with their wounds oozing and not healing on account of the starvation we all had to endure, literally for years. Knowing quite a bit of history by that time, that was when I started thinking that history's always recurring and repeating tragedies must have a common denominator and I must find it, for my own satisfaction, not for any material, or fame associated gains. In the next 40 years I went through thousands of books, recognizing the repetitious stories , but not the underlying causes that have been making people go crazy, always committing the same mistakes over and over again, destroying the lives of millions in the process. Then, in 1985 I came across the definition of economic efficiency in two contradicting ways in the same textbook, ending up with the highest profits for the lowest monetary inputs as the ultimate definition of economic efficiency. That woke me up, as nobody can break long established physical laws and get away with it, and I suddenly realized, that there was the solution to my quest. "Wealth is the temporary control of energy" "Wealth cannot be created, only taken from other sectors, the environment and the future" When we look at history, the biggest brigands and murderers , once upon a time my heroes, have been blessed with names like "great" and "conqueror", showing that what they always have done, together with all the colonizations and the enslavement of whole societies, was to take, steal and call it "divine right", just as today's economists and multinationals are using legalized theft, now called with the fancy name of "globalization", to steal the world blind while calling it " competitive efficiency". Nothing has changed, we're still using the same paradigms and ideologies, under new and different names to cover up the criminal actions of the Lords of the World, who once upon a time used to be called "aristocracies" and now " wealth creating foreign investors". Just as millions of Germans and their satellites have fought and died in WW2, allegedly fighting for " Freedom, Christianity and Western civilization", while the chimneys of the death camp incinerators were spewing forth the smoke from gassed bodies. Some "Western Culture", as we now are supposed to believe our economists that boom times are just around the corner. Unfortunately, they're lying to keep the population from asking awkward questions. From papadop at peak.org Sun Jun 28 11:21:46 2009 From: papadop at peak.org (MichaelP) Date: Sun Jun 28 11:23:27 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Palestine: UCSB terminates case against Professor Message-ID: http://sb4af.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/breaking-news-ucsb-terminates-case-against-professor/ Date: June 24, 2009 UCSB terminates case against Professor after withholding recommendation of charges committee, UCSB drops case against Robinson Contact: Daniel Olmos, (818) 468-8894, olmos@umail.ucsb.edu. Yousef Baker, (301) 703-3315, youseft@gmail.com SANTA BARBARA, Calif. Nearly five months after opening an investigation of University of California sociology professor William I. Robinson for alleged faculty misconduct, university officials abruptly announced today that it has dismissed all charges and terminated the case. In fact, an Ad Hoc Committee set up by the Academic Senate to investigate the allegations had already reached the conclusion on May 15 that the charges against Robinson were without merit. The Committee is "unanimous in finding that his sending the email is in accord with the principles of academic freedom, especially when teaching a class whose content is the sociology of globalization," stated the report. Yet, remarkably, the top-level administration kept these results secret for six more weeks, dragging Robinson deeper into public scrutiny and further tarnishing the university's own image. It was only on June 24 that executive vice chancellor Gene Lucas informed Robinson, without any explanation for the delay, that he "accepted the findings of the Charges Committee" and terminated the matter. "Why did the administration wait six more weeks before ending this case," asked Yousef Baker, of the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom. "The professor faced six more weeks of harassment and disruption of his teaching, and research, while the sense of intimidation among faculty and students only deepened. They owe us an explanation." The case began when he introduced materials criticizing the Israeli invasion of Gaza into a course on global affairs last January. The materials included a photo essay that Robinson forwarded to students from the Internet juxtaposing images of Israeli abuse against Palestinians with Nazi abuses during the holocaust. Two students took offense at the images and withdrew from the course, prompting pro-Israel groups to pressure the university to pursue charges of "anti-Semitism" against Robinson. According to Baker, "university officials might believe this case is closed, but we will pursue the matter until full justice is achieved. Unless those that violated university procedures and effectively politicized this case are held accountable and punished accordingly this episode will have set a precedent for impunity and will leave in place a chilling atmosphere of censorship on campus." The case against Robinson has attracted broad national and international attention and brought the University of California under increasing condemnation for violation of academic freedom and political retaliation against faculty members who introduce materials critical of Israel. For his part, Robinson stated that he is awaiting "a public apology from the university as a first step in clearing my name after it has smeared my reputation and undermined my professional integrity." He added, "as my supporters and I have documented from the start, university officials have acted deceitfully and shamelessly. It is now time for amends." Robinson said that he is in the process of filing a grievance with the Academic Senate for the violation of his rights as a faculty member. The decision to prosecute Robinson generated an angry backlash on campus. In April, students formed a