18,000 Americans die every year for lack of HEALTH INSURANCE

But President Barack Status Quo Obama isn't launching a war on that. In fact he had to be bullied into even allowing single payer advocates to attend his big health care reform planning meeting with the insurance companies.

I'm sick to death of right wing democrats and will not be voting for this one in 4 years. Let the republicans completely wreck the country. Then maybe the citizens will get up off their asses and fight back.
.....
if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."

Already this year there have been 1,000 people killed in Mexico along the border, following 2008's death toll of 5,800, according to federal officials who credit Mexican President Felipe Calderon for a crackdown on drug cartels.

But the spillover on the border -- for example, to El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juarez -- has created a political reaction.

In a recent visit to El Paso, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called for 1,000 troops to protect the border.

Obama was cautious, however. "We've got a very big border with Mexico," he said. "I'm not interested in militarizing the border."

True Dirty Facts About The Dip Shit Right Wing

[...]

The conservative movement has invested enormous effort in crafting a political mythology that gratifies its ideological impulses. The lesson they learned from Ronald Reagan is that ideological purity is not only compatible with political success, but is also the best path to political success. They dutifully applied this interpretation to everything that happened since--George H.W. Bush, then Newt Gingrich, and then George W. Bush all failed because they deviated from the true path--and to all that happened before. Nixon failed because he embraced big government. Kennedy succeeded because he was actually a proto-supply-sider.

From such a perspective, Roosevelt casts a long and threatening shadow over the conservative movement. Here was a case of a wildly unpopular conservative Republican, Herbert Hoover, who gave way to an unabashed liberal Democrat who won four presidential elections. Shlaes goes to great pains to explain away this apparent anomaly. In this instance, she does produce an internally coherent argument. It is, alas, wildly ahistorical.

If the New Deal failed so miserably, one might wonder why voters continued to endorse it. In Shlaes's telling, Roosevelt's first challenger, Alf Landon, lost in 1936 because he "failed to distinguish himself" from Roosevelt. It is certainly true that Landon hailed from the party's moderate wing and shied away from the root-and-branch condemnation of the New Deal favored by, say, Hoover. But as the campaign wore on, Landon's rhetoric grew increasingly harsh. If Roosevelt returned to office, he warned, "business as we know it is to disappear." Voters who opposed the New Deal may not have had a perfect choice, but they did have a clear one. It also takes quite a bit of ideological credulity to believe, as Shlaes apparently does, that Roosevelt's twenty-point victory represented anything other than massive support for his program. Landon himself later remarked that "I don't think that it would have made any difference what kind of a campaign I made as far as stopping this avalanche is concerned."

And Shlaes offers an even odder explanation for Roosevelt's triumph in 1940. Wendell Willkie seized the advantage by attacking the New Deal, she writes, but squandered it with his dovish position on the war. The war, she argues, had become "the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers." After the election, she asserts, the Republicans "concluded, accurately enough, that the outcome would sideline not only their party but their record of accuracy when it came to the economy. They had been right so often in the 1930s and they would not get credit for it. The great error of their isolationism was what stood out."

Shlaes, characteristically, bolsters this highly idiosyncratic reading of history with only bare wisps of data. It is true that the outbreak of war in Europe made Roosevelt, the incumbent, appear safer. But this pro-incumbent upsurge merely cancelled out a powerful current of anti-third term sentiment. Moreover, public opinion opposed entry into the war, and Roosevelt had to fight the suspicion that he was nudging the country into the war by explicitly promising to stay out. Shlaes's portrayal of an electorate seeking activist government abroad and laissez-faire at home gets the history almost perfectly backward. (The Forgotten Man ends with the 1940 race, sparing her readers any further contortions of electoral interpretation.)

[...]

Games With Oil

Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest exporter and its de facto leader, said in Cairo that $75 a barrel oil represents a “fair price” needed to support investment in new fields. The group’s next meeting is in Oran, Algeria, on Dec. 17.

Oil fell as much as $99.02 a barrel from its July record, making the four-month slump steeper than crude’s drop from its 1996 peak to the low set in December 1998.

At that time the hesitation of countries including Iraq, Venezuela and Russia to rein in output amid the Asian financial crisis and a warm U.S. winter contributed to the decline. Now, sinking demand is the main issue as the world’s largest economies slip into recession.

Crude oil for January delivery fell $5.15, or 9.5 percent, to $49.28 a barrel at 2:47 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest settlement since May 23, 2005. It was the biggest one-day drop since Oct. 10.

Supplies Rise

OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Department reduced consumption projections in November because of the economic outlook. OPEC trimmed its forecast for average oil use next year by 530,000 barrels, or 0.6 percent, and the IEA cut its estimate by 670,000 barrels, or 0.8 percent.

Never Mind Barack Obama. Fascism Still on the March in the USA

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

he long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

Clouds of pollution threaten glaciers, health

A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds."

When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.

[...]

One of the most serious problems, Ramanathan said, is retreat of the glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush and in Tibet. The glaciers feed most Asian rivers and "have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia," he said.

Monsoon rains over India and southeast Asia decreased between 5 and 7 percent overall since the 1950s, the report says, naming brown clouds and global warming as a possible cause. Likewise, they may have contributed to the melting of China's glaciers, which have shrunk 5 percent since the 1950s. The volume of China's nearly 47,000 glaciers has fallen by 3,000 square kilometers (1,158.31 square miles) in the past 25 years, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Soot winds up on the surface of the glaciers that feed the Ganges, Indus, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which makes the glaciers absorb more sunlight and melt more quickly and also pollutes the rivers, the researchers say.

[...]

Wow!

Better Watch Out Obama or Rahm wil get you oily

Just 3 ‘superbanks’ now dominate industry. so much for competition.

[...]
Several of the nation's biggest banks have failed or been absorbed by healthier institutions, leaving three giant "superbanks" with an unprecedented concentration of market power: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

While that may be good news for emerging giants and the failing companies they helped rescue, the new oligopoly raises troubling questions about regulation and competition, analysts and consumer advocates say.

"Bank fees are going up, up, up, and that’s the danger to consumers as more of these banks consolidate,” says Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumer League. “It’s difficult for the average person to get a bank account that doesn’t involve fees, and if you get into financial distress you’re cooked, and you’ll be ‘fee-ed’ to death.”

According to a recently released banking fee study from Bankrate.com, ATM surcharges rose 11 percent this year to an average of $1.97, and the fee a bounced checks rose 2.5 percent to an average $28.95.

“Large institutions are impossible to manage prudently, let alone regulate,” says Amar Bhide, a professor at the Columbia Business School.

In fact, existing federal banking laws say that no bank can have more than 10 percent of the domestic deposit market — a threshold recently surpassed by all three superbanks.

When asked whether the government would take any action, a Justice Department official was noncommittal.

“It’s always something we’ve looked at and will continue to look at," said spokeswoman Gina Talamona. "It’s something we’ve looked at as part of our general antitrust review.”

The reason limits on market share were put in place were so banks didn’t get so big they’d become monopolies that could risk the whole economy, explains Atul Gupta, finance department chair for Bentley University in Boston.

But now the government appears to be pushing banks in the direction of more consolidation. The Treasury is pouring some $250 billion of taxpayer money into healthy financial institutions, and some of that is being used by stronger banks to snap up weaker rivals.

[...]

Barack Obama elected 44th president

The Telescope Turns 400

Dutch eyeglass-maker Hans Lippershey first tried to patent the telescope in October 1608, and his invention was soon a big hit in Europe—as a tool for insider trading. Futures contracts were in vogue, and spying a cargo ship first had financial benefits. Oh, and the telescope also redefined our universe: In 1608, Earth was the center of God's perfect Creation. By 1610, Galileo showed that Jupiter had moons, Earth's moon had mountains, and the Catholic church was fallible. Four centuries on, we know we're a mere speck in a universe of wonders.

Oil May Fall to $50

[...]

Crude-oil future prices have fallen almost a third in New York since reaching a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11, driven by concerns a worsening financial crisis in the U.S. is crimping energy demand. U.S. oil use is declining faster than expected, while European consumption is falling ``rapidly,'' and OPEC production capacity is ``just about to soar,'' Merrill said.

``Combined, these factors represent significant short-term headwinds for both upstream and downstream companies alike,'' Merrill analysts Mark Hume and Alexis Clark said in the report. ``Notionally it is conceivable that in a worst-case scenario global oil demand actually contracts in the near-term as it did back in the 1980s post the Iranian Revolution.''

[...]

Pictured: Typical Republican Voter

Mortgages Now, Credit Cards Later

A hurricane of bad credit card debt will start crashing ashore in the United States in the first quarter of next year, even as the mortgage crisis continues, analysts at New York research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors warned Monday.

“A combination of a 10-year steady drip of deteriorating personal finances and a tidal wave . . . brought on by the mortgage and credit crisis leads us to believe that credit cards are going to implode in the near term,” Gregory Larkin, Innovest's senior banking analysts said during an online seminar on the topic.

So far, credit-card “charge-offs” – debts declared irrecoverable by card issuers – have been “defying gravity,” with losses lower than in both 2001 and 2005, Mr. Larkin said.

But, historically, after a time lag, irrecoverable credit-card debt has followed mortgage charge-offs up or down, and U.S. mortgage charge-offs have rocketed up eight-fold since the last quarter of 2007.

US Econmoy Cracks From Years Of Right WIng Deregulation. Autosale Crash

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major automakers reported plunging U.S. sales for September on Wednesday -- led by a 34 percent slide at Ford Motor Co -- as an escalating credit emergency slammed a slumping industry and raised new doubts about when the world's largest auto market would hit bottom.

The downturn in auto sales for September coincided with a crisis on Wall Street and claimed even the auto industry's better-performing brands.

Sales were down 24 percent at Honda Motor Co Ltd, 32 percent at Toyota Motor Corp and 37 percent at Nissan Motor Co Ltd.

U.S. industry sales leader General Motors Corp, which was more aggressive in discounting its vehicles, managed to keep its September sales decline to a relatively small 16 percent to take a larger share of a rapidly declining market.

Satellite-Surveillance Program to Begin Despite Privacy Concerns

The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

Congress provided partial funding for the program in a little-debated $634 billion spending measure that will fund the government until early March. For the past year, the Bush administration had been fighting Democratic lawmakers over the spy program, known as the National Applications Office.

[...]

Nasty Old Liar McCain Acts like He was born to Rule, like Chimpy

At another point, McCain was asked if he's strayed from his "straight talk" image with advertising that some have labeled deceptive. McCain dryly responded, "It would be valuable if you gave some examples for an assertion of that nature."

He went on to say: "I have always had 100 percent, absolute truth, that's been my life and putting my country first. I'll match that record with anyone and an assertion that I have ever done otherwise, I take strong exception to."

As examples, a questioner at the Register noted a McCain commercial that suggested Obama favored comprehensive sex education for kindergartners and assertions by his campaign that a "lipstick on a pig" comment Obama made was a reference to Palin. News media fact-checking the sex education ad deemed it deceptive and a distortion of Obama's position.

What the right is really up to.

n an example of how fragile credit markets have become, the state of Massachusetts yesterday tried to borrow $400 million to make its routine quarterly local aid payments to cities and towns. State treasury officials said the credit markets abruptly froze midday, leaving them $170 million short. The state will have to use its own funds to complete the local aid payments, draining the state's balance to extremely low levels.

"I don't think any treasurer alive could say they've ever seen anything like this," said Timothy P. Cahill, the state's treasurer. "There have always been cash shortages, but you could always go to the market and get more. This is the first time we haven't been able to do that."

Cahill said he believes the credit market will in effect remain shuttered today as the nation's largest lenders hold on to their cash amid uncertainty over plans for a federal bailout. In short, the House's rejection of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan takes Massachusetts and the rest of the US economy into territory that few policy makers and analysts wanted to explore.

Gerald Lechliter writes:

I'm a retired (1999) Army colonel and was astounded by McCain's confusion about military "strategy" during the debate. I listened to it and then read the applicable area in the transcript. Either he was using language extremely carelessly or he didn't learn some basics in his military career. He was a Navy captain who attended, I believe, the National War College and national security is supposedly his strong suit. It should be second nature.

