Al-Qaeda still aims to strike inside the United States but home-grown or unaffiliated extremists now “pose an equally serious threat,” FBI chief Robert Mueller warned US lawmakers Thursday.

“Al Qaeda and its affiliates are still committed to striking us in the United States,” Mueller told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, pointing to plots to bomb New York City subways and the failed Christmas airline attack.

“Home-grown and lone-wolf extremists pose an equally serious threat,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation director said, citing the shootings at the sprawling Fort Hood army base in Texas.

Experts have warned that a “lone wolf” — an extremist acting alone, without connections to an established network like Al-Qaeda — may be the most difficult threat for authorities to thwart.

“We have also seen US-born extremists plotting to commit terrorism overseas,” such as Mumbai attacks planner David Headley, the US-born son of a former Pakistani diplomat and American woman, said Mueller.

“These terrorist threats are diverse, far-reaching and ever-changing, and to combat these threats, the FBI must sustain our overseas contingency operations and engage our intelligence and law enforcement partners both here at home and abroad,” he said.

Is the FBI prematurely closing the books on a still unsolved terror case?

April 25, 2010  |

A microbiologist who supervised the work of accused anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins explained to a National Academy of Sciences panel Thursday why the arithmetic of growing anthrax didn’t add up to Ivins’ mailing deadly spores in fall 2001.

“Impossible,” said Dr. Henry S. Heine of a scenario in which Ivins, another civilian microbiologist working for the Army, allegedly prepared the anthrax spores at an Army lab at Fort Detrick. Heine told the 16-member panel that Ivins would have had to grow as many as 10 trillion spores, an astronomical amount that couldn’t have gone unnoticed by his colleagues.

According to FBI calculations, Ivins accomplished this working after-hours in a special suite for handling lethal agents designated B3, for Biohazard Level 3. A bar chart released by the bureau (PDF) when it closed its nearly 9-year-old Amerithrax case in February showed that in August and September 2001, the months immediately before the first anthrax letters were mailed, Ivins logged 34 more hours in the B3 suite than his combined total for the previous seven months.

“That’s more than 8,000 hours (close to a year) short of what he would have needed to grow the anthrax,” Heine told ProPublica in an interview after his NAS presentation.

Heine, one of the few scientists at the Army lab with the skills to grow large batches of anthrax, told ProPublica it would have taken around “100 liters of liquid anthrax culture,” or more than 26 gallons, to grow all the dried spores that killed five Americans and infected 17 others.

“He couldn’t have done that without us knowing it,” said Heine.

Other biodefense scientists who didn’t work with Ivins have done the same calculations and reached the same conclusion as Heine.

The FBI declined to comment on this latest challenge to its decision to end one of the most expensive manhunts in the bureau’s 102-year history. In closing the case, the agency said Ivins alone was responsible for the anthrax letters. Ivins committed suicide in 2008.

Many of Ivins’ colleagues and some federal lawmakers protested that the FBI was premature in closing the books on Ivins before the academy had completed its review of the science undergirding the bureau’s case. “To this day, it is still far from clear that Mr. Ivins had either the know-how or access to the equipment needed to produce the material,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., in written remarks published in March.

The day Heine and his Fort Detrick colleagues learned of Ivins’ suicide in July 2008, Heine said they conferred and feared the F.B.I. would then blame the attacks on someone who could no longer speak in his own defense. “And the very next day, the bureau named Bruce the mailer,” Heine recalled.

Because of an FBI gag order, Heine said he was unable to discuss these details until he left his job at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, where Ivins also worked developing anthrax vaccines. Heine left in February and is now senior scientist at the Ordway Research Institute, Inc. Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infections in Albany, N.Y.

‘Long-term greedy” was the phrase that Sidney Weinberg, Goldman Sachs’s legendary managing partner from the 1930s to the 1960s, used to describe the American investment bank’s overarching strategy. Such a pious mission statement from a corporate titan would make a modern audience balk. However the phrase neatly encapsulates the way that Goldman Sachs has operated over the past 80 years, a period in which it has risen from being a little-known, slightly scrubby broker to the world’s most profitable, powerful and controversial financial institution.

When Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s current chairman and chief executive, was caught saying last year that the bank was doing “God’s work”, the contrast between Goldman Sachs’s own view of its business and what the rest of the world thought of it was vividly demonstrated.

His comments came just weeks after the firm was memorably described in an article in Rolling Stone magazine as a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. Doing God’s work is the last thing most think Goldman Sachs is up to.

As Philip Pullman writes in his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, “As soon as men who believe they’re doing God’s will get hold of power, whether it’s a household or a village or in Jerusalem or in Rome itself, the devil enters into them.”

Last Friday, those who believed that the devil was running the show at Goldman Sachs finally received the news they had been waiting for. America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that it was investigating the bank for misleading investors in so-called collateralised debt obligations, a complex financial product sold by the bank during the boom years of the Noughties.

Goldman Sachs immediately hit back, saying that it would “vigorously” contest the case. However some will have found it hard to hide a feeling of Schadenfreude that at last a bank that at its peak was worth more than $100 billion (£65 billion) was finally being brought to heel.

The story of the bank over the past decade has been one of inexorable rise. In the 1980s Salomon Brothers, now part of the American banking behemoth Citigroup, was the bank to beat on the global stage. In the 1990s a cluster of largely American firms vied for supremacy after the demise of Salomon’s, brought down in part by being found guilty of rigging bond market auctions. The 2000s, however, undoubtedly belonged to Goldman Sachs.

In whichever market observers cared to look at, whether it be share trading, bond trading, corporate advisory or securities underwriting, Goldman Sachs was either at the top or running a close second. Its success was born of a combination of brutally hard work, an undoubted ability to attract the best young minds and that undefinable X-factor that comes from being acknowledged as the best game in town.

“No one ever got fired for hiring Goldman Sachs” is still one of the markets’ mantras. Indeed it has been said that the bank was often hired by companies to advise them only because they were afraid that it might end up working for a rival.