Committee to Defend Academic Freedom (CDAF), and in may more than 100 professors and 20 department head signed a petition demanding that the Senate cease its investigation. The petition charged that "procedural improprieties have already produced a substantive injustice with respect to Professor Robinson." It called on the Senate to "conduct inquires into the reasons why these mistakes were made" and to "take disciplinary measures against those responsible for them." On June 8, a Senate meeting took up the petition, approving motions to investigate mismanagement of student complaints and recommended changes in Senate procedures to avoid improprieties in the future. Among those irregularities, according to sociology professor Geoffrey Raymond, the Charges Officer "bypassed relevant options for seeking an informal resolution of the matter before seeking to form an ad hoc committee." In an April memorandum to the Senate, Raymond wrote, "his [the Charges Officer] departures from steps laid out in the Faculty Code of Conduct effectively prevented the accused from meaningfully participating in the process." Moreover one member of the Academic Senate Charges Committee, Aaron Ettenburg violated confidentiality by discussing the Robinson case with Rabbi Aruthur Gross-Schaefer the interim director of the Santa Barbara chapter of Hillel, an organization that works with Jewish communities on college campuses. Gross-Schaefer was a vocal public critic of Robinson in the local community and called for the university to punish the professor. In a blatant conflict of interest, Ettenburg did not disclose that from 2006-2008 he served as president of the local congregation Bnai Brith, to which the Anti Defamation League belongs. The Anti Defamation League was the driving force behind a national campaign launched by the Israel lobby to have Robinson prosecuted. According to Baker, anyone who knew of Ettenburg's conflict of interest and violation of confidentiality and yet said nothing is just as complicit." Beyond campus, as the case dragged on it generated increasing repudiation from free speech and civil rights organizations. On June 10 the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education (FIRE) sent a letter to UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang saying that the charges against Robinson "make a mockery" of the first amendment and academic freedom, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was preparing to release a docket this week calling for the dismissal of the case as baseless. For detailed information about the Robinson case, visit the CDAF Web site at www.sb4af.wordpress.com. For media inquiries, call Olmos at (818) 468-8894 or Baker at (301) 703-3315. From diongiles1 at aapt.net.au Sun Jun 28 16:42:37 2009 From: diongiles1 at aapt.net.au (Dion Giles) Date: Sun Jun 28 16:43:07 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Eliminating debt Message-ID: <20090628234238.253C7F402@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090629/0fb7e2d3/attachment.html From glparramatta at greenleft.org.au Sun Jun 28 17:06:03 2009 From: glparramatta at greenleft.org.au (glparramatta) Date: Sun Jun 28 17:20:33 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Australia's Green Left Weekly celebrates its 800th issue | Links Message-ID: <4A48056A.1010509@greenleft.org.au> Congratulations on reaching the 800th issue. It is not easy these days for independent left journals to sustain themselves, when they are so badly needed. Look forward to hearing about the 1000th. -- Noam Chomsky, radical US activist, writer and intellectual As so much of the corporate media becomes a parody of itself, the agents of power not of people, we need the view from ground more than ever and Green Left Weekly more than ever. -- John Pilger, journalist and documentary maker June 28, 2009 -- The need for a radical green and left alternative to the monopolised corporate media is even greater today than when the first issue of Green Left Weekly came out in February 1991. From the outset we knew this non-profit project could survive only with the dedication and support from those inspired by a vision of democratic and ecologically sustainable socialist change. GLW has generated a dedicated following from socialists, militants and activists throughout the world, as the many heartfelt solidarity messages below prove. (They include well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and , as well as lesser known but equally important activists in the social change movements in Australia and around the world, and of course some of our subscribers -- the backbone of the GLW project.) Read all the greetings at http://links.org.au/node/1123 Subscribe free to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090629/a563f56a/attachment.html From creuss at bluewin.ch Mon Jun 29 04:46:47 2009 From: creuss at bluewin.ch (Christoph Reuss) Date: Mon Jun 29 04:47:37 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] HoloIndustry Lawyer Loses License for Fraud Message-ID: Note that WJC chairman Israel Singer also was fired for millionaire fraud ( http://www.ganzfried.ch/aktuell/artikel/08.htm ) while the real survivors are literally dying waiting for the money. What does this tell about the credibility and "unselfishness" of the hollow-caused industry? http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/06/the_lawyer_who_represented_hol.html Lawyer Edward Fagan is disbarred in N.J. for misusing Holocaust victims' funds by Mary Fuchs/Statehouse Bureau Wednesday June 24, 2009, 8:02 PM TRENTON -- Only a few years ago, Edward Fagan was a world-renowned lawyer for the underdog, brash and audacious enough to take on Swiss banks and even whole countries to win judgments for Holocaust survivors and victims of South African apartheid. This week, the Supreme Court announced he was barred from practicing law in New Jersey, completing one of the steepest falls from grace in the state's law community. Aaron Houston/For The Star-LedgerEdward Fagan contests his disbarment in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court in Trenton today. The court found Fagan, 56, misappropriated nearly $400,000 of the money he won for the victims he so effectively championed. The justices agreed with the Disciplinary Review Board that Fagan knowingly misused client and escrow trust funds and was also punished for his "conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation." Fagan was disbarred in New York in December. "Somebody's life work that goes bad in such a negative way ... that's the sad part," said Jeannette Bernstein, the niece of Estelle Sapir, a Holocaust victim and former client of Fagan's who had "entrusted" him with "everything." "I think the survivors were badly serviced by him," Bernstein said. "He worked very hard but along the way, he lost us somewhere. He walked away with millions, and for him to end up doing what he did, is unconscionable." Fagan said in an e-mail he had no comment on the court's order. When he appeared before the court last week, Fagan said he "didn't misappropriate a penny of client funds." Fagan did not deny he had taken money from Gizella Weisshaus, a Holocaust survivor he represented, after putting it in his own personal trust fund. He said he was "entitled" to the money -- more than $80,000 -- she owed him for work he had done. But Fagan could not produce all of the records showing he had done that work. "I was a terrible bookkeeper," he told the court, saying the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics had stolen his documents. Fagan initially worked with large law firms in Manhattan and New Jersey, including the Morristown law firm formerly known as Shanley & Fisher, defending tobacco companies and asbestos producers against personal injury claims. But he got fed up with that and tried to make it big on the other side -- by representing those who had personal injury claims to make. That led him to work for skiers killed in a fire on a lift in Austria and a 2002 legal action against Swiss banks, claiming their financial dealings had helped extend South Africa's apartheid regime. He gained international attention by being the first to file suit against Swiss banks for Holocaust survivors. In the class-action case, he and other lawyers eventually got a $1.25 billion settlement for thousands of clients in 1998. Elan Steinberg, the former executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said when the case began, he was "critical" of lawyers like Fagan, who charged fees for the survivors they represented. Steinberg, who knew Fagan, described his misappropriation of client funds as a "tragedy twice over" for Holocaust victims. "There's something also particularly poignant here, in that the effort was trying to achieve justice and this terrible turn of events makes this particularly bitter," Steinberg said. During the ethics probe, Fagan testified he grew up in a conservative Jewish home in Texas, where the Holocaust was frequently discussed. He described traveling to Israel, first for school and then for a brief stint in the military during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. When he decided to become a lawyer, after spending time in Israel and teaching Jewish education classes in the Midwest, he said he wanted to help people who had suffered. But the ethics report detailed several lapses in Fagan's career. John McGill, the ethics attorney representing the state, said he was not surprised at the court's decision, because there was "overwhelming evidence of guilt" in Fagan's record. Weisshaus, 79, who survived Auschwitz and lives in Brooklyn, said Fagan still owes her money from her settlement. "I'm not going to go after him because he claims he's broke," she said. "This is all right for the time being." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". From thinker at xplornet.com Mon Jun 29 07:42:44 2009 From: thinker at xplornet.com (Ed Deak) Date: Mon Jun 29 07:40:39 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Goldman Sachs Message-ID: <20090629143953.67B72FB9855@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com> ___________________________________________________________________________________________ THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again By MATT TAIBBI The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ... But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals. They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them. IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN. BUBBLE #1 - THE GREAT DEPRESSION Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids - just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan. You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman's disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s. This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game. Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund - which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah - which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading. The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line; The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred. In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale." BUBBLE #2 - TECH STOCKS Fast-Forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street. It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair - but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace." But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind. Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy - beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits. The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement. It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system - one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control. "Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share." The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s." Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future." Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent. How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price - let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 - in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit - a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money. Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nichol as Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television rear end in a top hat Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman. "Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation - manipulated up - and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations - a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.) Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price - ensuring that those "hot" opening price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business - effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO. In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age - Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" - shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business." Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater. GOLDMAN SCAMMED HOUSING INVESTORS BY BETTING AGAINST ITS OWN CRAPPY MORTGAGES. Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits - an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement. The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.") For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent - they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin. BUBBLE #3 - THE HOUSING CRAZE Goldman's role in the sweeping disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that poo poo out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar. None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those lovely mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are. Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the lovely ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance - known as credit-default swaps - on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't. There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses. More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped." Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 1l,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity. But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities - a third of which were subprime - much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap. Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation - no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months. Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners - old people, for God's sake - pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions .... However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages. "That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge-fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb - they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing." I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against - particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer - doesn't amount to securities fraud. "It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud." Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck ho1ding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million - about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom. The effects of the housing bubble are well known - it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It hosed the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and hosed the taxpayer by making him payoff those same bets. And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion - an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here." But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down - and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with. BUBBLE #4 - $4 A GALLON By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, subprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years - the notion that housing prices never go down - was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling. Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market - stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008. That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out. GOLDMAN TURNED A SLEEPY OIL MARKET INTO A GIANT BETTING PARLOR - SPIKING PRICES AT THE PUMP. But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down. So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help - there were other players in the physical-commodities market - but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed. As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops. In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps - to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years. All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops - Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too. This was complete and utter crap - the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies. Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market - driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash - finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers - and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump. What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions. "1 had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'" The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over. Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index - which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil - became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions - meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up." Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities-trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives." But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices - it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices. In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World. Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up." Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it. BUBBLE #5 - RIGGING THE BAILOUT After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming - this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle. It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers - one of Goldman's last real competitors - collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed. Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bankholding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding - most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs - and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret. Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman - New York Fed president William Dudley - is yet another former Goldmanite. The collective message of all this - the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds - is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage." Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 - with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses - off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 - which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first-quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge-fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit." Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first-quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout. Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money - suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC - which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before." And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008? Fourteen million dollars. That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion - yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year. How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely hosed corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all. This should be a pitchfork-level outrage - but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore." BUBBLE #6 - GLOBAL WARMING Fast-Forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs. AS ENVISIONED BY GOLDMAN, THE FIGHT TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING WILL BECOME A "CARBON MARKET" WORTH $1 TRILLION A YEAR. Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion-dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. Here's how it works: If the bill passes; there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billions worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount. The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of an electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that 'Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money." The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market? "Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee. Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected. "If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine." Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it. It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there. But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going. The bubbles don't come 'til the end of the program... Turn off the bubbles... Turn off the bubble machine! From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Mon Jun 29 23:22:28 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 30 00:25:21 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fw: World Leaders Thank Arrestees, Avert Climate Disaster Message-ID: <011601c9f953$d9c30bd0$34ad57ca@jfos> Excerpt: "Roosevelt would never have been able to push through the New Deal if people hadn't taken to the streets, occupied factories, and demanded it," noted newspaper writer/editor and University of California professor Lawrence Bogad. Segregation, British rule in India, and apartheid wouldn't have ended without a lot of people being creatively uncooperative - even if that meant getting arrested. Nonviolent civil disobedience is the bread and butter of progress." > http://BeyondTalk.net > World Leaders Thank Arrestees, Avert Climate Disaster > > In a front-page ad in today's International Herald Tribune, the leaders > of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in > months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate > conference that will be held this December. "It was only thanks to your > massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically > shift our climate-change policies.... To those who were arrested, we > thank you." > > There was only one catch: the paper was fake. > > Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a > million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by > thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the > Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009. > (At the moment, the conference is aiming for much more modest cuts, > dismissed by leading climate scientists as too little, too late to > stave off runaway processes that will lead to millions or even billions > of casualties.) > > The paper describes in detail a powerful (and entirely possible) new > treaty to bring carbon levels down below 350 parts per million - the > level climate scientists say we need to achieve to avoid climate > catastrophe. One article describes how a website, > http://BeyondTalk.net, mobilized thousands of people to put their > bodies on the line to confront climate change policies - ever since way > back in June, 2009. > > Although the newspaper is a fake (its production and launch were > coordinated by Greenpeace), the website is real. Beyondtalk.net is part > of a growing network of websites calling for direct action on climate > change, building on statements made in recent months by noted political > figures. (For example, in September Nobel laureate Al Gore asserted > that "we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience > to prevent the construction of new coal plants.") > > Leading American environmentalist Bill McKibben was enthusiastic about > the newspaper's message and the methods BeyondTalk.net calls for. "We > need a political solution grounded in reality - grounded in physics and > chemistry. That will only come if we can muster a wide variety of > political tactics, including civil disobedience." > > "Non-violent civil disobedience has been at the forefront of almost > every successful campaign for change," said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes > Men, who helped write and edit the newspaper and are furnishing the > technology for BeyondTalk.net. "Especially in America, and