A good analogy to explain military strategy is a stool with three legs: goals (mission); means (concept of operation); and resources (people and equipment). If the legs are not balanced, you have an unbalanced stool, increasing the likelihood of failure.

The surge added troops (resources) to carry out the counterinsurgency mission of defeating the insurgents and establishing enough stability so that the Iraqis themselves could develop the means of controlling the violence.

The final goal (grand strategy as distinguished from military strategy) is the emergence of a fully functioning Iraqi state friendly to the US. Military strategy must support that goal. The primary means (concept of operation) in the military strategy was to station small units among the Iraqis rather than in large Forward Operating Bases; cordon off the neighborhoods of Baghdad with cement walls; co-opt the Sunnis by paying them to fight al Qaeda in Iraq; and winning the hearts and minds of the population that tolerated and supported insurgents (dry up the sea in which the insurgents found nourishment). His continued stating that the surge was a strategy is inexplicable.

Finally, many factors unrelated to a preceding the surge led to the reduction in violence. For example, the decision of Sunni tribal leaders to eliminate al Qaeda in Iraq by cooperating with the US for personal reasons and money; the completed ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods in Baghdad; and Sadr's truce with the US, among others

End of Season

Shoppers to see more foods labeled with country of origin

[...]
It's a law years in the making but timely, as China's milk scandal and the recent salmonella-tainted Mexican peppers prompt growing concern over the safety of imported foods.

Still, hold the import-bashing: Numerous outbreaks in recent years have come from U.S.-produced foods, like spinach grown in California.

Until now, shoppers have had little clue where many everyday foods — meats, fresh fruits and vegetables, certain nuts — originate. That's what the so-called COOL law, for country-of-origin labeling, changes.

[...]
But if your melamine containing chinese milk product is mixed with industrial organic ala Horizon, no label law applies.
Q: What does the new law require?

A: That retailers notify customers of the country of origin — including the U.S. — of raw beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, goat, wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish, fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, peanuts, pecans, macadamia nuts and whole ginseng. (The aim was big agricultural commodities; ginseng was added for fear of imports masquerading as U.S.-grown.)

Q: Where will I see the country of origin?

A: Anywhere it fits. The rubber band around asparagus; the plastic wrap on ground beef; the little sticker that says "Gala" on an apple. If a food isn't normally sold in any packaging — such as a bin of fresh green beans or mushrooms — then the store must post a sign.

Q: Aren't many foods already labeled?

A: Some fresh produce already uses origin labeling as advertising. "Fresh from Florida" or "Jersey Grown" or "Vidalia Onion" tags don't have to be changed under the new rules; the shopper should realize they're all U.S. products.

The COOL law mandating such labels first passed in 2002, but lobbying by grocery stores and large meatpackers led Congress to delay the U.S. Department of Agriculture from implementing it. Seafood labeling was phased in first, in 2005 — a key change given recurring safety problems with fish and shellfish from certain countries, including China.

Q: What's the biggest exception?

A: The labels aren't for processed foods, meaning no label if the food is cooked, or an ingredient in a bigger dish or otherwise substantially changed. So plain raw chicken must be labeled but not breaded chicken tenders. Raw pork chops are labeled, but not ham or bacon. Fresh or frozen peas get labeled, but not canned peas. Raw shelled pecans, but not a trail mix.

Q: What if the foods are merely mixed together?

A: They're exempt, too. So cantaloupe slices from Guatemala get labeled. Mix in some Florida watermelon chunks, and no label. Frozen peas, labeled. Frozen peas and carrots, no label. As for bagged salads, USDA considers iceberg and Romaine to be just lettuce, so that bag gets a label. Add some radicchio? No label.
{...}

More Evidence America is a Nation of Clueless Idiots

Four State Board of Education members are promoting a Bible curriculum for Texas public schools that has been criticized as favoring certain Christian views and has already landed some districts in court.

An e-mail to school districts encouraged local control in deciding which Bible courses to adopt, but it went on to recommend a curriculum that some officials are predicting will lead to more lawsuits.

The e-mail was sent by board members Terri Leo of Spring, Barbara Cargill of The Woodlands, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond and Gail Lowe of Lampasas.

"We recognize ... that the curriculum provided by the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools has been implemented successfully in numerous school districts within the state of Texas for years," they wrote in the e-mail.

Mark Chancey, chairman of Southern Methodist University's department of religious studies, said in Saturday's editions of the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle that the national council's curriculum "reflects a bias toward conservative Protestant perspectives of the Bible at the expense of other perspectives."

"It's absolutely jaw dropping," Chancey said of the e-mail.

Lowe said the e-mail was an effort to "inform and reaffirm that this curriculum has been around for a number of years and has always satisfied" the state's requirements for electives.

Leo, Cargill and Dunbar did not respond to requests for comment.

Money market freeze stirs rate cut speculation

[...]

Global central banks more than doubled the amount of dollar funding to $620 billion, but the move showed no signs on Tuesday of thawing the freeze in money markets where banks are hoarding cash and bracing for more trouble ahead in the deepening year-long credit crisis.

Analysts said central banks may now be forced to cut interest rates in a coordinated move because their massive fund injections have done little to ease strains that are threatening to become a bigger systemic breakdown that could endanger the global economy.

[....]

More than 140 dead in Indian temple stampede

[...]
handful of people fell while climbing a steep slope toward the Chamunda temple, sited inside a hilltop fort near the city of Jodhpur, triggering the crush, a Reuters photographer at the scene said.

"People were falling over one another. Many ran but were trampled under the feet of thousands," Anubhav, a witness who only gave his first name, said.

Other witnesses said too many people were trying to pass through a narrow part of the climb at the same time. Many suffocated after they fell.

"We have a final figure of 147 people died and 55 injured," Rajiv Dasoth, an inspector-general with the Rajasthan police, said. "The situation is under control and all the injured are being taken care of in hospitals."

Officials said the crowds were especially large Tuesday, as pilgrims gathered for the start of the nine-day Navratri festival.

[...]

Congress has passed legislation quickening citizenship applications for those serving in the U.S. military.

[...]
An estimated 34,000 foreign-born troops have served overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lawmakers say citizenship applications from troops have been delayed months, and in some cases, years.

NASA Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow, Soil Data Suggest Liquid Past

[...]

A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground.

"Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway, of York University, Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground."

Phoenix experiments also yielded clues pointing to calcium carbonate, the main composition of chalk, and particles that could be clay. Most carbonates and clays on Earth form only in the presence of liquid water.

"We are still collecting data and have lots of analysis ahead, but we are making good progress on the big questions we set out for ourselves," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Since landing on May 25, Phoenix already has confirmed that a hard subsurface layer at its far-northern site contains water-ice. Determining whether that ice ever thaws would help answer whether the environment there has been favorable for life, a key aim of the mission.

The evidence for calcium carbonate in soil samples from trenches dug by the Phoenix robotic arm comes from two laboratory instruments called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, and the wet chemistry laboratory of the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA.
[....]

Green-spored Lepiota (Chlorophyllum molybdites) in Maturity, Forming "fairy ring"

He wha tills the fairies' green

Nae luck again shall hae :

And he wha spills the fairies' ring

Betide him want and wae.

For weirdless days and weary nights

Are his till his deein' day.

But he wha gaes by the fairy ring,

Nae dule nor pine shall see,

And he wha cleans the fairy ring

An easy death shall dee.

Green-spored Lepiota (Chlorophyllum molybdites) in Their Youth

“Is This the United States Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?”

The House is set to vote today on a $700 billion emergency bailout plan for the financial industry. The proposed legislation was forged during a marathon negotiating session over the weekend between lawmakers from both parties and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The 110-page bill would authorize Paulson to initiate what is likely to become the biggest government bailout in US history, allowing him to spend up to $700 billion to relieve faltering banks and other firms of bad assets backed by home mortgages, which are falling into foreclosure at record rates.

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While the legislation creates multiple levels of Congressional oversight, Paulson would be granted broad latitude to purchase any assets from any firms at any price and to assemble a team of individuals and institutions to manage them. The measure would also require federal officials to rein in excessive compensation for corporate executives who participate in the bailout.

Money for the program would be released in segments, with the Treasury secretary receiving $250 billion dollars immediately. Paulson has said he expects to spend about $50 billion a month on the program.

The Senate could take up the bill by Wednesday. The financial package looms as a final piece of business before lawmakers leave to campaign for the November elections.

[...]

Gay high school planned for Chicago.

[...]
The Greater Lawndale Little Village School for Social Justice submitted the proposal to the CPS Office of New Schools for a Social Justice High School-Pride Campus. This project has been in the works since spring of this year. If approved, Pride Campus, a voluntary public high school that would implement a college prep curriculum in all subject areas, would open in 2010. It would serve LGBTQA ( lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning and allied ) students from all over the city.

CPS will announce its decision by the end of October. Until then, a CPS community hearing will be held Sept. 18 at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted. There, the public can learn more about the proposed school.

Bill Greaves, director and community liaison of the City of Chicago Commission on Human Relations’ Advisory Council on LGBT Issues and a member of the proposed school’s design team, told Windy City Times that the community forum will be the "last hurdle" in the process. The CPS Office of New Schools has already twice interviewed the design team, made up of veteran teachers and administrators, a member of About Face Theater, CPS Office of Student Development staff and others. On Aug. 26, the delegate principal, Chad Weiden ( the current assistant principal at the Greater Lawndale Little Village School for Social Justice ) , was interviewed.

A location for the Pride Campus has not yet been chosen, and the team has pledged to work with CPS in finding an appropriate location.

Greaves said the design team is currently looking at several locations, but it is his "personal hope" that the campus will be centrally located, such as the South or West Loop area, so that students can have equal access to it from all parts of the city and come and go safely. Greaves said that his model is Jones College Preparatory High School in the South Loop, which has the largest GSA ( gay-straight alliance ) in the city, in large part because of its location.

[...]

Activists Demand Say In Chicago Olympics

[...]
People have already lost jobs at Michael Reese Hospital, which is to close by the end of the year. The city had intended to borrow $85 million to have the hospital campus at 29th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue razed and replaced with an Olympic Village, but it was revealed earlier Wednesday that the deal to purchase the hospital broke down.

"Now we got word Michael Reese took the bid off the table, so that's a surprise to me," said former Michael Reese employee Joe Smith, "and I'm still without a job."

"We know that whether the Olympic Village takes place at Reese, or McCormick Place or anywhere else, our concerns remain," said Amisha Patel of Communities for an Equitable OIympics. "Communities of color need a real investment of jobs, transportation and real affordable housing."

The city's original plan called for demolition and cleanup costs at the Michael Reese campus to come out of the pocket of Michael Reese parent Medline, at a cost of $20 million that the city characterized as a "charitable contribution." In the proposed deal, Mayor Daley wanted to roll the dice that the depressed real estate market would come roaring back.

The $20 million was supposed to be enough to cover demolition, environmental cleanup and five years of interest payments on the loan at a rate of 5 percent. But costs to raze the 37-acre campus came back 60 percent higher, at $32 million. Chicago 2016 Chairman Pat Ryan tried to salvage the deal by renegotiating the purchase price, but Medline apparently wouldn't budge.

Public Provides Funds for Transit Only to Be Harrassed by ever increasing costs and corporate Ads

Cadbury Chocolate Made in China

A Cadbury spokesman says preliminary results show its Chinese-made chocolates contain the industrial chemical melamine.

The spokesman said Monday it was too early to say how much melamine the chocolates contained.

He declined to give his name because of company policy.

Radical Right Wing Eradicating 1st Amendment.

[...]
From his pulpit at Bethlehem First Baptist Church outside of Atlanta, he urged his congregation to vote for Sen. John McCain and to not vote for Sen. Barack Obama.
[...]

Corrupt Cracker and Snapping Turtle Look Alike Mitch McConnell in Dead Heat to keep his Kentucky Senate Seat. Vote Lunsford

The Lunsford campaign welcomed the results, saying that it showed that people are tired of the nation's Republican leaders.