For all its reputation, there has always been at least a hint that some of Goldman Sachs’s success had less to do with its market nous and more to do with its connections. After Lehman Brothers was allowed to file for bankruptcy in September 2008, Goldman Sachs, along with Morgan Stanley, was allowed to convert itself into a bank holding company just weeks later. This gave it access to tens of billions of dollars of government lending. One did not need to be a conspiracy theorist to point out that US Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson – the man in charge of the bail-out – was the bank’s former chief executive.

This impression was not helped when Mr Paulson selected Neel Kashkari, a youthful former Goldman Sachs executive, to run the American government’s Troubled Asset Relief Programme, the equivalent of Britain’s Asset Protection Scheme. The move put him in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money. Again, Goldman Sachs was a beneficiary.

The American authorities’ case against Goldman Sachs prominently features another young Goldman Sachs banker, a French-born 31-year-old called Fabrice Tourre. Mr Tourre, who referred to himself in emails published by the SEC as “the fabulous Fab”, is alleged to have sold a debt product that he knew would fail to a group of investors, mainly large banks, including ABN Amro, now part of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Tourre is alleged to have allowed another Goldman Sachs client, American hedge fund Paulson & Co, to select the complex bonds that were put inside the product. The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs did this so that Paulson & Co could make money by betting that the bonds would fall in value (Paulson & Co has not been accused of any wrongdoing).

Goldman Sachs’s strong links with hedge funds have always aroused suspicion; however, the bank has argued that it has highly effective internal “Chinese walls”, barriers that stop employees from sharing information that might allow them or a client to trade on insider information.

The significance of the latest allegations is twofold. First, they suggest that Goldman Sachs was favouring one client over another. This is particularly resonant as Paulson & Co was one of the most high-profile success stories of the financial crisis and recently the subject of a best-selling book, The Greatest Trade Ever. The book detailed how Paulson & Co founder John Paulson made billions of dollars shorting the American sub-prime market.

Second, the allegations imply that Goldman Sachs made money from the travails of its own customers. It is often pointed out that the bank makes far more money from trading with its own money than it does from advising its clients. This so-called proprietary trading involves the firm putting billions of dollars of its own capital at risk by buying stakes in assets as diverse as golf courses – the firm was once the largest owner of golf courses in Japan – to oil and ships.

In the case of the sub-prime market, it is now well-known that Goldman Sachs, unlike almost all of its Wall Street rivals, took an early decision around 2006 to begin betting against the American housing market.

The SEC’s allegations suggest that these trades might have involved not just canny positioning by the bank, but actively putting its clients into trades that it knew would lose them money.

What this means for the future of Goldman Sachs is still too early to say. At best, the bank will be one of many financial institutions that become embroiled in a series of investigations relating to this issue – Britain’s own Financial Services Authority is already reported to be starting its own investigation into the matter. Finding safety in numbers would allow Goldman Sachs to argue that it was just doing what everyone else was.

It would be more serious, however, if the SEC’s investigation remained an isolated incident. If this was the case it could mark the beginning of the end for Goldman Sachs, going the same way as other investment banks that sailed too close to the wind and sank. Who now, aside from those with a long memory and an interest in markets, remembers Salomon Brothers or Drexel Burnham Lambert?

As one Goldman Sachs partner, quoted in Charles Ellis’s history of the bank The Partnership, said: “Only looking back could we see the real risk – the risk of arrogance. We didn’t see it then, but it was there and it was growing.

“The firm was at the top. We had always been the best – always the top students and the best athletes and the class leaders. And now we were the best firm – in our self-appraisal. But that was the first step towards arrogance.”

Lawyers suing Google claimed Thursday they have discovered evidence in a patent application that Google deliberately programmed its Street View cars to collect private data from open Wi-Fi networks, despite claims to the contrary.

“At this point, it is our belief that it is not an accident,” said Brooks Cooper, an Oregon attorney suing Google in one of several class actions lawsuits around the country arising from Google’s disclosure that its Street View cars intercepted Wi-Fi traffic around the world. Google has described the sniffing as a coding error.

The evidence, the relevance of which Google disputed Thursday, is a 2008 Google patent application (.pdf) describing a method to increase the accuracy of location-based services - services that would allow advertisers or others to know almost the exact location of a mobile phone or other computing device. The patent application involves intercepting data and analyzing the timing of transmission as part of the method for pinpointing user locations.

The so-called “776? patent application, published by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January, describes “one or more of the methods” by which Google collects information for its Street View program, Cooper’s legal team said in court documents filed late Wednesday in federal court in Oregon.

Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said in an e-mail that the patent in question “is entirely unrelated to the software code used to collect Wi-Fi information with Street View cars.” In a follow up e-mail, Chen added that Google files “patent applications on a variety of ideas that our engineers come up with. Some of them mature into real products or services, and some of them don’t.”

Chen did not immediately respond to an e-mail asking whether Google has performed the “776? method in practice.

Whether Google willfully sniffed out internet traffic on unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots in dozens of countries is an enormous public relations headache. It also carries huge legal and monetary ramifications in the United States, where the Mountain View, California, internet giant is being sued for privacy violations in multiple federal courthouses.

Among other reasons, Google might escape liability if it accidentally collected and never divulged the data, which includes web pages users visited or pieces of e-mail, video, audio and document files.

Google must turn over the U.S. data it siphoned to a federal judge in Oregon by Friday. The data will remain under lock and key.

Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides panoramic pictures of streets and their surroundings across the globe.

The internet giant has maintained the collection of data was inadvertent –- the result of a programming error with code written for an early experimental project that wound up on the Street View code. Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in dozens of countries for the last three years, until German privacy authorities began questioning what data Google’s Street View cameras were collecting.

BY GOLNAZ ESFANDIARI

Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I knew the identities of the contributors. I told her I did, but she seemed disappointed when I told her that one of them was in the United States, one was in Turkey, and the third — who specialized in urging people to “take to the streets” — was based in Switzerland.

Perhaps I shattered her dreams of an Iranian “Twitter Revolution.” The Western media certainly never tired of claiming that Iranians used Twitter to organize and coordinate their protests following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s apparent theft of last June’s elections. Even the American government seemed to get in on the act. Former U.S. national security adviser Mark Pfeifle claimed Twitter should get the Nobel Peace Prize because “without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confidant to stand up for freedom and democracy.” And the U.S. State Department reportedly asked Twitter to delay some scheduled maintenance in order to allow Iranians to communicate as the protests grew more powerful.