especially > today, we need to push our leaders hard to stand up to industry > lobbyists and make the sorts of changes we need." > > "Roosevelt would never have been able to push through the New Deal if > people hadn't taken to the streets, occupied factories, and demanded > it," noted newspaper writer/editor and University of California > professor Lawrence Bogad. Segregation, British rule in India, and > apartheid wouldn't have ended without a lot of people being creatively > uncooperative - even if that meant getting arrested. Nonviolent civil > disobedience is the bread and butter of progress." > > The fake newspaper also has an ad for "Action Offsets," whereby those > who aren't willing to risk arrest can help those who are. > > A HOPEFUL NEWS PANDEMIC? > Today's fake International Herald Tribune is part of a rash of recent > publications which mimic prominent newspapers. > Last November, a fake edition of the New York Times announced that the > Iraq War was over. > A few days earlier, a hoax USA Today featured the US presidential > election result: "Capitalism Wins at the Polls: Anarchy Brewing in the > Streets." > And this April 1st, a spoof edition of Germany's Zeit newspaper > triumphantly announced the end of "casino capitalism" and the abolition > of poor-country debt. > > The rash of fakes is likely to continue. "People are going to keep > finding ways to get the word out about common-sense solutions those in > power say are impossible," said Kelli Anderson, one of the designers of > the fake International Herald Tribune and co-designer (with Daniel > Dunnam) of BeyondTalk.net. > > "We already know what we need to do about climate change," said Agnes > de Rooij of Greenpeace International. "It's a no-brainer. Reduce carbon > emissions, or put the survival of billions of people at risk. If the > political will isn't there now, it's our duty to inspire it." > ++++++++++++++++++ > 'Bow Down No Way' by Shoe Shine Boy (Kenya) and Izzy Brown from Combat > Wombat (Australia) > Film clip by Labrats and Hoodman Productions. Fat hip-hop/ragga > colaboration from the Slums of Nairobi to the town camps in Alice > Springs... > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFt9V7Lzqg0 From hermann at picknowl.com.au Tue Jun 30 01:04:25 2009 From: hermann at picknowl.com.au (John Hermann) Date: Tue Jun 30 01:05:16 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Eliminating debt In-Reply-To: <20090628234238.253C7F402@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> References: <20090628234238.253C7F402@fep07.mfe.bur.connect.com.au> Message-ID: <200906300804.n5U84Qu7014814@mail11.tpg.com.au> At 09:12 AM 29/06/2009, Dion Giles wrote: >Thanks to Clem Clarke for this one: It is the month of July, a >resort town sits next to the shores of a lake. It is raining, and >the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody >is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. Suddenly, a rich Swiss >tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 dollar >bill on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms >upstairs in order to pick one. The hotel proprietor takes the 100 >dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The Butcher >takes the 100 dollar bill, and runs to pay his debt to the pig >farmer. The pig farmer takes the 100 dollar bill, and runs to pay >his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel. The feed and fuel >supplier takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the >town's prostitute that, in these hard times, gave her "services" on >credit. The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the >100 dollar bill to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that >she rented when she brought her clients there. The hotel proprietor >then lays the 100 dollar bill back on the counter so that the rich >tourist will not suspect anything. At that moment, the rich Swiss >tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 >dollar bill, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and >leaves town. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now >without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism. And >that is how the United States Government is doing business today. I don't see the point of this story. Fact is that nobody in the town had any net debt to begin with. It seems that the loan assets and loan liabilities of each citizen were equal. John Hermann -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090630/57d18931/attachment.html From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 30 19:04:38 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 30 19:05:14 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Fwd: The Wages of Hubris and Vengeance - The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire Message-ID: <011601c9f9f0$4b982820$01ad57ca@jfos> Excerpt: "State terror is all but integral to the latest weapons and tactics with which Israel's forces engage the Palestinian resistance fighters. Of course the latter also resort to terror, the hallmark of asymmetrical warfare. But it is Israel that sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind. A vicious, endless cycle of vengeance, driven by the clashes of Israel's overconfident, sophisticated, and regular military forces with crude and irregular paramilitary forces, further intensifies the distrust between Israelis and Palestinians, including Israeli Arabs, most of them Muslim. Though intended to break the will of the armed militias by inflicting unbearable pain on the host society, as in Lebanon and Gaza, the collateral damage of Israel's campaigns of "shock and awe" only serve to fire the avenging fury of the powerless.(snip) To seek a conciliation and accommodation with the restive Palestinian political class, edgy Arab regimes, and turbulent Islamic world is to forsake the Joshua-like martial and closed Zionism of Weizmann, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Begin, Netanyahu, and Barak. It would call for and make possible a recovery of the repressed Isaiah-like humanist and open Zionism of Ahad Haam, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Ernst Simon, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz for either two demilitarized states or a single bi-national state for two peoples with open borders, the separation of state and religion, universal civil and social rights, and ecumenically informed cultural reciprocity. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk for political actors as well as philosophers. Israel's leaders, reflecting more critically on Herzl's belief in the need for an imperial patron, must grasp the implications of the incipient decline of the American empire for Israel's future." Full article at http://www.counterpunch.org/mayer06042009.html ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ From jfos at vic.australis.com.au Tue Jun 30 22:11:38 2009 From: jfos at vic.australis.com.au (john foster) Date: Tue Jun 30 22:15:13 2009 Subject: [Mai-not] Up Against Historical Ignorance and WrongThinking! Message-ID: <019101c9fa0a$d2e68730$01ad57ca@jfos> http://www.counterpunch.org/behzad06032009.html June 3, 2009 The End of Idealism in China? Tiananmen Square, Twenty Years After By BEHZAD YAGHMAIAN June 4th marks the twentieth anniversary of the violent crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests by the Chinese army. The American Dream-capitalism and Western democracy-inspired the students who occupied the square for nearly two months. The protests ended when tanks rolled into the square, but what brought a final defeat to the student movement was a new dream, the Chinese Dream-capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Two decades after June 4th, 1989, nationalism, and pride in China's new power has replaced student idealism. An economic powerhouse, and a global stakeholder, China is now at par with Japan, England, and other "foreign invaders" who left deep and humiliating scar in Chinese people's collective memory. Proud of their country's new international standing, the post-Tiananmen Square generation is mistrustful of those criticizing China's politics, and its economic practices. Their nationalism is rooted in economics, and the successes of China's model of development in the past thirty years. Using fax machines, and eagerly engaging foreign journalists, the Tiananmen Square protesters brought the attention of the world to their plight, making their showdown with the government a global spectacle. Unwilling to rock the boat, and longing to join China's prospering new middle class and share the fruits of economic reforms, the post-Tiananmen Square generation is resentful of the negative coverage of China by foreign media. Traveling in China for an eyewitness account of ordinary people's experience with economic reform, I encountered a new generation of youth interested not in making social change, but saving, and benefiting from the status quo. Many had not heard of the Tiananmen Square protests. Others were skeptical of the protesters' motives. "Students are impressionable. They can easily get misled by others," said a twenty-two year old university graduate who was told of the protests by a sympathetic professor. No doubt, political repression and fear played an important role in creating this generational change. Equally important, however, is the visible achievements of the economic reforms in molding a generation of loyal youth willing to sacrifice political reform for a share of China's new riches. China has entered the age of development, a national project requiring the faithful participation of everyone. Politics and activism create "chaos" and derail development. This has become the motto of the post-Tiananmen Square generation. The occupation of Tiananmen Square began by the students from Beijing University, but soon, arriving in trucks and on foot, thousands of other students, factory workers, and ordinary citizens joined the protests. Setting up roadblocks and street barricades, workers from nearby factories protected the students by slowing down the movement of tanks and soldiers to the square. They endured most of the casualty in the final days of the protests. Today, however, prejudice, conflict of interest, and, in cases, outright hostility, separate students from the new Chinese working class, millions of underpaid internal migrants working tirelessly, and under severely substandard conditions, in the country's export-processing factories. The alliance that once threatened the power of the Communist Party of China is now broken. It is replaced by economic pragmatism on the part of the students, and the fear that increased workers' power would endanger growth, and their chances for a stable and prosperous future. "What could unions do other than destroy the stability China is enjoying now?" said a social work major when I made a case for independent unions to improve the living conditions of migrant workers. Unions lead to "chaos and revolution," he told me. China could not help all its citizens at the same time. Someone had to get rich first; others-migrant workers and farmers-had to wait their turn, said others. "Why do you focus on the migrant workers so much? They are not a representative group. It is not fair to judge a nation on the basis of a small group of people. This is what foreigners liked to do," a graduate student of English literature told me. "Look at America. Many Indians were killed in the beginning, but America is now the greatest country in the world. The Indians were sacrificed for progress. Why should China be any different?" she said. June 4th will be an anniversary of the death of idealism in China. Behzad Yaghmaian is a professor of political economy at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and the author of Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. Yaghmaian is currently working on a book about China. He can be reached at behzad.yaghmaian@gmail.com. ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ ------------------------------------------------------ Provided by Australis http://www.australis.com.au/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 8162 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.globalproblematique.net/pipermail/mai-not/attachments/20090701/bd6561ec/attachment.jpe