"We're headed in the wrong direction, and eight years of Bush-McConnell economics are at the very heart of the matter. We need change now, more than ever," Lunsford said in a statement. "This will be a tight race up until the end, so we're going to work hard every day until Election Day."

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said he was surprised the polling showed Lunsford had closed the gap on McConnell.

"If Lunsford is actually doing this well, it's got to be because the public is so upset by the economic meltdown and may be blaming the legislative leaders," Sabato said. "If this is true, Democrats may win a lot more seats in both the House and the Senate than people are predicting."

Bush Appointee Michael Mukasey Refuses To Prosecute Crimnal Bush Appointee Alberto Gonzales. Big Surprise. Not

Link to "Bailout" legislation

Bolivian prez blasts U.S. anti-drug blacklisting Becuase it is A Cheap Political Trick To Influence Perception in US

[...]

Morales pointed out Wednesday that the U.S. is one of the world's largest markets for cocaine and that its close ally Colombia saw a much greater increase in coca production than Bolivia last year.

The U.S. decertification of Bolivia is part of an annual review but comes just days after Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador, accusing him of backing Bolivia's conservative opposition.

U.S. anti-drug aid to Bolivia will continue despite the blacklisting. The annual money added up to US$55 million last year.

[...]

GUATEMALA: Lachuá, a Corner of the Jungle Resists

The Q’eqchies are entrusted with preserving 1,994 hectares of forest, and for their work they received 82,000 dollars from INAB in 2006-07. In the same period, forest production from 1,290 hectares brought in more than 617,000 dollars, said López.

Tourism routes were developed in El Peyán Canyon, Rocjá Postila, the Salinas Nueve Cerros estate, and the lake, Laguna Lachuá. Furthermore, the community members have planted 9.6 hectares of pineapple. The goal is to reach about 50 hectares, with harvests providing a livelihood for 110 families.

In addition, some 200 people manage 2,000 beehives that produce honey, with plans to expand to 5,000 hives that would provide income for 300 families.

Also planted in the area are avocados, lemons, oranges, chilli peppers and cacao. In 2006, 70,000 cacao seeds were imported and planted on 98 hectares, providing a marketable crop but also increasing the absorption of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

In the Chixoy River, the residents raise tilapia fish, with the aim of harvesting 60,000 adults every six months.

In 2005, the indigenous communities created two Community Development Councils (COCODES) responsible for improving access to the eco-region, building eight schools, administering a scholarship fund and providing electricity to three communities.

The following year the Lachuá Park was declared a Ramsar wetlands site by the United Nations, due to its important role as habitat for animal species, especially migratory birds.

But this is no Garden of Eden. There is heavy pressure in the area to expand farmland, drill for oil and build highways.

Destruction in the area began in the 1970s, according to Luis Solan, in his study "Northern Transversal Strip: Neo-Colonisation On the March", when high-ranking military officers and business executives "dedicated themselves… to the accumulation of land in order to open the way for livestock and the exploitation of lumber resources."

Encroachments on the land have not disappeared, although López said that there have been no problems so far in the protected area itself.

In the park’s buffer zone, where the project is being carried out, 90 percent of the indigenous people are landowners. If more rural settlers establish themselves there it would amount to illegal seizure of land.

There are six communities facing possible relocation from the buffer zone and the park itself, according to Raúl López, from the Agrarian Affairs Secretariat.

Two communities, which only work in the buffer zone, will be relocated. The other four occupied the land after it was declared a protected area, so "there is a possibility that they will be expelled" as well, he told Tierramérica.

According to Solano, oil palm -- to produce biodiesel -- is grown on 55,000 hectares in Guatemala, but there are plans to expand to 150,000 hectares by 2012. Monoculture is advancing with the purchase of communal lands. The peasant farmers who sell off their property then move elsewhere to settle other land.

Green Earth Fuels, property of the Carlyle Group, Riverstone Holdings and Goldman Sachs investment funds, acquired more than 25,000 hectares this year in La Soledad, Rubelsanto, Playitas and Ixcan -- the latter three located near Lachuá.

Furthermore, the Truestar Petroleum Corporation holds the licence for exploiting crude oil in Tortugas and Atzam, 20 kilometres west of the Rubelsanto oil fields, also located near Lachuá.

In September 2005, PetroLatina Energy also obtained a licence to operate in Tortugas and Atzam, in an area of 31,000 hectares that includes parts of the buffer zone around the park.

Meanwhile, the plan to build a highway through the Northern Transversal Strip has been postponed. For now it is a gravel road that would be turned into a 330-km highway as part of the plans for connecting Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.

The project, granted by the government to the Solel Boneh company, does not include considerations for preserving the environment, nor does it question the planned road that would run through the heart of Lachuá park.

Nine oil companies invest in Colombia oil exploration

[...]

The companies include oil giants Shell and Exxon Mobil, Australian mining and primary resources company BHP Billiton, and the Korean National Oil Company, as well as companies from Canada and Peru.

"These companies have three years to estimate the potential of the area and choose more specific places to carry out exploration," said ANH director Armando Zamora.

The search is being carried out in eight blocs totally 127,000 square kilometers (49,000 square miles) located in the eastern Colombia departments of Meta, Arauca, Casanare, Vichada, Guania and Guaviare.

Colombia currently produces some 585,000 barrels of crude per day, and hopes to produce a million barrels a day by 2020.

[...]

Huge European bank fails

The deal will force the bank -- which has headquarters in both Brussels and the Dutch city of Utrecht -- to sell its stake in Dutch bank ABN Amro, which it partially took over last year. Fortis paid 24 billion euros for its share of ABN.

Fortis Chairman Maurice Lippens will be forced to resign and will be replaced by a candidate from outside the company, Leterme said.

"We have taken up our responsibility, we did not abandon" account holders, Leterme told reporters.

Wachovia Option-ARM Mortgage Losses May Force Merger

[...]
hree days after Chief Executive Officer Robert Steel told employees Wachovia was ``strong and performing well,'' the Wall Street Journal reported today that the Charlotte, North Carolina- based bank was in advanced takeover talks with Wells Fargo & Co. Citigroup Inc. also may make a bid, the paper reported. Wachovia fell 52 percent to $4.88 in German trading.

Wachovia's plight stems from the $24 billion acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp., a California lender that specialized in payment-option adjustable-rate mortgages. Former CEO Ken Thompson told shareholders in May 2007 the loans would help propel earnings to new highs. Instead, Wachovia now expects losses on 12 percent, or $14 billion, of the $122 billion option- ARM portfolio. Analysts at Fitch Ratings predict default rates on such loans packaged as securities may reach 45 percent.

[...]

US Congress passes 25 bln loan guarantees to automakers

[...]

The loan guarantees were included in a continuing resolution that included funding for the US government and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President George W. Bush has indicated that he intends to sign the bill.

"We're very pleased Congress has chosen to act at this critical time," said Greg Martin, director of communications for General Motors Corp's Washington office.

GM had been subject of much speculation that it could be forced into bankruptcy.

The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday, are the first loan guarantees for US carmakers since Congress approved a similar 675 million dollar measure for Chrysler Corp. in 1980.

Chrysler Chairman Robert Nardelli, however, said this week the loan guarantees should not be considered a rescue package for struggling carmakers. "This is not a bailout," he said.

Under provisions of the new legislation, not only US carmakers are eligible for the guarantees but also suppliers and foreign automakers with plants in the United States that are more than 20 years old -- Nissan and Honda's US operations qualify.

[...]

Treasury Would Emerge With Vast New Power through Use of "Bailout"

Under the bill, the Treasury is to buy the securities at prices he deems appropriate. Mr. Paulson may set prices through auctions but is not required to do so.

Rarely if ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government money as he sees fit, with no rules requiring him to seek out the lowest possible price for assets being purchased.

The secretary is supposed to do what he can to maximize the profit or minimize the eventual loss to the federal government as a result of its purchase of mortgages and other financial instruments. But in the case of mortgages controlled by the government, he is required to approve “reasonable requests for loss mitigation measures, including term extensions, rate reductions, principal write-downs” and other possible changes. Such requests could help homeowners at the expense of the government.

RBS will get 'billions' in US bail-out of economy

The Edinburgh-based bank will be able to write off a significant portion of its dodgy assets thanks to the bail-out, also known as into Tarp, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme as a result of the bank's significant presence in the US.

Tarp was the brainchild of US treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who earlier this week got down on his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, to rescue his plan to save Wall Street.

The Royal Bank, led by chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, has had operations in the United States since 1988, when it bought the Rhode Island-based Citizens Bank. It has since bulked up its presence there with a string of acquisitions including those of Connecticut based Greenwich NatWest and Ohio-based Charter One.

This entitles the Scottish bank to entrust billions of dollars of non-performing loans and sub-prime tainted assets to US taxpayers, according to Colin McLean, chief executive of Edinburgh-based SVM Asset Management.

FACTBOX-Top ten U.S. bank failures

We'll Miss You

Palin Contradicts McCain On Pakistan, Seems To Back Obama’s Position

[...]
Palin’s apparent disagreement with McCain’s position on Pakistan came as the Alaska governor was picking up a couple of cheesesteaks at Tony Luke’s in South Philadelphia. She was approached by a man wearing a Temple University t-shirt, who later identified himself as Michael Rovito.

“How about the Pakistan situation?” Rovito asked. “What’s your thoughts about that.”

“In Pakistan?” Palin responded.

“What’s going on over there, like Waziristian?”

“It’s working with Zardari to make sure that we’re all working together to stop the guys from coming in over the border,” Palin said. “And we’ll go from there.”

“Waziristan is blowing up,” Rovito replied.

“Yeah, it is,” Palin said. “And the economy there is blowing up, too.”

“So we do cross-border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan, you think?” Rovito asked.

“If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should,” Palin said.
[...]

CBC Presses Republicans: Do You Agree With Bachmann’s Asssertion That ‘Minorities’ Caused Financial Crisis?

During a Senate hearing on Thursday, Rep. Michele Bachmann pinned blame for financial crisis on President Clinton, “blacks,” and “other minorities.” To make her point, she read from an article written by Terry Jones in the right-wing publication Investor’s Business Daily. Jones criticized the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and said Clinton was misguided for pushing “homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.” Watch Bachmann’s speech, followed by sharp criticism from Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) here.

In a new letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) obtained by ThinkProgress, 31 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) call Bachmann’s claims “ridiculous” and ask Boehner whether her comments represent the views of the Republican Caucus:

It is clear from Rep. Bachmann’s comments that she believes that the bipartisan laws enacted over the past decade ensuring that minority communities have equal access to banking and other financial services are the cause of this financial situation. […]

Netherlands has taken the bold step of imposing stiff taxes on perceived fat cat benefits

[...]

As other European governments mull public dissatisfaction with large executive bonuses and severance packages, also known as golden parachutes, the egalitarian Dutch have been the ones to draw a line in the sand.

"This fiscal discouragement policy ... is founded in the desire to counter excesses," Finance Minister and labour party leader Wouter Bos said in May, presenting a controversial bill to members of parliament to hit high earners with stiffer taxes.

The measures were passed by the lower house of parliament this month, and are expected to get the final nod from the senate within weeks before coming into effect on January 1.

"Thousands of people will pay more taxes," a finance ministry spokesman told AFP this week.

The centre-left government will slap a new 30 percent tax on companies for "disproportionate exit bonus payments" to those earning more than 500,000 euros a year.

It will also introduce a new 15 percent tax on companies who contribute to executives in the same salary bracket enjoying "excessive" pension payouts.

Finally, it will raise the tax on the earnings of private equity and hedge fund managers from 1.2 percent to 25 percent, closing a loophole that minimised their contribution to the tax authorities.

The measures are expected to add an annual 60 million euros to the public purse.

The debate came to a head in recent months with the news of top bonuses paid to the executives who sold Dutch bank ABN Amro to a European banking group, and the 80 million euros in options, shares and bonuses paid to Numico boss Jan Bennink after selling the baby food concern to French dairy company Danone.

Several top executives, including Michel Tilmant, of the ING banking group, have reportedly threatened to leave the Netherlands if the government pursued its plans.