But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of “Balatarin,” one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. “Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz,” he said. “But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

A number of opposition activists have told me they used text messages, email, and blog posts to publicize protest actions. However, good old-fashioned word of mouth was by far the most influential medium used to shape the postelection opposition activity. There is still a lively discussion happening on Facebook about how the activists spread information, but Twitter was definitely not a major communications tool for activists on the ground in Iran.

Nonetheless, the “Twitter Revolution” was an irresistible meme during the post-election protests, a story that wrote itself. Various analysts were eager to chime in about the purported role of Twitter in the Green Movement. Some were politics experts, like the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder. Others were experts on new media, like Sascha Segan of PC Magazine. Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.

A pristine instance of this myopia was a profile, published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, of Oxfordgirl, a Twitter blogger who was described as “a key player” in Iran’s postelection unrest. “Before they started blocking mobile phones, I was almost coordinating people’s individual movements — ‘go to such and such street,’ or ‘don’t go there, the Basij are waiting,’” she was quoted as saying. It’s a riveting story — but the reporter failed to ask how Oxfordgirl managed to communicate with residents of Tehran via cell phone when the Iranian government shut down the whole city’s mobile network, as it always did on days of protest.

Oxfordgirl was ultimately more successful at gaining publicity for herself than at helping any protesters in Iran. Compare her 10,000 Twitter followers with the 300 followers of a Karaj-based Green activist (who prefers not to be identified or to have his Twitter page publicized). The activist tweets in Persian, which few Western journalists can read, and he is often a source of valuable information about the mood in the country.

The story of Oxfordgirl gives a clue about the real role that Twitter played. There is no doubt that she helped spread news about the Iranian protests — often very quickly. Twitter played an important role in getting word about the events in Iran out to the wider world. Together with YouTube, it helped focus the world’s attention on the Iranian people’s fight for democracy and human rights. New media over the last year created and sustained unprecedented international moral solidarity with the Iranian struggle — a struggle that was being bravely waged many years before Twitter was ever conceived.

But an honest accounting of Twitter’s role in Iran would also note its pernicious complicity in allowing rumors to spread. It began with the many unsubstantiated reports from the protests. In the early days of the post-election crackdown a rumor quickly spread on Twitter that police helicopters were pouring acid and boiling water on protesters. A year later it remains just that: a rumor. Other Twitter stories were quickly debunked, like the suggestion that circulated in late June that Mousavi had been arrested at his home in Tehran.

Twitter followers of #iranelection also helped quickly name Saeedeh Pouraghayi — who was allegedly arrested for chanting “Allah Akbar” on her rooftop, only to be raped, disfigured and murdered — a new “martyr” of the Green Movement. Her tragic story quickly made the rounds on Twitter and other social networking websites. Mouasvi and his aides even reportedly attended a commemoration ceremony that was held for her in Tehran.

Yet the whole story turned out to be a hoax. Pouraghayi later appeared on a program on Iran’s state television and said that on the night when she was supposedly arrested, she had escaped by jumping off her balcony. In the intervening two months, she said was being treated at the home of the person who found her in the street. A reformist website later wrote that the Iranian government had planted the story in order to cast doubt on opposition claims about the rape of post-election detainees and pave the way for further arrests of opposition leaders. Twitter, it seems, can serve the purposes of Iran’s regime as easily as it can aid the country’s activists.

To be clear: It’s not that Twitter publicists of the Iranian protests haven’t played a role in the events of the past year. They have. It’s just not been the outsized role it’s often been made out to be. And ultimately, that’s been a terrible injustice to the Iranians who have made real, not remote or virtual, sacrifices in pursuit of justice.

Posted by Philip Dru on 5/27/10 

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media’s most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals — it’s time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here. . . . The problem is more than a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems here.  In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles for the United States in its effort to build a stronger alliance with a country to which it gives more than a billion dollars a year in aid.

Initially, it’s worth asking how these “conspiracy theories” compare to this:  from the front page of The New York Times, September 8, 2002:

More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. . . . In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. . . . An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks.

• Continue reading

From the front page of The Washington Post, April 3, 2003:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday. Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting 11 days ago, one official said. . . . Lynch’s rescue at midnight local time Tuesday was a classic Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos in Blackhawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound, defense officials said.

Brian Ross, ABC News, the week of October 25, 2001:

[S]ources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons — Iraq. . . . Former UN weapons inspectors say the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994. . . . At the same time those [anthrax] results were coming in, officials in the Czech Republic confirmed that hijack ringleader, Mohammed Atta, had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, raising what authorities consider some extremely provocative questions.

NBC News, April 26, 2004:

Pat Tillman, who gave up the glamorous life of a professional football star to join the Army Rangers, was remembered as a role model of courage and patriotism Friday after military officials said he had been killed in action in Afghanistan. . . . [U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew] Beevers said Tillman was killed by enemy fire, but he had no information about what type of weapons were involved in the assault, or whether he died instantly.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, February 10, 2003:

According to several intelligence officials I spoke to, the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi. . . . In interviews with senior officials, the following picture emerged: American intelligence believes that Al Qaeda and Saddam reached a non-aggression agreement in 1993, and that the relationship deepened further in the mid-nineteen-nineties . . . I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad. . . . [James] Woolsey, who served as President Clinton’s first C.I.A. director, said that it is now illogical to doubt the notion that Saddam collaborates with Islamist terrorism.

Bernard Lewis, Wall St. Journal, August 8, 2006:

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. . . . This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, January 11, 2002, explaining the treatment of detainees:

I mean, these are people that would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down. I mean, so this is — these are very, very dangerous people, and that’s how they’re being treated.