But Bos has stood firm, questioning the impact of such excesses on the economy, and the moral wisdom of having large income disparities.

"One has appreciation that individuals with a unique talent should be paid more," he said recently. "But that understanding dissipates when the remuneration takes on an air of self-enrichment because the counter-balance is inadequate, or when it is not transparent or in line with achievement."

His bill passed with the support of a majority of parties in parliament.

Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way

[...]

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

“If I go into a bank,” said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden’s finance minister at the time, “I’d rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer.”

Sweden spent 4 percent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor, the equivalent of $11.7 billion at the time, or $18.3 billion in today’s dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the $700 billion, or roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.

But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than 2 percent of its G.D.P. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.

The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Mr. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.

A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.

[...]

Hundreds of Economists Urge Congress Not to Rush on Rescue Plan

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- More than 150 prominent U.S. economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, urged Congress to hold off on passing a $700 billion financial market rescue plan until it can be studied more closely.

In a letter yesterday to congressional leaders, 166 academic economists said they oppose Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan because it's a ``subsidy'' for business, it's ambiguous and it may have adverse market consequences in the long term. They also expressed alarm at the haste of lawmakers and the Bush administration to pass legislation.

``It doesn't seem to me that a lot decisions that we're going to have to live with for a long time have to be made by Friday,'' said Robert Lucas, a University of Chicago economist and 1995 Nobel Prize winner who signed the letter. ``The situation may get urgent, but it's not urgent right now. Right now it's a financial sector problem.''

The economists who signed the letter represent various disciplines, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, behavioral and information economics, and game theory. They also span the political spectrum, from liberal to conservative to libertarian.

Some lawmakers are already citing the letter as reason not to endorse the Paulson plan. Today Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said he has ``five pages of the leading economists in America that wrote to me and the leadership saying the Paulson plan is a bad plan. It will not solve problems. It will create more problems.''

`How Capitalism Works'

The letter, initially conceived by economists at the University of Chicago, was signed by professors from dozens of American universities and several outside the U.S.

David I. Levine, a professor of economics at University of California-Berkeley, says the current plan being discussed has the wrong structure.

Clueless Gov of California wants More Bad Debt

[...]
n denying AB"‰1830, Schwarzenegger "turned his back on consumers," said Ginna Green, a spokeswoman for the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending, which supported the bill. "Many of the bills signed today do not get at the root cause of the problem, which was reckless lending," she said. "AB"‰1830 would have been a step in that direction."
[...]

Carbon Is Building Up in Atmosphere Faster Than Predicted

[...]

In 2007, carbon released from burning fossil fuels and producing cement increased 2.9 percent over that released in 2006, to a total of 8.47 gigatons, or billions of metric tons, according to the Australia-based Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that tracks emissions. This output is at the very high end of scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and could translate into a global temperature rise of more than 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to the panel's estimates.

"In a sense, it's a reality check," said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. "This is an extremely large number. The emissions are increasing at a rate that's faster than what the IPCC has used."

The new statistics also underscore the growing contribution to the world's "carbon budget" from rapidly industrializing countries such as China, India and Brazil. Developing nations have roughly doubled their carbon output in less than two decades and now account for slightly more than half of total emissions, according to the new figures, up from about a third in 1990. By contrast, total carbon emissions from industrialized nations are only slightly higher than in 1990.

[...]

Zimbabwe children eating toxic roots, rats

[...]
"The rising malnutrition and the rise in diseases are going to mean that children will die and we have to act very fast," said Sarah Jacobs, a spokeswoman for the relief group.Children in Zimbabwe are eating rats and inedible roots riddled with toxic parasites to stave off hunger because of chronic food shortages, an aid agency said on Thursday. Save the Children said the most vulnerable faced starvation unless they get food aid in the next couple of weeks.

The agency, which has launched a 5 million pound ($9.2 million) appeal for emergency operations in Zimbabwe, said the situation had got much worse in the past few months and that rampant inflation meant even people with jobs would need food aid.

The United Nations had said previously that more than 5 million people in Zimbabwe would need food aid by early next year after a poor harvest compounded by economic turmoil. Jacobs said many people in the Zambezi Valley, the poorest and driest area, were now surviving on a vile-tasting, fibrous root called makuri. "It's got no nutritional value whatsoever. It tastes disgusting and it also has a parasite which attaches to it which is toxic," said Jacobs, who has just returned from the region. "This is all they have to eat. You see babies eating it and toddlers eating it, and it's not digestible. It creates terrible stomach pains." People were eating anything to survive, she said. She had come across one child who had died after eating a poisonous root and young children eating tiny rats they caught in their huts.

Save the Children and other agencies are resuming work after Zimbabwe's government lifted a ban on their operations at the end of August. President Robert Mugabe imposed the ban before a run-off presidential election in June, accusing the agencies of supporting the opposition. But Save the Children said in reality many agencies had not been able to work in the field since the first election round in March. "People's ways of coping have been completely exhausted. People are saying they're scared they're going to die within weeks if food doesn't come," Jacobs said. "We really are playing catch up. It's a huge humanitarian job now and there has to be much more money than there has ever been before."
[...]

Zimbabwe children eating toxic roots, rats

Children in Zimbabwe are eating rats and inedible roots riddled with toxic parasites to stave off hunger because of chronic food shortages, an aid agency said on Thursday. Save the Children said the most vulnerable faced starvation unless they get food aid in the next couple of weeks.

"The rising malnutrition and the rise in diseases are going to mean that children will die and we have to act very fast," said Sarah Jacobs, a spokeswoman for the relief group. The United Nations had said previously that more than 5 million people in Zimbabwe would need food aid by early next year after a poor harvest compounded by economic turmoil. Jacobs said many people in the Zambezi Valley, the poorest and driest area, were now surviving on a vile-tasting, fibrous root called makuri. "It's got no nutritional value whatsoever. It tastes disgusting and it also has a parasite which attaches to it which is toxic," said Jacobs, who has just returned from the region.

President Robert Mugabe imposed the ban before a run-off presidential election in June, accusing the agencies of supporting the opposition. But Save the Children said in reality many agencies had not been able to work in the field since the first election round in March."This is all they have to eat. You see babies eating it and toddlers eating it, and it's not digestible. It creates terrible stomach pains." People were eating anything to survive, she said. She had come across one child who had died after eating a poisonous root and young children eating tiny rats they caught in their huts. Save the Children and other agencies are resuming work after Zimbabwe's government lifted a ban on their operations at the end of August. The agency, which has launched a 5 million pound ($9.2 million) appeal for emergency operations in Zimbabwe, said the situation had got much worse in the past few months and that rampant inflation meant even people with jobs would need food aid. "People's ways of coping have been completely exhausted. People are saying they're scared they're going to die within weeks if food doesn't come," Jacobs said.
[...]

What Country Ought to Be - Lucinda Williams

Women's rights

Better ways to spend 700 Billion Dollars

[...]
Let's start with the nation's infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates our nation's bridges need $180 billion in repairs, with our rail infrastructure in need of $185 billion in maintenance. California wants to spend $40 billion for the nation's first high-speed rail network to connect southern and northern California.
Saskia Sassen, a professor at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought points out that infrastructure investments would feed directly into GDP based on job and enterprise growth. And we certainly have the builders to do it. Unemployment in construction is 40 percent higher than in manufacturing.

Arizona Public Service, the state's public power utility, is currently building the nation's largest solar power array in the desert near Gila Bend, Ariz. It will be able to power 70,000 homes using only the sun's rays — and create thousands of high-tech green energy jobs to boot. Construction costs will be about $1 billion, but the utility says it will pay for itself in about seven years. The project covers just three square miles. With the $699 billion left over, you could put even more southwestern desert to work in creating clean energy.

Health care and climate change are other major concerns. Kenneth Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University points out that for $150 billion you could provide every American with private health insurance and create a universal automated health-information system. When you consider that the National Cancer Institute receives $5 billion a year in funding, you could multiply its budget by 10 and provide private health care to every American.

McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm, estimates it will cost the U.S. economy $150 billion per year to stabilize greenhouse gases by 2030. For three years, $700 billion could pay for the cost of both health care plans (in case one doesn't work) and cover the cost to reduce carbon emissions.

Since global trade isn't going away any time soon and America's ports are getting increasingly crowded, using the money for port expansion might be a smart idea. According to the American Association of Port Authorities, container volumes at American ports have increased by 7 percent per year over the last 20 years, far outpacing capacity growth.

National security is also a concern. After five years in Iraq, most estimates for the war's cost tally into the $500 billion range. Unlike investments in distressed assets, paying for the Iraq War won't produce a return, but $700 billion would stem the government's future debt obligations to its creditors.

Then there's education. The U.S. currently spends some $500 billion annually on public education, yet still finds itself slipping behind many other industrialized nations when it comes to giving the next generation the skills it needs to compete globally.

The difference, of course, is that government spending for any of this would require a massive tax increase, with no chance of getting any of the money back. The upside: At least it would be a sure bet.

What Brought Us Here: Reagan Trashing the Federal Trade Commission

director of the Congressional Budget Office said yesterday that the proposed Wall Street bailout could actually worsen the current financial crisis.

[...]

In an interview later yesterday, Orszag explained using the following example: Suppose a company has Asset X, whose value is recorded on the books as $100. Because of the current economic decline, Asset X's real value has dropped to $50. If the company takes part in the government bailout and sells Asset X for $50, the company has to report a $50 loss on its books. On a scale of millions of dollars, such write-downs could ruin a company.

Such companies "look solvent today only because it's kind of hidden," Orszag said. "They actually are insolvent" already, he said.

In hearings on Capitol Hill so far this week, criticism of the bailout plan put forward by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has largely been restricted to the shape of the $700 billion proposal, how the money will be spent and what sort of oversight Treasury should have.

But Orszag yesterday questioned the wisdom of the plan itself, testifying that "it therefore remains uncertain whether the program will be sufficient to restore trust."

In yesterday's interview, Orszag said, "The key question is: What are we buying and what are we paying for it?"

[...]

China banks told to halt lending to US banks-SCMP

[...]

The Hong Kong newspaper cited unidentified industry sources as saying the instruction from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to U.S. banks but not to banks from other countries.

"The decree appears to be Beijing's first attempt to erect defences against the deepening U.S. financial meltdown after the mainland's major lenders reported billions of U.S. dollars in exposure to the credit crisis," the SCMP said.

[...]

U.S. will lose financial superpower status: Germany

Germany blamed the United States on Thursday for spawning the global financial crisis with a blind drive for higher profits and said it would now have to accept greater market regulation and a loss of its financial superpower status.
n some of the toughest language since the crisis worsened earlier this month, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck told parliament the financial turmoil would leave "deep marks" but was primarily an American problem.

"The world will never be as it was before the crisis," Steinbrueck, a deputy leader of the center-left Social Democrats, told the Bundestag lower house.

"The United States will lose its superpower status in the world financial system. The world financial system will become more multi-polar."

Steinbrueck, whose efforts to secure greater transparency on hedge funds during Germany's G8 presidency last year collapsed amid objections from Washington and London, attacked what he called an Anglo-Saxon drive for double-digit profits and massive bonuses for bankers and company executives.

"Investment bankers and politicians in New York, Washington and London were not willing to give these up," he said.

He proposed eight measures to address the crisis, including an international ban on "purely speculative" short-selling and an increase in capital requirements for banks in order to offset credit risks.

AIG who Already got their 85 billion dollar bailout, under investigation for fraud since March. Only since March?

[...]
As with the 25 other ongoing FBI inquiries involving the mortgage debacle, the main focus of interest is whether companies and their executives misled investors and auditors when they put a value on their mortgage-related investments.

On Feb. 28, AIG posted its largest quarterly loss ever, blaming complex financial instruments known as derivatives for write-downs of more than $11 billion. Martin J. Sullivan, the insurer's chief executive at the time, resigned in June after AIG suffered another multibillion-dollar quarterly loss on its derivatives connected to defaulting home mortgages.

The company's near-death is largely being blamed on its heavy involvement in a kind of unregulated derivative called credit default swaps, whereby AIG earned hefty premiums in exchange for guaranteeing another company's mortgage investments if the mortgages defaulted. AIG bet that many of the mortgages would never fail, but an unusually high percentage did.

Bush Lies in Attempt to Scare Public into giving Money to Wall Street Criminal Gangs

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"

Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, George Bush and Wall street Chieftains line up to gang rape American taxpayer

How it Happened: The Powell Manifesto or Right Wing Game Plan that Brought us Here

[...]

Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy.

Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though usually with contrasting goals. One of our great frustrations is that "progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to build. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, band-aids and short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance.

We see depressingly little sign of change. Progressive institutions eagerly embrace tools like the web and e-mail as hopes for turning the nation in a progressive direction. They will not. They are tools that can and must be used to raise funds and mobilize people more effectively (and we rely on them heavily), but tools and tactics are no substitute for long-term vision and strategy.

So did Powell's political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment "right" for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.

[...]

How it Happened. Glass Steagall.

McCain: We should deregulate health insurance like we deregulated Wall Street.

$39 billion: The Wall Street bonuses for the big five investment banks last year.

In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.

That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.

Bush Backs Unlimited Compensation For Disgraced CEOs: Now Is Not The Time For ‘Punitive Measures

We certainly understand and are sympathetic to the sentiment regarding the pay of CEOs and senior management of these firms, but we have to focus on the problem, and the problem is that we need these firms to participate in the program and sell us this debt. Having punitive measures would provide a disincentive for firms to participate, and that would make the program much less likely to succeed.

CEO compensation and corporate governance in public companies are very important issues — especially when receiving taxpayer support — but we need to be focused on fixing this problem in our markets right now. We can and should return to those issues once we get this legislation passed.

President Bush also released another statement earlier today warning Congress against inserting any “unrelated provisions” — such as help for struggling homeowners — in the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

The Bush administration’s position is unjustifiable. As ABC News reported:

In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.

That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.

Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines — their worst year since 2002.

In short, the Bush administration wants zero punishment for these wreckless CEOs who lost shareholder money and are now costing each person in the United States $2,000. In return for $700 billion, the White House has yet to name any ways that it will hold these corporations accountable or institute safeguards to ensure that this irresponsible lending and borrowing won’t happen again.

Millions spend half of income on housing

[...]

Ray is one of more than 7.5 million people — almost 15 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — who are spending half of their income or more on housing costs, according to 2007 data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. That is up from nearly 7.1 million the year before.

Traditionally, the government and most lenders consider a homeowner spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing costs to be financially burdened. But that definition now covers almost 38 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage — 19 million of them.

Though home prices have fallen this year, in the most expensive markets where home prices tripled during the boom, many working families still cannot afford to buy a home.

[...]

The data underscore the serious affordability problems in this country and highlight how the slightest financial problem — from a lost job to higher gas prices or insurance premiums — can put a family behind on their mortgages and into the realm of foreclosure.

When home prices fell in the early 1990s, borrowers had more equity in their homes, and were able to escape foreclosure. But now, an estimated 10 million homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to Moody's economy.com.

More than 4 million homeowners were at least one month behind on their loans at the end of June, and almost 500,000 had started the foreclosure process, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Cascading foreclosures over the past two years created a domino effect in the lending industry, undermining investor confidence and forcing the Bush administration last weekend to announce the greatest rescue package and market intervention since the Great Depression.

Rush to Give Taxpayer Money to Wall Street Echoes Bush Rush to War

"You can draw some valid parallels between the prosecution of the war under the Bush regime and the way the financial sector has operated in recent years," said Tom Schlesinger, head of the nonprofit research group Financial Markets Center in Howardsville, Va.

"It fails the most basic test of democratic accountability," Schlesinger said.
[...]

Some policy observers point to a "trust us" mentality in the administration's call to obtain sweeping powers that are scant on checks and balances on the executive branch. In addition, the White House is faulted with a failure to raise alarm before the situation spiraled out of control, forcing the mobilization of more troops and untold financial resources.

Outlining the administration's remedy, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came up with a three-page plan to spend $700 billion on toxic mortgage debt that was very spare on key details.

It boils down to "give me the money and trust me," Schlesinger said.

James Angel, a professor of finance at Georgetown University, said the White House appears to be "flying by the seat of their pants."
[....]

Paulson Debt Plan May Benefit Mostly Goldman, Morgan While Screwing American Public

[...]

``Its benefits, in its current form, will be largely limited to investment banks and other banks that have aggressively written down the value of their holdings and have already recognized the attendant capital impairment,'' Jeffrey Rosenberg, Bank of America's head of credit strategy research, wrote in a report dated yesterday, without identifying particular banks.

Many banks may not participate in the Troubled Asset Relief Program because they haven't had to write down as much assets under accounting rules, meaning decisions to sell into the program would cause them to lose capital, Rosenberg wrote. Investment banks operate ``under a mark-to-market accounting model while commercial banks hold assets at cost until realizing a loss (or until they reasonably expect one),'' he wrote.

Rosenberg assumed the government will use a reverse auction in which banks submit the lowest prices they are willing to sell certain types of assets for and then the government buys the cheapest ones, with the goal of ``protecting the taxpayers,'' the report said.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's push for the program, now considered by lawmakers, is designed to remove ``illiquid assets'' clogging the financial system, reverse declining asset values and prevent the freezing of lending for U.S. financial firms, companies and consumers.

The intervention into markets would be the broadest since at least the Great Depression. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said today lawmakers and Paulson narrowed differences on the plan.

[...]

Heart Attack Care Often Delayed for the Poor

[...]

Their conclusions stem from an analysis of more than 6,700 medical records of men and women who experienced a heart attack between 1993 and 2002. By matching patient addresses to 2000 U.S. census data, the research team was able to establish household income levels as either low (less than $33,533), medium (between $33,533 and $50,031) or high (over $50,032).

Foraker and her colleagues determined that 36 percent of the patients faced a short delay (less than two hours) in reaching their local hospital. Another 42 percent experienced a medium delay of between two and 12 hours, while 22 percent underwent a long delay of between 12 hours and three days.

After accounting for such factors as age, gender, health insurance status, history of diabetes and/or high blood pressure, distance to hospital, and race, the study authors found that Medicaid patients and those living in low-income areas were relatively more likely to experience a long or medium delay in getting to the hospital for heart attack care.

For example, patients residing in lower-income neighborhoods were 46 percent more likely to experience a long rather than a short delay in getting to a hospital after heart attack, the study found. And patients on Medicaid were 87 percent more likely to wait a long time before having their symptoms seen to, the team reported.

Why the disparity based on income? The researchers aren't sure. They noted that one factor -- a lack of health insurance -- didn't seem to affect wait times.

"From a public health standpoint these disparities should be further investigated," said Foraker. "And in the meantime, to reduce these disparities, one of the targets may be to increase the recognition of symptoms of a heart attack. And to promote EMS use throughout the community, so people know to call an ambulance right away when they experience these symptoms."

[...]

Methane 'escaping' from Arctic sea bed

[...]

Huge methane deposits are rising to the surface as the Arctic region heats up, according to preliminary findings.

Researchers found massive stores of sub-sea methane in several areas across thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf and observed the gas bubbling up from the sea floor through "chimneys", according to reports.

One of the expedition leaders, Orjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University in Sweden, said researchers had found "an extensive area of intense methane release".

[...]

The researchers believe escaping sub-sea methane - which is around 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide - is connected to the recent rises in temperatures in the Arctic region.

He added: "The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place.

"The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane. The permafrost now has small holes.

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

so much for possee comitatus Welcome to the police state. Perhaps the GOP is planning on cancelling elections.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/22/headlines#10

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1

3rd Infantry's 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping 'people at home' may become a permanent part of the active Army

By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Sep 8, 2008 6:15:06 EDT

The 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they're training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

"Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future," said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. "Now, the plan is to assign a force every year."

The command is at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who returned in April after 15 months in Iraq, will operate out of their home post at Fort Stewart, Ga., where they'll be able to go to school, spend time with their families and train for their new homeland mission as well as the counterinsurgency mission in the war zones.

Stop-loss will not be in effect, so soldiers will be able to leave the Army or move to new assignments during the mission, and the operational tempo will be variable.

Don't look for any extra time off, though. The at-home mission does not take the place of scheduled combat-zone deployments and will take place during the so-called dwell time a unit gets to reset and regenerate after a deployment.

The 1st of the 3rd is still scheduled to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan in early 2010, which means the soldiers will have been home a minimum of 20 months by the time they ship out.

In the meantime, they'll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the "jaws of life" to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.

The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

"It's a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they're fielding. They've been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we're undertaking we were the first to get it."

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

"I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered," said Cloutier, describing the experience as "your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.

"I'm not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds ... it put me on my knees in seconds."

The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced "sea-smurf").

"I can't think of a more noble mission than this," said Cloutier, who took command in July. "We've been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you're going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones."

While soldiers' combat training is applicable, he said, some nuances don't apply.

"If we go in, we're going in to help American citizens on American soil, to save lives, provide critical life support, help clear debris, restore normalcy and support whatever local agencies need us to do, so it's kind of a different role," said Cloutier, who, as the division operations officer on the last rotation, learned of the homeland mission a few months ago while they were still in Iraq.

Some brigade elements will be on call around the clock, during which time they'll do their regular marksmanship, gunnery and other deployment training. That's because the unit will continue to train and reset for the next deployment, even as it serves in its CCMRF mission.

Should personnel be needed at an earthquake in California, for example, all or part of the brigade could be scrambled there, depending on the extent of the need and the specialties involved.

Other branches included

The active Army's new dwell-time mission is part of a NorthCom and DOD response package.

Active-duty soldiers will be part of a force that includes elements from other military branches and dedicated National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams.

A final mission rehearsal exercise is scheduled for mid-September at Fort Stewart and will be run by Joint Task Force Civil Support, a unit based out of Fort Monroe, Va., that will coordinate and evaluate the interservice event.

In addition to 1st BCT, other Army units will take part in the two-week training exercise, including elements of the 1st Medical Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C.

There also will be Air Force engineer and medical units, the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

One of the things Vogler said they'll be looking at is communications capabilities between the services.

"It is a concern, and we're trying to check that and one of the ways we do that is by having these sorts of exercises. Leading up to this, we are going to rehearse and set up some of the communications systems to make sure we have interoperability," he said.

"I don't know what America's overall plan is — I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they're called," Cloutier said. "It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help the people at home."

GOP Propaganda Falsely Tying Iran to 9/11

Call to Action on Behalf of DN! Journalists Facing Charges for Reporting on the Republican National Convention

Today it is critical that you make your voice heard in the Ramsey County Attorney and St. Paul City Attorney offices. Demand that they drop all pending and current charges against journalists arrested while reporting on protests outside the Republican National Conventions.

Democracy Now! Host Amy Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s office is in the process of deciding whether or not to press felony P.C. (probable cause) riot charges against Democracy Now! Producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Please contact Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner by all means possible to demand that her office not press charges against Kouddous and Salazar.

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner
RCA at co.ramsey.mn.us (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
651-266-3222

Susan Gaertner for Governor
info at susangaertner.com (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org)
(612) 978-8625
(612)804-6156

The St. Paul City Attorney’s office has already charged Amy Goodman with misdemeanor obstruction of a legal process and interference with a peace officer. Contact St. Paul City Attorney John Choi by all means possible to demand that the charges against Goodman be dropped immediately.

St. Paul City Attorney John Choi
john.choi at ci.stpaul.mn.us (cc: dropthecharges at democracynow.org) (651) 266-8710

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, as was a photographer for the Associated Press.

IMPORTANT

Be sure to cc: dropthecharges@democracynow.org on all emails so that our team can deliver print outs of your messages to the St. Paul City Attorney and Ramsey County Attorney offices.