And that’s to say nothing about the orgies of “conspiracy theories” churned out on a daily basis from right-wing talk radio, blog outlets, Fox News and even establishment Republicans over the years — from Iranian computer viruses, Vince Foster’s murder, the nefarious Muslim-Leftist alliance, ACORN’s omnipotence, and Obama death panels to The Vicious War on Christmas, the DOJ’s “Al Qaeda 7,” Maoist followers in the administration, Obama’s Kenyan birthplace and Islamic beliefs, and the subversive Congressional interns serving at the behest of CAIR.

* * * * *

There’s little doubt that many Pakistanis believe all sorts of things that are false and that some extremist sectors peddle paranoid conspiracies.  Propaganda is a standard tactic used by political and religious leaders of all types to manipulate their followers, as is casting blame on external enemies for those leaders’ failures.  Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to find a society free of extremist paranoia, and Pakistan undoubtedly has its share.  But look at the specific beliefs identified by the NYT as proof of how conspiratorial the Pakistanis are, and decide where the real propaganda is.

First we learn that “no part of the Pakistani state — either the weak civilian government or the powerful military — is willing to risk publicly owning [its] relationship” with the U.S., and that “[o]ne result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies.”  The NYT specifically cites the fact that “the Central Intelligence Agency uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist.”

But isn’t exactly the same true in the U.S., where our most consequential acts in Pakistan — from drone attacks to Special Forces operations — are ones the U.S. Government will not even publicly acknowledge, let alone debate and describe?  Here’s what Hillary Clinton said when asked last December about the deaths of Pakistani civilians caused by U.S. actions in that country:  ”I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”  And the NYT should perhaps check its own front page from yesterday, which detailed a secret order from last fall directing a massive escalation in the use of U.S. Special Forces in a whole slew of Muslim countries — all without any public discussion, debate, or authorization from Congress.  We’re essentially fighting covert, unauthorized wars in multiple Muslim nations — including Pakistan — all while the NYT mocks those silly Pakistanis for failing to publicly discuss their own military policies and for believing that the U.S. is engaged in unknown and unseen conduct in their country.

Then the NYT derides some Pakistanis for their crazy “theory that India, Israel and the United States — through their intelligence agencies and the company formerly known as Blackwater — are conspiring to destroy Pakistan.”  But what the NYT fails to mention is that the U.S. is actually using Blackwater for a wide variety of covert, lethal missions inside Pakistan, as The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill has documented at length.  They may not be “conspiring to destroy Pakistan,” but they are engaged in “targeted assassinations,” “‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan,” and “assist[ing] in gathering intelligence and help[ing] direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.”

Given Blackwater’s history and the secrecy in which its conduct is shrouded, isn’t it more rational to worry about their conduct inside one’s country than to ignore it or assume it’s benign?  After all, if a foreign country were sending its military and intelligence services inside the U.S. to assassinate our citizens, drop bombs on us from robots in the air, and infiltrate our society with shadowy private contractors — as we’re doing to Pakistan — do you think we might be projecting intense hostility toward that country and expressing serious suspicions about what else they were doing inside our country?  Is it conspiratorial paranoia or rational self-interest that leads one to think that way?

As further proof of this pervasive myth-making in Pakistan, the NYT article cites the fact that one Pakistani lawyer with a talk show “argues that Al Qaeda is an American invention.”  While that’s not precisely true, it is a matter of undisputed fact that the mujahedeen who were the precursors to Al Qaeda — as well as Osama bin Laden himself — were supported and funded by the U.S. throughout the 1980s, all the way up to the formal founding of “Al Qaeda” itself:

Thousands of Muslim radicals joined the CIA and mujahedeen, including bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Saudi road builder. Though he didn’t actually take up arms, he helped build roads and arms depots, using his own funds and CIA money.

“We funded him, we and the Saudis,” said Glynn Wood, professor of international policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. . . . Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid reported recently that the CIA funded an underground arms depot, training facility and medical center that bin Laden helped build in 1986 near the Pakistan border. There bin Laden set up his first training camp.

As the BBC said in 2004:  ”Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding” in the 1980s and “[s]ome analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.”  In 2007, Der Spiegel called bin Laden “one of the best customers for the CIA” during that decade.

In light of all that, what’s more irrational and propagandized:  believing that the U.S. was responsible for the birth of Al Qaeda (as some benighted Pakistanis do) or treating that belief as though it’s some wild, unhinged, crazed conspiracy theory with no basis in reality (as the NYT today does)?  The same is true for what the NYT castigates as Pakistani conspiracies “infused with anti-Semitism,” such as the belief that Jewish and Indian lobbies exert influence on U.S. Government foreign policy.  What rational person denies that such groups — along with a slew of others — exert political power in Washington, or that Israel maintains close military and other relations with Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India?

It’s not until the third-to-last paragraph that the NYT article cursorily acknowledges the clear basis which rational Pakistanis would have for being highly suspicious of American involvement in their country:

There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be skeptical of the United States. It encouraged — and financed — jihadis waging a religious war against the Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s education system with Islamists.

And, of course, the U.S. propped up that country’s oppressive Musharraf regime with massive amounts of aid — not to mention the small fact that the U.S. invaded and has been militarily occupying two of Pakistan’s neighboring countries (one of which shares a large border with Pakistan) for almost the entire last decade.  In sum, the U.S. has covertly played a central role in the internal affairs of the region generally and Pakistan specifically for decades.  In light of that, what’s more irrational:  to question what the U.S. is up to or to treat such questions as the by-product of crazed and deranged fanaticism?

Finally, note how the NYT article is framed at the top by a photograph of a Pakistani holding a sign that reads “We Hate America” — as though the only reason someone might harbor such anti-American hostility is because they’ve been misled with false claims and conspiracy theories about Our Noble and Magnanimous Land.  That — about a country where we’ve propped up numerous oppressive regimes and continue to slaughter civilians via sky robots.  Of all the myths identified by the NYT article, the implicit one conveyed by that photograph – Pakistanis harbor anger toward the U.S. only because of false conspiracy theories they’re being fed — is easily the most extreme.