Right Wing Extremist Pin Up Girl Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is red meat for carnivorous misogynist evangelicals....5 kids and a teen pregnancy in her very own christian right household. An after 40 pregnancy which she no doubt knew would result in a kid with downs, because they test for it when women get around 40, but this gun slingin' life lover saw it through. And will oversee the teen pregnancy too. The authoritarian forces in control of the republican party will use that to illuminate her committed anti abortion position. The stamina! The Character! The Love for LIFE!

If they can get the Evangelical vote they can win the election. Or fix it more easily. There are people in America who care about nothing but abortion and they run to the polls over it. The call abortion murder. They call it a holocaust. They are extremely well organized and well funded. Their funding often comes from corporations. They believe BIRTH CONTROL is murder. They don't give a fuck what happens to anyone after they're born, but they don't want pregnancy terminated or even prevented..

They believe poverty and despair in other countries are god's way of controlling heathen populations which is how they justify events like the Iraq invasion. They believe the constitution should be replaced with biblical law.

And now, with a "woman" on the ticket, the cretinous right can feel like they too are making history with their vote. It's just history, not change. Republican women aren't threatening to the status quo when they are such subservient boot licking bitches. (Like Sandra Day O'Connor who is now being painted as some kind of feminist when she was most certainly not. )

Pioneering lesbian rights activist Del Martin has died

Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said Martin died at a San Francisco hospital Wednesday morning, two weeks after a broken arm exacerbated her existing health problems.

Her wife, Phyllis Lyon, was by her side, Kendell said.

Along with six other women, they founded a San Francisco social club for lesbians in 1955 called the Daughters of Bilitis. Under their leadership, the group evolved into the nation's first lesbian advocacy organization.

More Exxon News. Arctic Ice At 2nd-Lowest Level On Record

With several weeks left in the melt season, ice in summer 2008 has a chance to diminish below the record low set last year, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Environmental groups said the ice melt was another alarm bell warning of global warming.

"It's an unfortunate sign that climate change is coming rapidly to the Arctic and that we really need to address the issue of global warming on a national level," said Christopher Krenz, Arctic project manager for Oceana.

"This is not surprising but it is alarming," said Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department special assistant for Alaska. "This was a relatively cool summer, and to have ice decrease to the second lowest minimum on record demonstrates that global warming's ongoing impact is profound."

Exxon Still Refuses to Pay Bills on Damage it Caused 20 years ago

The Exxon Valdez spilled some 34,000 tonnes of crude oil in the costliest accident of its kind. The clean up alone cost around $2.5 billion.

The two sides still disagree about whether Exxon owes interest on the $507 million award, which would bring the final figure to $1 billion, according to plaintiff's lawyers. There is also debate over another $70 million, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

David Oesting of Anchorage, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, and Exxon were not immediately available for comment.

While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the subject, the justices sent the case back to the lower court to handle the final settlement of the $507.5 million award, which the Court said was the maximum damages available to the plaintiffs.

Exxon Refused to pay orignal fine of 5 billion ( they make in a month ) for 20 years

Last year, Exxon Mobil netted a record $40.6 billion in profits. At that rate, it could pay the punitive damages with about four days' worth of profits. But in the end, the punitive damages will amount to only a small part of the company's payout: Exxon already has spent $2 billion on environmental cleanup and paid $1.4 billion more in fines and compensation to thousands of fishermen and cannery workers.

In a statement Wednesday, Exxon Mobil Chairman and Chief Executive Rex W. Tillerson said that "the Valdez oil spill was a tragic accident and one which the corporation deeply regrets. . . . We have worked hard over many years to address the impacts of the spill and to prevent such accidents from happening in our company again."

But some lawmakers and environmentalists faulted the court for giving a big-money reprieve to one of the world's richest companies. Exxon Mobil earned more than $10 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year.
"This ruling is another in a line of cases where this Supreme Court has misconstrued congressional intent to benefit large corporations," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).

The executive director of Greenpeace called the decision a betrayal of Alaskan communities and their fishermen. They "deserved far better after their long and difficult battle to hold Exxon Mobil accountable," said John Passacantando. He described the oil spill as "the worst environmental calamity in U.S. history."



At issue Wednesday were the punitive damages awarded to more than 32,000 fishermen, cannery workers and Alaska natives whose livelihoods were damaged or destroyed by the oil spill. A jury in Alaska agreed that the company should be punished for its recklessness, and it handed down a $5-billion award.

Exxon appealed, insisting that verdict was out of line. Its lawyers pointed out that for centuries, shipowners were not punished for accidents on the high seas even if their captain was at fault. (In earlier times, shipowners had no way to contact captains after they had left port.)

Eventually, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reduced the punitive damages to $2.5 billion. But Exxon appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the judgment should be thrown out entirely.

Cheney Expresses Joy at Prospect of a Profitable War with Russia. Go Nukes!

Joseph R. Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia shortly before the war began.
[...]
And so it was that a team from the vice president's office, U.S. security officials and others were in Georgia several days before the war began.
[...]

More on the antiquated, decaying, highly profitable for a few infrastructure. Nationalize Electricty NOW!

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

[...]

No Democracy in America. ABC Reporter Arrested in Denver for Taking Pictures of Senators with Big Donors

Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic Senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

Police on the scene refused to tell ABC lawyers the charges against the producer, Asa Eslocker, who works with the ABC News investigative unit.

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.

Eslocker was put in handcuffs and loaded in the back of a police van which headed for a nearby police station.

Privatized Cops Under Authority of raving joke "homeland Security" harrass citizen, pee all over constitution

[...]
Lapriss Gilbert said she was picking up a Social Security card for her son when the guard was offended by her "lesbian.com" shirt and threatened her with arrest.
She was eventually allowed inside after her mother called police, according to a Los Angeles Daily News story.

The guard, whose name was not immediately available, works for Paragon Security, which contracts with the Department of Homeland Security.
[...]

Taxpayers Pick up Tab for Deregulation that made handful wealthy

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

The borrowed money would be repaid once the assets of that failed bank are sold.

"I would not rule out the possibility that at some point we may need to tap into (short-term) lines of credit with the Treasury for working capital, not to cover our losses," Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview with the paper.

Get Your Religion Outta My Face

Bush Administration Continues to Use Unproven allegations to foment War, this time with Venezuela

U.S. Economy: Consumer Prices Rise More Than Forecast

Still, increases went beyond food and fuel, including gains in clothing, airline fares and education, likely intensifying discussions among Fed policy makers about how quickly to shift toward raising rates.

``What we are seeing is a lot of commodity-price spillover'' into other items, said Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp. in Cleveland, who correctly forecast the increase in core prices. ``Numbers like this increase the hand of hawks'' at the Fed who argue that rates need to rise to quell inflation, he said.

Rex Tillerson Godfather of Exxon Mobil Lies and Distorts

"I think the response to that is to have as many diverse supplies of energy as possible. And that means both in terms of geographic diversity. You want to expose yourself or certainly have access for the American people to as many different geographic sources of supply as possible. So the disruption in one area does not leave you ... hostage to any one area."

Last week, Obama called to "end the age of oil in our time," claiming that the United States could produce enough renewable energy to replace all U.S. imports of oil within 10 years.

But Tillerson said that "it's going to be very challenging to achieve that goal, in that period of time. And again, so much of the energy issue that the United States deals with and the world deals with, people I think do not have an appreciation for the lead times that are required."

Had the Reagan administration, back in 1980, not purposefully derailed plans to do exactly that - develop alternative energy sources and break the cycle of dependence on imports - we would have many diverse sources of energy by now. It is challenging to achieve that goal ONLY because corporations have obstructed achievement of it at every turn, and Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations have each stood in the way of doing anything achieving it. Our politicians felt the more important thing to do was make a very few people wealthy beyond imagining, even if it meant betraying the people of the country and suppressing any semblance of democracy.

Hair Samples in Anthrax Case Don't Match

[...]
The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence over which researchers continue to puzzle in the case, which ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.
[...]
Friends and former colleagues of Ivins, who died before he could see the full array of evidence prosecutors had gathered, continue to demand information about the DNA advances that authorities say led them to a flask in Ivins's lab.
[...]

Pander in Chief

Iraq and Oil

Oil Reserves

According to the Oil and Gas Journal, Iraq’s proven oil reserves are 115 billion barrels, although these statistics have not been revised since 2001 and are largely based on 2-D seismic data from nearly three decades ago. Over the past two years, multinational companies, at the request of the Government of Iraq (GoI), have reexamined seismic data and conducted comprehensive surveys of Iraq’s hydrocarbons reserves in locations throughout the country. Geologists and consultants have estimated that relatively unexplored territory in the western and southern deserts may contain an estimated additional 45 to 100 billion barrels (bbls) of recoverable oil. While internal Iraqi estimates have ranged into the hundreds of billions of barrels of additional oil, the seismic data under review by a host of international firms seem to be pointing to more conservative, but significant, increases. Iraq has the lowest reserve to production ratio of the major oil-producing countries.

The majority of the known oil and gas reserves in Iraq form a belt that runs along the eastern edge of the country. According to the GoI, Iraq has around 9 fields that are considered “super giants” (over 5 billion bbls reserves) as well as 22 known “giant” fields (over 1 billion bbls). According to independent consultants, the cluster of super-giant fields of southeastern Iraq forms the largest known concentration of such fields in the world and accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the country’s proven oil reserves. An estimated 20 percent of oil reserves are in the north of Iraq, near Kirkuk, Mosul and Khanaqin. Control over rights to reserves is a source of controversy between the ethnic Kurds and other groups in the area.

The Western Desert is of interest to oil prospectors as well as to the sectarian groups occupying these areas where there is no active oil production. Minor oil formations beneath western territory have been known of for decades, but little has been done in the way of development. Much of this area is just now undergoing exploration, although it belongs to same geological formation as part of the Saudi Arabian deposits. According to an Egyptian news source from February, 2007, a test well at the Akkas field in the Al-Anbar province is flowing at rates equivalent to larger fields elsewhere in Iraq.

more US Military Oil Consumption

US military oil consumption

More Oil wars Break out

The breakaway province of South Ossetia is claimed by Georgia, a former Soviet republic that cast its lot with the United States and the West to the eternal irritation of Moscow. But South Ossetia has resisted Georgia's rule and has been under Russia's sway for years.

Georgia sits in a tough neighborhood, shoulder to shoulder with huge Russia, not far from Iran, and astride one of the most important crossroads for the emerging wealth of the rich Caspian Sea region. A U.S.-backed oil pipeline runs through Georgia, allowing the West to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil while bypassing Russia and Iran.

The dispute makes the Bush administration the middleman between a promising ally it wants to help and the powerful former adversary next door whose help it needs.

Washington praises democratic development in Georgia, delights in its contribution of combat troops for Iraq and acknowledges valuable intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation.

Moscow's cooperation is vital to numerous Washington aims in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.

"For all those reasons, and the fact that Georgia has demonstrated that it is a close ally, we cannot simply sit by and say, 'So be it - what does South Ossetia mean to us?' " said Janusz Bugajski, director of the new European democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Georgia as a whole means quite a lot."

The pipeline that crosses Georgia can pump slightly more than 1 million barrels of crude oil per day, or more than 1 percent of the world's daily crude output. The 1,100-mile pipeline carries oil from Azerbaijan's Caspian Sea fields, estimated to hold the world's third-largest reserves. Its potential vulnerability was already in the spotlight after it was sabotaged this week, apparently by Kurdish separatists.

Most of the oil is bound for Western Europe, where gas prices are even higher than the $4 and more a gallon that U.S. consumers are now paying. With only so much oil to go around, what the pipeline carries affects prices elsewhere. The United States also hopes it will be a model for other development projects that could have a more direct effect on the U.S. market.

Whole Foods recalling Beef

Whole Foods Market is recalling fresh ground beef sold between June 2 through Aug. 6 because the beef might be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.

The company has received reports that seven people in Massachusetts and two people in Pennsylvania who shopped at Whole Foods Market became ill, said spokeswoman Libba Letton.

Letton said the company's recalled beef was processed at the Nebraska Beef plant linked to the E. coli outbreak this summer. Federal health authorities say there have been 49 confirmed illnesses tied to that outbreak.

[...]