This game of Let’s Mock Those Crazy, Conspiratorial Arabs and Muslims is as useful as it is common:  recall how only the Paranoid “Arab Street” believed that the invasion of Iraq would lead to permanent American military bases in that country, only for this to be revealed, followed by this.  There is a lot of propaganda, paranoia and myth in Pakistan, along with most places in the world.  But the American media’s fixation on pointing to it and deriding it has the principal effect (if not intent) of obscuring the role we play in enabling (and even justifying) those sentiments, along with at least our own equal share of such propaganda and our own media’s central role in bolstering it.

A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done and why evidence has been so hard to gather

Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and “frisk” people at distance.

The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material. And even though they don’t travel far inside the body, there is great hope that the waves can be used to spot tumours near the surface of the skin.

With all that potential, it’s no wonder that research on terahertz waves has exploded in the last ten years or so.

But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. “Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none,” say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.

And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.

This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0910.5294: DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field

By JIM DWYER

“I know perfectly well,” Cynthia Magnus said, “that garbage is not glamorous.”

Certainly not. But it can be famous.

Last winter, as Ms. Magnus, a graduate student at the City University of New York, walked along 35th Street in Manhattan to get to class, she often spotted bags of unworn clothing left with the trash. Some of the garments had been thrown out by H & M, the retail chain, which has a branch on 34th Street. The clothes had apparently been deemed unfit for sale.

To make sure the items would never be worn or sold, H & M employees had slashed them. Outside another building on the block, Ms. Magnus found unworn clothes tagged with Wal-Mart labels and punched through with holes to make them unwearable.

When this column reported her discoveries, tens of thousands of people posted comments on Twitter, many of them appalled that on the coldest days of winter, perfectly good clothing had been destroyed. H & M said some unnamed employees had made mistakes, and it promised the practice would end.

Having seen something and said something, Ms. Magnus resumed her regularly scheduled life. She continued to walk down 35th Street. She also kept an eye on the trash.

“On the 24th of May, a Monday night, I discovered two Dumpsters filled with new children’s sneakers on that same block,” Ms. Magnus said last week.

This was more than indifference to the poor on a single block in a wealthy city. Every year, millions of pounds of textiles that could be recycled wind up, instead, in landfills. The fabrication of shoes and clothing requires large amounts of energy. Risking catastrophe, we drill a mile under water to get to oil that ultimately will be used to make mountains of garbage.

New York is considering sensible steps to recycle more textiles and other materials. Under legislation before the City Council, rigid plastics would be added to the list of items that are collected for reuse.

Another bill would require the city to put recycling baskets next to the regular trash cans in public places like parks and schools. There would be efforts to do more composting — allowing food waste to naturally decompose — without creating buffets for rats. (About 15 percent of the city’s garbage is food, and about 70 percent of the weight of that food is water — which means that the city is shipping tons of water to landfills, according to testimony before the Council last month.)

As for textiles — clothing, shoes and so forth — the Department of Sanitation hopes to set up collection bins in the city in the next year, expanding piecemeal textile recovery efforts now available for residents. Under this plan, a not-for-profit group would collect the items and sell them to recyclers. Businesses would continue to make their own arrangements.

New York’s commercial garbage has its own economic logic: Cardboard, certain grades of paper, scrap metals and food waste from restaurants are commodities, which means that sometimes they are quite valuable.

If textiles make up 10 percent or more of a company’s waste, the city requires the business to separate them. Ms. Magnus found, however, that the law is toothless and commercial textiles are often sent to landfills.

The fine for companies that don’t separate their textiles is $25, unchanged in the two decades that the city has been recycling. The recycling legislation before the City Council does not increase those fines. It calls only for a study of commercial waste.

“The quantities of textile that I have seen discarded regularly by the garment businesses in Herald Square exceed in a single day what a family of 10 would discard in an entire year,” Ms. Magnus said.

But if there’s a recycling market for textiles, no matter what the law says, why aren’t the businesses taking advantage of it?

“People are often not aware that what they have is of value,” said Robert Lange, the director of the city’s recycling programs. He said the city needed a close study of commercial waste to see how it should change its laws. The low fines, Mr. Lange said, are a big flaw, but there has been little political interest in increasing them over the past 20 years.

On the day she spotted the piles of sneakers, Ms. Magnus said, she was running late for class, so she grabbed a few samples from the container, as well as a few yards of unused fabric. Her walks along 35th Street have convinced her that the city needs to look beyond the trash thrown out by individuals.

“One guy doing the right thing with his tuna cans does almost nothing to curb the impact of the steady stream of toxics that businesses abandon daily with near impunity,” she said.

Professor of Media and Criminal Justice, University of Bedfordshire

Jamaica’s most-wanted man, Christopher “Dudus” Coke, is finally in police custody, after attempts to capture him in May led to clashes in which scores of people died.

Many on the Caribbean island of Jamaica attribute its propensity for drug-related violence to passenger traffic travelling from the US to Jamaica.

For a number of years, flights known as “Con Air” have taken off from American airports carrying convicted Jamaican criminals who have been deported to the land of their birth.

In 2007, a report by Jamaica’s Ministry of National Security traced a tripling of the annual murder rate - from 542 in 1990 to 1,674 in 2005 - to these involuntary returnees.

Continue reading the main story

• Profile: Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke

And it is certainly true that the fractured relationship between Jamaica and the US - exacerbated by drugs and with the UK acting as the third point of a triangle - is one reason why Kingston is a dysfunctional city.

Tivoli Gardens, the stronghold of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, is a fiefdom of the Jamaica Labour Party.

Since it was built 40 years ago, replacing a wasteland of zinc squatter shacks with no sanitation, its denizens have voted JLP in overwhelming numbers: In the 1993 election, the party won 99% of votes in the area.

For a generation, political patronage flowed down from the JLP’s charismatic leader, Edward Seaga, through local so-called dons who wielded more or less absolute power over their area.

One such don was Christopher Coke’s father, Lester Lloyd Coke (aka Jim Brown), who was also the subject of an extradition request by the US in the early 1990s.

DynastyLester Lloyd Coke was burned to death in a fire in a Kingston prison cell in 1992 before he could be extradited.

Only days earlier, another of his sons, with the grandiose name Mark Anthony (aka Jah T), was murdered in Kingston.

Shortly before his death, Mark Anthony Coke had been spotted in London’s Brixton by undercover detectives monitoring a crack cocaine dealer.

Drugs - crack cocaine and marijuana - are the reason that the United States, and, to a lesser extent, the UK, have had an interest in the Coke dynasty for more than 20 years.

PM Edward Seaga, left, attended the funeral of Christopher Coke’s father

Lester Lloyd Coke helped create the Shower Posse, perhaps the most successful of the Jamaican crime groups to gain a toehold in the American narcotics market in the 1980s.

Many of its members originated from Tivoli Gardens and the JLP’s other so-called garrison towns, such as Southside.

Christopher Coke is alleged by the US authorities to have carried on the family business by trafficking in drugs and firearms.

In Tivoli Gardens, there has been a sense of betrayal that one of its own so-called sons, the JLP Prime Minister Bruce Golding, has authorized Christopher Coke’s extradition.

Admittedly, Mr Golding delayed his decision for eight months, which might explain the strength and organization of the resistance when the security forces moved in to seize Mr Coke.

Shielded from the lawAnother explanation is the fear and hatred with which the police, in particular, are regarded in ghettoes like Tivoli.

Thousands of police have been involved in the Kingston operation

Although training by officers seconded from Scotland Yard has improved standards, the human rights record of the Jamaican constabulary is a grisly one.

UN reports and audits by Amnesty International have recorded extra-judicial killings - both inside and outside police stations - endemic corruption and other abuses.

Set against this, dons like Christopher Coke can guarantee a measure of protection, as well as jobs, housing and other services.

For them, the transaction is simple: They supply the votes to put either the JLP - or its rival, the PNP - into power and, in return, they expect to be shielded from the law.

I once asked Edward Seaga why he made a public show of support by attending the funeral of Lester Lloyd Coke, a man alleged to have committed many murders as well as running a drug empire.

“I look at the man in terms of how the community respects and treats him as a protector from their community,” was his response.

And although in recent years, politicians have made some effort to disassociate themselves from the community dons, this philosophy still holds sway in Kingston, Jamaica.

Jon Silverman is the author of Crack of Doom, the first British book to explore Jamaican drugs crime.

BY GLENN FRANKEL

History is a great teacher, but sometimes it packs a nasty sense of irony. A case in point: South African Prime Minister John Vorster’s visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in April 1976, where he laid a wreath to the victims of the German Reich he once extolled.

It’s bad enough that a former Nazi sympathizer was treated like an honored guest by the Jewish state. Even worse was the purpose behind Vorster’s trip to Israel: to cement the extensive military relationship between Israel and the apartheid regime, a partnership that violated international law and illicitly provided the white-minority government with the weaponry and technology to help sustain its grip on power and its oppression of the black majority over two decades.

Like many illicit love affairs, the back-door relationship between Israel and the apartheid regime was secret, duplicitous, thrilling for the parties involved — and ultimately damaging to both. Each insisted at the time that theirs was just a minor flirtation, with few regrets or expressions of remorse. Inevitably it ended badly, tainting everyone it touched, including leaders of American Jewish organizations who shredded their credibility by endorsing and parroting the blatant falsehoods they were fed by Israeli officials. And it still hovers like a toxic cloud over Israel’s international reputation, providing ammunition to those who use the comparison between Israel’s 43-year military rule over Palestinians and the now-defunct system of white domination known as apartheid to seek to delegitimize the Jewish state.

As bureau chief for the Washington Post in Southern Africa and Jerusalem in the 1980s, I squandered a lot of hours trying to pierce the iron curtain that the two countries carefully drew around their strategic partnership. I reported the various estimates that the arms trade between the two amounted to anywhere from $125 million to $400 million annually — far beyond the $100 million that the International Monetary Fund reported as total imports and exports in the mid 1980s. Soon after arriving in Jerusalem in 1986, I asked Ezer Weizman, a former Israeli defense minister and champion of the secret partnership, about the uncanny resemblance between Israel’s Kfir fighter jet — itself patterned on the French Mirage — and South Africa’s newly minted Cheetah. He just smiled at me and replied, “I’ve noticed that as well.”

Now comes Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who is an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, a Rhodes scholar, and an American Jew whose parents emigrated to the United States from South Africa. His singular achievement in his new book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa scheduled for publication on May 25, is to have unearthed more than 7,000 pages of heretofore secret documents from the bowels of South Africa’s Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and Armscor, the state defense contractor, including the secret 1975 military cooperation agreement signed by defense ministers Shimon Peres and P.W. Botha.

The Israeli government sought to block release of the pact to the author, but the post-apartheid South African government ignored its protests. The black-majority government, led by the African National Congress, “is far less concerned with keeping old secrets than with protecting its own accumulated dirty laundry after 15 years in power,” Polakow-Suransky notes. Beyond locating the secret papers, he also interviewed South Africans and Israelis who played key roles in forging and promoting the partnership. The result is the best-documented, most thorough, and most credible account ever offered of the secret marriage between the apartheid state and Israel.

(By way of disclosure, let me add that Polakow-Suransky thanks me in his acknowledgements, although he needn’t have; I only bought him a cup of coffee and passed on a handful of names and numbers when he approached me about this project some five years ago.)

Polakow-Suransky puts Israel’s annual military exports to South Africa between 1974 and 1993 at $600 million, which made South Africa Israel’s second or third largest trading partner after the United States and Britain. Military aircraft updates in the mid-1980s alone accounted for some $2 billion, according to correspondence he obtained. He puts the total military trade between the countries at well above $10 billion over the two decades.

Israel reaped big profits, but paid a price in moral standing. By focusing solely on its purported strategic value to the United States, Israel and its supporters have tended to downgrade the country’s real case for preserving a special relationship with its staunch ally. Foreign-policy realists argue that the price Washington pays in the Muslim world for its support of Israel far outweighs whatever strategic value the Jewish state provides. The more compelling case has always focused on Israel’s character as a robust democracy that shares American values. But the clandestine alliance with South Africa undermined Israel’s rightful claim on U.S. admiration and support. After all, if Israel is just another standard-issue country that conducts business with pariah states and lies about it, why should America be concerned about its fate?