15 out of 30 federally accredited organic certifiers audited put on "probation"

[...]
the USDA just announced Monday it was putting 15 out of 30 federally accredited organic certifiers they audited on probation, allowing them 12 months to make corrections or lose their accreditation. At the heart of the audit for several certifiers were imported foods and ingredients from other countries, including China.

Chinese imports have had a bad year in the news, making headlines for contaminated pet food, toxic toys, and recently, certified organic ginger contaminated with levels of a pesticide called aldicarb that can cause nausea, headaches and blurred vision even at low levels. The ginger, sold under the 365 label at Whole Foods Market, contained a level of aldicarb not even permissible for conventional ginger, let alone organics. Whole Foods immediately pulled the product from its shelves.

[...]

Farms that produce USDA-certified organic food are not personally inspected by anyone from the USDA National Organic Program (NOP). As a small and underfunded agency within the USDA (it has fewer than a dozen employees), NOP relies on what it calls Accredited Certifying Agencies -- ACAs -- to do the legwork. The ACAs take responsibility for ensuring that any farm or processor bearing the organic label meets the strict requirements for certification.

Since the Chinese government does not allow foreigners to inspect Chinese farms, an extra step is involved for oversight of organics from China: Chinese companies, which are allowed to inspect Chinese farms, subcontract with foreign ACAs. Cummins believes "the safest course of action is ... to say we won't certify imports from China because their law won't allow inspections."

[...]

Deadly John Foster Dulles Spider

Letter to Congress

George Bush and his gang of felons should be held accountable for numerous impeachable offenses, crimes against the world and crimes against the American public. Instead each administration felon, including Chimpy himself, goes about conducting business as usual.

Why is Karl Rove free? He's defied a subpoena. I'd be in jail if I did that.

How is it abuses of military recruiters continue unchecked by congress? It is an outrage that recruiters are allowed into public high schools to begin with, but there should be criminal prosecution of those who lie, manipulate and coerce vulnerable children into the military.

Why is Blackwater Mercenary still in operation? If we must have wars, even aggressive, preemptive, illegal, immoral ones like the Iraq occupation for oil debacle, we should have a DRAFT, not mercenaries.

Why is there no Manhattan project for energy? The oil companies have fractured the economy, already weak from years of privatization, deregulation, Wall Street manipulation, "free Market" ideology, deliberately created bad debt, lowered education standards, outsourcing, book cooking, corporate crime, etc.

If we can pull ourselves together to deliver a WMD or 2 to Japan, surely we can pull ourselves together to develop a new decentralized, environmentally friendly energy system. Instead we have oil company candidate John McCain being paid to promote off shore drilling, which won't solve our energy problems and will increase our environmental problems.

Why is congress not pushing and shouting for single payer universal health coverage the public overwhelmingly wants?

How is it that the telephone companies got away with trampling all over the civil rights of Americans?

Where is the congressional investigation into Bruce Ivins' suicide? His "therapist" has no credibility. His suspicious death looks like part of a cover up, because it probably is a cover up. The war on terror is as phony as a 3 dollar bill and is little more than a way of organizing people into supporting policies that hurt them. The war is the against the American people, and the people of the world, by corporate interests and their government lackeys.

How is there any question of whether or not the oil companies will be held accountable for their various criminal activities, including Chevron's disastrous environmental assault in Ecuador.

I want our troops out of Iraq. I want the privatization of the military to stop. I want single payer universal health care. I want the might of the federal government behind the development of a new, green energy infrastructure.

I want the FTC to break up the giant media conglomerates that are poisoning the minds of Americans with disinformation and spin and junk. It is inexcusable.

I want REAL campaign finance reform with PUBLIC financing ONLY.

I want religion out of politics. I am sick to death of hearing politicians talk about god. It is repulsive, inappropriate and utterly unamerican.

And I want Bush and his gang of felons investigated and prosecuted when appropriate. One of the biggest mistakes ever made in this country was pardoning felon Richard Nixon. Don't let it happen again!

I cannot think of a single thing going well in the USA. I'm finally as disgusted with the democrats as I am with the republicans. The fact that the congressional agenda involves itself with steroid use in pro sports and digital TV while the country is driven into the ground by lobbyists, speculation, deregulation, privatization, "free trade", outsourcing and a complete lack of accountability for the lies, war crimes and assaults on the constitution by the criminal Bush administration is an outrage.

Congress is a criminal gang. I've entirely lost my faith in and loyalty to the democrat party. Living through the onslaught of right wing democrats like Bill Clinton, Obama and skanks like Harold Ford, and democrats who have enabled the criminal Bush administration by simply doing nothing, has made it abundantly clear that the democrats are the party of big business while the republicans are the party of big nazi.

Obama's Energy Policy Plan

Obama’s comprehensive New Energy for America plan will:

• Provide short‐term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
• Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
• Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
• Put 1 million Plug‐In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.
• Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
• Implement an economy‐wide cap‐and‐trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Get the details by reading Barack Obama's New Energy for America plan

Obama and McCain: Energy Policies. McCain's is Delusional Pro Oil Company gargle

PICKENS COMPLIMENTS OBAMA ENERGY PLAN

“I’m strongly encouraged by Senator Obama’s speech on America’s energy future. Foreign oil is killing our economy and putting our nation at risk," wrote Pickens, a billionaire oil man, who proposes ending America's dependence on oil by promoting renewable enegies like wind power and natural gas. Pickens was one of the principal financiers of the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry. “When I started this campaign my goal was to make this the biggest issue in the coming election and the top priority to be addressed in the first hundred days of the next administration. This issue is clearly moving up in the priority of political debate; Senator Obama’s statement is an indication that is what is indeed happening. I will continue to push this as a priority for the rest of the year.”

Earlier, in Obama's speech, the Illinois senator said, “We can’t simply pretend, as Sen, McCain does, that we can drill our way out of this problem,” Obama said. “T. Boone Pickens is right. We need a much bolder and much bigger set of solutions.”

Chevron's profit hits record high

Chevron Corp. said Friday its second-quarter earnings soared to a new high, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy investors whose expectations have been raised by the oil industry’s recent run of eye-popping profit. The company’s shares tumbled.

The San Ramon-based company earned $4.35 billion, or $1.97 per share, for the three months ended in June. That represented an 18 percent increase from net income of $3.68 billion, or $1.76 per share, at the same time last year.

It marks the company’s largest three-month profit in its 127-year history, eclipsing earnings of $4.14 billion registered in last year’s final quarter after energy prices spiked in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Chevron History and Rap Sheet

Chevron

Chairman and CEO	David J. (Dave) O'Reilly
Vice Chairman; Policy, Government and Public Affairs; Human Resources	Peter J. Robertson
EVP Technology, Chemicals MIning and Health, Environment and Safefy	John E. Bethancourt

Chevron's dumping of wastes into Inlet harms salmon

[...]
Cook Inlet remains the only coastal water body in the nation where the oil and gas industry legally dumps billions of gallons of toxic drilling and production wastes each year. These waste streams contain oil and grease, and metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic -- the very same type of pollutants an EPA subsistence foods study found in fish and shellfish around Tyonek, Nanwalek and Seldovia.

These toxic pollutants taint our efforts to brand and market Cook Inlet salmon as clean, healthy and wholesome -- an essential component in our fight for market share against a glut of farmed fish on world markets.

The technology exists to properly dispose of these wastes -- by reinjecting them back into the formation. In fact, for all of the Cook Inlet platforms, roughly 95 percent of the waste dumped each year comes from one facility -- the Trading Bay Production Facility on the West side of Cook Inlet-- and an injection well there would go a long way toward solving the problem.

Yet in the latest permit proceeding, Chevron steadfastly refused to stop the dumping and proposed instead to install a diffuser on the Trading Bay discharge pipe. Instead of properly treating these toxic wastes through re-injection, Chevron's proposal will simply spread them around. Many of the pollutants persist in the environment and can accumulate in the fish we eat, so dispersing them makes little sense in the long term -- especially since industry also wanted to nearly triple the volume of pollutants discharged into Cook Inlet each year.

Using our public water bodies and fisheries as dumping grounds equates to a huge subsidy for industry at a time when corporate profits are skyrocketing with high fuel prices. For example, Chevron is the largest operator in Cook Inlet, and it raked in profits of more than $5 billion in just the first three months of 2008, so it's increasingly difficult for them to argue that cost is a substantial hurdle to proper treatment.

[...]

Poland needs to sign a treaty on the deployment of elements of a U.S. missile shield on its territory before the upcoming U.S. presidential elections.

According to Kaczynski, his country should not take too much risk in advancing terms to the United States about the deployment of the missile shield elements on its territory because failure of these talks would aggravate the situation for Poland.

In long-running negotiations with the U.S., Warsaw has been pushing Washington to spend billions of dollars improving Poland's air defenses in exchange for allowing the deployment of the interceptor missiles.

Kaczynski said Poland must sign the missile shield deal with the current U.S. administration, without waiting for the U.S. presidential elections.

Moscow strongly opposes the possible deployment of the U.S. missile shield, viewing it as a threat to its national security. Russia's Foreign Ministry has said that if U.S. strategic missile defense elements are deployed near Russia's borders, Moscow would be forced to respond with a "military-technical approach" rather than a diplomatic one.

Chevron Lobbies White House to Pressure Ecuador to Stop $12 Billion Amazon Pollution Lawsuit

Chevron is being accused of promoting geopolitical blackmail in its efforts to stave off a lawsuit accusing it of contaminating the Ecuadorian rain forest. Nearly 30,000 Amazon residents are seeking $12 billion from Chevron for dumping billions of gallons of toxic oil waste. According to Newsweek, the oil giant is urging the Bush administration to yank special trade preferences for Ecuador if the country’s government doesn’t force the Amazon residents to drop the case. If the White House agrees, it would be the second major lobbying victory for Chevron in just a matter of weeks. Last month, the Senate dropped an effort to penalize Chevron for maintaining extensive ties to the military junta in Burma.
[...]

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author: Bush Ordered Back-Dated, Fake Letter Linking Iraq to 9/11

[...]
Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.
[...]

Doubts about anthrax story

[...]
Ivins died last Tuesday after federal investigators had spent a year watching his house near Fort Detrick in Frederick, following him, and interviewing him and his colleagues at the U.S Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Ivins' lawyer has said the scientist was innocent.

"I think he's a convenient fall guy. They can say, 'OK, we found him, case closed, we're going home,'" said Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, the former chief of bacteriology at Fort Detrick who hired Ivins. "The FBI apparently applied a lot of pressure to all the investigators there [at Detrick], and they found the weakest link."

The FBI has not yet said how it was able to connect Ivins to the attacks.

But the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, relying in part on unnamed sources, reported that investigators employing new technology were able to find a genetic link between the specific anthrax strain recovered from the letters and the bodies of victims and the one found in an office and other "nonlaboratory space" where Ivins worked in 2001.

The New York Times reported that investigators intensively questioned his children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24. One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Ivins' daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

"It was not an interview," Byrne said. "It was a frank attempt at intimidation."

Byrne said he believed Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. "If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?"

The Associated Press, quoting unnamed government sources, reported yesterday that Ivins had a lengthy obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which has a chapter house near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox from which the anthrax letters were sent. However, the report says the FBI can't place Ivins in Princeton the day the letters were mailed.

Hedlund said Ivins was a bacteriologist and lacked the expertise to convert the anthrax into the deadly form that was used in the 2001 mailings to government offices and newsrooms.

Rep. Rush Holt, who represents the central New Jersey district where the anthrax letters were mailed, said circumstantial evidence is not enough, especially after the series of mistakes made in this case. The FBI spent years investigating Steven J. Hatfill, another scientist who worked in the same lab as Ivins. The government recently agreed to pay a $5.82 million settlement to Hatfill.
[...]

John McCain: The Oil Company Candidate

The oil industry is reporting record profits as consumers empty their wallets at the pump, so why is Senator John McCain (R-AZ) suddenly backing policies like offshore oil drilling that do nothing to help gas prices today (or the environment tomorrow), but stand to make Big Oil a handsome profit down the road? Public Campaign Action Fund's Campaign Money Watch project released a new report today that sheds some light on McCain's energy policy decisions, and what they have to do with the money from the oil industry that has filled his campaign coffers.

It's not just that McCain is pulling in four-figure checks from oil executives, or that he's been raising even more money from them since changing his position on offshore oil drilling. His campaign is filled with people who've taken handsome paychecks for lobbying on behalf of oil interests. Some high-profile examples:

• John Green, McCain’s campaign liaison to Congress, has lobbied for Chevron, Hess, and the American Petroleum Institute, among others. This work, which took place between 2002 and 2008, earned Green and his firm $3,450,000. Employees and PACs of his clients have given McCain a total of $106,050 since 1989.
  
  
  
• Wayne Berman, a leading McCain bundler, has lobbied for Chevron, Amerada Hess, and the American Petroleum Institute, among others. This work, which took place between 2004 and 2008, earned Berman and his firm $3,170,000. Employees and PACs of his clients have given McCain a total of $105,300 since 1989.
  
  
  
• Steve Phillips, a leading McCain bundler, has lobbied for eight different oil and gas entities, including BP and Occidental Petroleum. This work, which took place between 2000 and 2007, earned Phillips and his firm $3,130,000. Employees and PACs of his clients have given McCain $40,950 since 1989.
  
  
  
• Charlie Black, a senior McCain advisor, has lobbied for Occidental Petroleum and Yukos Oil. This work, which took place between 2001 and 2007, earned Black and his firm $1,725,000. Employees and PACs of his clients have given McCain $18,550 since 1989.

And that's only a small chunk of the list. Read the full report (in pdf) here.

The energy crisis we face requires serious debate, not rash policy reversals that put money in the pockets of the oil industry while ignoring both consequences to the environment and the need to invest more heavily in alternative energy sources. Yet another way special interest money warps policy debate at a critical time.

Biography of a free trading, George Bush Licking, Right Wing Pig Robert Zoellick

Murdoch arrived in India July 30 and met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress party, before traveling to M

A wage-bill imposed by international donor institutions on poor country is complicating the roll-out of an effective antiretroviral treatment plan to reach millions of needy recipients, Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF) has said.

Experts from the medical charity told the XVII International Aids Conference in Mexico that the wage-bill has blocked efforts by some countries like Rwanda to recruit qualified staff to manage the ART programme.

An estimated 70 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS who need antiretroviral therapy (ART) are still not receiving it, and MSF says the growing numbers of those who have been started on ART have only increased the burden on existing health care staff.

[...]

The main hurdles here, according to MSF, are wage-bill restrictions or salary freezes dictated by the International Monetary Fund, Ministers of Finance, the World Bank, or health-reform strategists that "block employment of extra health staff as well as the use of international funds for salary increases in the public sector".

Corporations cheat the system by using tax break to beef up rewards for sociopathic CEOs who Run Corporate Amerikkka

[...]
n recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail. Now, with the current bear market in stocks weakening many pension plans, this practice could put more in jeopardy.

How many is impossible to tell. Neither the Internal Revenue Service nor other agencies track this maneuver. Employers generally reveal little about it. Some benefits consultants have warned them not to, in order to forestall a backlash by regulators and lower-level workers.

The background: Federal law encourages employers to offer pensions by giving companies a tax deduction when they contribute cash to a pension plan, and by letting the money in the plan grow tax free. Executives, like anyone else, can participate in these plans.

But their benefits can't be disproportionately large. IRS rules say pension plans must not "discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees." If a company wants to give its executives larger pensions -- as most do -- it must provide "supplemental" executive pensions, which don't carry any tax advantages.

[...]

ntel's case shows how lucrative such a move can be. It involves Intel's obligation to pay deferred compensation to executives when they retire or leave. In 2005, the chip maker moved more than $200 million of its deferred-comp IOUs into its pension plan. Then it contributed at least $187 million of cash to the plan.

Now, when the executives get ready to collect their deferred salaries, Intel won't have to pay them out of cash; the pension plan will pay them.

Normally, companies can deduct the cost of deferred comp only when they actually pay it, often many years after the obligation is incurred. But Intel's contribution to the pension plan was deductible immediately. Its tax saving: $65 million in the first year. In other words, taxpayers helped finance Intel's executive compensation.

Meanwhile, the move is enabling Intel to book as much as an extra $136 million of profit over the 10 years that began in 2005. That reflects the investment return Intel assumes on the $187 million.

Fred Thiele, Intel's global retirement manager, said the benefit was probably somewhat lower, because if Intel hadn't contributed this $187 million to the pension plan, it would have invested the cash or used it in some other productive way.

[...]

So how can companies boost regular pension benefits for select executives while still passing the IRS's nondiscrimination tests? Benefits consultants help them figure out how.

To prove they don't discriminate, companies are supposed to compare what low-paid and high-paid employees receive from the pension plan. They don't have to compare actual individuals; they can compare ratios of the benefits received by groups of highly paid vs. groups of lower-paid employees.

Such a measure creates the potential for gerrymandering -- carefully moving employees about, in various theoretical groupings, to achieve a desired outcome.

Another technique: Count Social Security as part of the pension. This effectively raises low-paid employees' overall retirement benefits by a greater percentage than it raises those of the highly paid -- enabling companies to then increase the pensions of higher-paid people.

[...]

Generally, only the executives are aware this is being done. Benefits consultants have advised companies to keep quiet to avoid an employee backlash. In material prepared for employers, Robert Schmidt, a consulting actuary with Milliman Inc., said that to "minimize this problem" of employee relations, companies should draw up a memo describing the transfer of supplemental executive benefits to the pension plan and give it "only to employees who are eligible."

[...]

Royal & SunAlliance, an insurer, sold a division and laid off its 228 employees in 1999. Just before doing so, it amended the division's pension plan to award larger benefits to eight departing officers and directors. One human-resources executive got an additional $5,270 a month for life.

But to do this and still pass the IRS's nondiscrimination tests, the company needed to give tiny pension increases to 100 lower-level workers, said the company's benefits consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers. One got an increase of $1.92 a month.

[...]

Structural Adjustment

A Spiraling Race to the Bottom

As detailed further below, the IMF and World Bank provide financial assistance to countries seeking it, but apply a neoliberal economic ideology or agenda as a precondition to receiving the money. For example:

• They prescribe cutbacks, “liberalization” of the economy and resource extraction/export-oriented open markets as part of their structural adjustment.
• The role of the state is minimized.
• Privatization is encouraged as well as reduced protection of domestic industries.
• Other adjustment policies also include currency devaluation, increased interest rates, “flexibility” of the labor market, and the elimination of subsidies such as food subsidies.
• To be attractive to foreign investors various regulations and standards are reduced or removed.

The impact of these preconditions on poorer countries can be devastating. Factors such as the following lead to further misery for the developing nations and keep them dependent on developed nations:

• Poor countries must export more in order to raise enough money to pay off their debts in a timely manner.
• Because there are so many nations being asked or forced into the global market place—before they are economically and socially stable and ready—and told to concentrate on similar cash crops and commodities as others, the situation resembles a large-scale price war.
• Then, the resources from the poorer regions become even cheaper, which favors consumers in the West.
• Governments then need to increase exports just to keep their currencies stable (which may not be sustainable, either) and earn foreign exchange with which to help pay off debts.
• Governments therefore must:
  • spend less
  • reduce consumption
  • remove or decrease financial regulations
  • and so on.
• Over time then:
  • the value of labor decreases
  • capital flows become more volatile
  • a spiraling race to the bottom then begins, which generates
  • social unrest, which in turn leads to “IMF riots” and protests around the world
• These nations are then told to peg their currencies to the dollar. But keeping the exchange rate stable is costly due to measures such as increased interest rates.
• Investors obviously concerned about their assets and interests can then pull out very easily if things get tough
  • In the worst cases, capital flight can lead to economic collapse, such as we saw in the Asian/global finacial crises of 1997/98/99, or in Mexico, Brazil, and many other places. During and after a crisis, the mainstream media and free trade economists lay the blame on emerging markets and their governments’ restrictive or inefficient policies, crony capitalism, etc., which is a cruel irony.
• When IMF donors keep the exchange rates in their favor, it often means that the poor nations remain poor, or get even poorer. Even the 1997/98/99 global financial crisis cam be partly blamed on structural adjustment and early, overly aggressive deregulation for emerging economies.
• Millions of children end up dying each year.

Rupert Murdoch to Begin Escalating the Pumping of Right Wing Propaganda into India

Murdoch arrived in India July 30 and met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress party, before traveling to Mumbai for meetings with Star Group executives. He is expected to leave later Monday.

The Star Group, which is owned by News Corp., broadcasts over 60 television services in ten languages to more than 300 million viewers in 53 Asian countries.

Republican John Warner Says Jimmy Carter was Right on Energy Policy.

Congo groups 're-arming' in east

Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

Could Lonesome George Be A Dad?

A female tortoise that has accompanied George since 1993 has laid three intact eggs - which George may have fertilized.

The female belongs to the closest existing species to that of George.

Ecologists at the Galapagos National Park are now caring for the eggs in an artificial incubator.

It will be another 120 days before they know if they will hatch.

Found in 1972 on Pinta island, George is estimated to be in his 70s, middle age for a giant tortoise.

OIL DROP BRINGS NO RELIEF TO THE PUMP

The two claim that owners of the US's 160,000 gas stations are not dropping retail gas prices in line with the drop in oil because they want to fatten their anemic margins.

"Of course, motorists are getting hosed," says Weeden & Co.'s Charles Maxwell, who's known as the "dean" of energy analysts.

"The dealers at the pump will often wait several days before passing along the drop in crude prices - and I don't blame them," Maxwell said. "If their competitors aren't going to drop the price, the dealer isn't."

Pretty soon they won't have a country in which to sell their ice cap melting, green house gassing fossil fuel.

Speculation behind global commodity price rise

There is now a growing discomfort about the role of speculative finance in the US, the capital of global finance. In an open letter addressed to all airline customers, leaders of airlines in the US have recently requested the passengers to join them in pushing legislation to add more transparency and disclosure in the oil markets.

They argue that "twenty years ago, 21% of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66% of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs."
Speculators have indeed sharply increased their allocation to commodity markets from $13 billion in 2003 to $260 billion in 2008 and at present they are not adequately constrained by rules about margin requirements and other regulations about buying and selling which apply to equity trades. In fact, there has been further deregulation in the US in recent years with respect to speculative futures trading in oil and commodity indices covering a wide spectrum of commodities including food and metals.

Eminent financiers such as George Soros and powerful US senators, such as Joe Lieberman, are arguing that commodity index speculators are a big part of the increase in commodity prices. Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager in his testimony before the US Congress, has said that gasoline prices could fall to $2 a gallon, half of today's price with legislation barring commodity index funds. There are now more than 10 legislative proposals before the US Congress calling for better regulation of commodity index markets.

At the same time, there are powerful forces in the US against regulation of such transactions. Investment funds managers and investment houses such as Morgan Stanley are benefiting from these speculative activities and they are mobilising public opinion against increased regulations. California's public employees' pension fund, the world's largest, earned a 68% rate of return on its investments in commodity futures and other investors are rushing in commodity markets.

The vested interests are trying to divert the attention from regulation by arguing that other factors, including growing demand from emerging markets such as China and India, is responsible for commodity price increases. This game of blaming emerging economies in which the President of the US has also joined is patently absurd because the rapid growth in India and China has been going on for more than a decade with no increase in commodity prices even in nominal terms and cannot explain the sharp increase in last two years.


Other factors such as drought in Australia and switch of corn to biofuels can explain part of the increase in food prices but none of them can explain increases of more than 100% in many commodity prices in a single year as it has happened in 2007 and 2008. There is little doubt that speculative finance is a key factor in sudden price increases in oil, food and metals in the last two years. Amartya Sen in his classical work on famines pointed out that even when supply situation for food is healthy, famines can occur because of collapse of purchasing power of the common man. Today we are witnessing a phenomenon of food riots caused by food price increases due not to demand-supply imbalance but to greed of speculators facilitated by lax regulatory system in the key trading centre of the world.

[....]