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, understood this, routinely condemned apartheid and sought to ally his country with the new black-governed nations of sub-Saharan Africa that emerged from colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the balance of forces began to change dramatically after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel seized control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Ben-Gurion’s heirs — Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan, second-generation leaders of the ruling Labor Party — worked to transform Israel into a mini super power and had no qualms about cooperating with South Africa to get there. “It was not a shotgun marriage,” writes Polakow-Suransky.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War put the seal on the shift. Egypt succeeded in framing the war as a Zionist invasion of the African continent, and more than 20 African states severed diplomatic ties with Israel. South Africa, by contrast, furnished Israel with spare parts for its Mirage jet fighters, and South Africa’s substantial Jewish community, encouraged by its government, poured money and support into the Zionist state. The two countries were on their way to becoming, in Polakow-Suranskys words, “brothers in arms.”

The relationship started as a marriage of self-interest. South African money helped Israel became a major arms manufacturer and exporter and funded its high-tech economy, while Pretoria gained access to cutting-edge weapons and military technology at a time when most of the world sought to isolate and condemn the apartheid regime. For the ensuing two decades Israel continued to publicly denounce apartheid while at the same time secretly propping up the white-minority government and helping sustain racial supremacy.

Peres had been Ben-Gurion’s gifted protégé and a key architect in building Israel’s defense establishment and its nuclear capability during his years as director general of the Defense Ministry. When he became defense minister after the Yom Kippur War, he sought to grow the military-industrial complex in part with millions from the arms export market, which Polakow-Suransky reports increased 15-fold between 1973 and 1981. Early on his new role, Peres secretly visited Pretoria. In a memo afterward, he told his South African hosts that their mutual cooperation was based not only on common interest, “but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.” That same year the two governments began holding biannual gatherings for Defense Ministry officials and arms industry exporters and an annual strategic cooperation conference between intelligence officials.

After Peres and Botha signed their secret security pact in April 1975, Israel sold tanks, fighter aircraft, and long-range missiles to Pretoria and offered to sell nuclear warheads as well. Israel also began to act as middleman, buying arms from countries that refused ostensibly to do business with Pretoria and passing them on to the regime. All of this continued even after the United Nations Security Council passed a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa in November 1977. Menachem Begin’s rightist Likud came to power that same year, and relations became even stronger.

Along the way, Polakow-Suransky introduces the unsung actors who helped cement the relationship. One of the key figures was Yitzhak Unna, a skilled, pragmatic and two-fisted Israeli diplomat who became counsel general in Johannesburg in 1969 and was later promoted to ambassador. Unna learned to speak Afrikaans, befriended the former Nazi sympathizer who headed South Africa’s bureau of state security and launched a series of deals that brought the two countries closer together. Then there was Binyamin Telem, former commander of Israel’s navy, who handled defense contracts with Armscor. Both men saw themselves as anti-racists — Telem insisted that the Israeli embassy pay its black employees at the same rate as whites — but both deepened the ties and approved contracts in the millions. Included were training and weapons systems that helped the South African military suppress internal revolts against apartheid. Israeli security companies and former military men also trained and equipped the repressive police forces of the sham puppet states known as Bantustans that South Africa sought to establish in the 1970s and 1980s.

By 1979, Polakow-Suransky writes, South Africa was Israel’s single largest arms customer, accounting for 35 percent of its military exports. South Africa supplied Israel a 500-ton stockpile of uranium for its nuclear program. In turn, Israel sold South Africa 30 grams of tritium, a radioactive substance that helped increase the explosive power of its thermonuclear weapons. The extent of Israeli-South African cooperation was symbolized in September 1979 by a double flash over the South Atlantic that analysts believed came from an Israeli nuclear bomb test, undertaken with South African cooperation. To this day the details remain classified.

In the early days of the arms supply pact, Israel could argue that many Western countries, including the United States, had similar surreptitious relationships with the apartheid regime. But by 1980 Israel was the last major violator of the arms embargo. It stuck with South Africa throughout the 1980s when the regime clung to power in the face of international condemnation and intense rounds of political unrest in the black townships.

By 1987 the apartheid regime was struggling to cope with the combination of internal unrest and international condemnation to the point where even Israel was forced to take notice. A key motivator was Section 508, an amendment to the anti-apartheid sanctions bill that passed the U.S. Congress in 1986 and survived President Ronald Reagan’s veto. It required the State Department to produce an annual report on countries violating the arms embargo. The first one, issued in April 1987, reported that Israel had violated the international ban on arm sales “on a regular basis.” The report gave South Africa’s opponents within the Israeli government and their American Jewish allies ammunition to force Israel to adapt a mild set of sanctions against South Africa. I was in Jerusalem when Israel admitted publicly for the first time that it had significant military ties with South Africa and pledged not to enter into any new agreements — which meant, of course, that existing agreements would be maintained. It was, writes Polakow-Suransky, “little more than a cosmetic gesture.”

From the start, spokesmen for American Jewish organizations acted as apologists or dupes for Israel’s arms sales. Moshe Decter, a respected director of research for the American Jewish Committee, wrote in the New York Times in 1976 that Israel’s arms trade with South Africa was “dwarfed into insignificance” compared to that of other countries and said that to claim otherwise was “rank cynicism, rampant hypocrisy and anti-Semitic prejudice.” In a March 1986 debate televised on PBS, Rabbi David Saperstein, a leader of the Reform Jewish movement and outspoken opponent of apartheid, claimed Israeli involvement with South Africa was negligible. He conceded that there may have been arms sales during the rightist Likud years in power from 1977 to 1984, but stated that under Shimon Peres, who served as prime minister between 1984 and 1986, “there have been no new arms sales.” In fact, some of the biggest military contracts and cooperative ventures were signed during Peres’s watch.

The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged “fact-finder” named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.” (In fairness, the ADL later changed its tune. After his release in 1990, Mandela met in Geneva with a number of American Jewish leaders, including ADL president Abe Foxman, who emerged to call the ANC leader “a great hero of freedom.”)

Polakow-Suransky is no knee-jerk critic of Israel, and he tells his story more in sorrow than anger. He grants that the secret alliance had its uses. To the extent it enhanced Israel’s security and comfort zone, it may have helped pave the path to peace efforts. Elazar Granot, a certified dove who is a former left-wing Knesset member and ambassador to the new South Africa, says as much. “I had to take into consideration that maybe Rabin and Peres were able to go to the Oslo agreements because they believed that Israel was strong enough to defend itself,” he tells the author. “Most of the work that was done — I’m talking about the new kinds of weapons — was done in South Africa.”

Polakow-Suransky sees in the excoriation of Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by American Jewish leaders an echo of their reflexive defense of Israel vis á vis South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The author himself draws uncomfortable parallels between apartheid and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, noting that both involved the creation of a system that stifled freedom of movement and labor, denied citizenship and produced homelessness, separation, and disenfranchisement. As the Palestinian population continues to grow and eventually becomes the majority — and Jews the minority — in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, the parallels with apartheid may become increasingly uncomfortable. Even Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed, observing in 2007 that if Israel failed to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians, it would inevitably “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.”

“The apartheid analogy may be inexact today,” Polakow-Suransky warns, “but it won’t be forever.”

I’ve always believed the apartheid analogy produces more heat than light. But it’s a comparison that Israel itself invited with its longstanding partnership with the white-minority regime. While Israel profited from the alliance, it paid a heavy price. Moral standing in the international community doesn’t come with an obvious price tag, nor does it command an influential lobby of corporate and military interests working tirelessly on its behalf. But it does have value and its absence has consequences. The anti-Israel divestment campaign that is slowly gathering steam in college campuses across the United States and Europe is one such potential consequence. This movement, backed both by genuine supporters of the Palestinians and by Arab governments whose motives are far more cynical, once again seeks to equate Zionism with racism and rob Israel of its hard-earned legitimacy by portraying it as, in Polakow-Suransky’s phrase, “a latter-day South Africa.” The Israeli government has provided this movement with plenty of ammunition, including the sad and sordid saga that he so carefully unearths in his important new book.

Japan has serious plans to send a solar-panel-equipped satellite into space that could wirelessly beam a gigawatt-strong stream of power down to earth and power nearly 300,000 homes.

The satellite will have a surface area of four square kilometers, and transmit power via microwave to a base station on Earth. Putting solar panels in space bypasses many of the difficulties of installing them on Earth: in orbit, there are no cloudy days, very few zoning laws, and the cold ambient temperature is ideal.

A small test model is scheduled for launch in 2015. To iron out all the kinks and get a fully functional system set up is estimated to take three decades. A major kink, presumably, is coping with the possible dangers when a 1-gigawatt microwave beam aimed at a small spot on Earth misses its target.

The $21 billion project just received major backing from Mitsubishi and designer IHI (in addition to research teams from 14 other countries).

OFF THE EASTERN SEABOARD — Name a recent U.S. military operation, and you can pretty much guarantee that a specially modified Air Force plane was somewhere in the vicinity, trying to influencing the minds of the people below. It’s called the Commando Solo. Ordinarily, civilians are not allowed on board.

The 193rd Special Operations Wing operates a fleet of three of these EC-130J aircraft, cargo haulers that have been converted into flying radio and television stations. These “psychological operations” aircraft can broadcast their own signal over AM and FM radio, UHF and VHF television bands — or override broadcast stations on the ground, something they apparently did during operations in Bosnia and Iraq.

I recently accompanied a Commando Solo crew on a training mission. It was an unusual opportunity to see the crew at work testing their radio and television equipment at full power.

The crew calls it “200-mile work”: In order to avoid interference with domestic frequencies — the aircraft can crank up to 1,000 watts of effective radiated power — the aircraft flies more than 200 miles off the East Coast.

Once we’re safely out over the Atlantic, says Weapons Systems Officer Lt. Col. Mike Rice, “it’s game on.”

As Weapon Systems Officer, Rice is responsible for aircraft defensive systems and data links. He also backs up the pilots during all phases of flight. The Weapons Systems Officer is also something like a station manager: He creates the broadcast plan, ensures it is broadcast to the highest level of fidelity possible and oversees a five-man mission crew.

These aircraft play a crucial role in reaching — and persuading — vulnerable civilian populations. During the recent Haiti earthquake-relief mission, Commando Solo aircraft based out of Puerto Rico relayed live broadcasts of Voice of America call-in shows in Creole, Haiti’s national language. During breaks in the programming, the plane broadcast public service announcements, giving earthquake victims information on everything from emergency sanitation to food-distribution points.

But Commando Solo also has a key mission in combat zones. As Danger Room reported in 2001, these aircraft played a crucial role in post-September 11 operations, reinforcing anti-Taliban messages, and helping persuade Afghans that U.S. intentions were good. Commando Solo radio broadcasts helped fill an important information gap in a country where a large part of the population was illiterate, and where television reception can be extremely spotty.

In other words, the aircraft needs to be able to operate anywhere globally; the broadcasting systems have to compatible with worldwide broadcasting formats and television encoding systems.

This training mission is straightforward: They set up different orbits and drop out different antennas. The EC-130J crews also practice aerial refueling, and occasionally perform some high-speed training missions with special operations forces.

A four-hour training flight is much more “event-intensive” than a real-world mission, where the main goal is to get on station and start broadcasting. I listen to some of the back-and-forth radio chatter, as the crew spools out various antennas: A vertically-polarized broadcasting antenna is lowered by a cable attached to a 500-pound weight. A horizontal trailing wire antenna is unreeled out of the back, sort of like casting a fishing line. This is a view of an antenna being reeled in, as seen through a periscope in the floor of the aft cargo compartment.

During the training mission, the crew also monitors a bank of receivers, to listen to and test a broadcast that’s being pumped out by the aircraft.

It’s not your father’s Vietnam-era C-130. The Commando Solo planes are built around the modern C-130J, which has a fully glass cockpit and modern avionics.

And of course, there’s a microwave in the cockpit, which makes life for the crew a bit easier on a long mission. This is the first flight as aircraft commander for Lt. Matthew Plasterer. During the pre-flight brief, he asks Technical Sgt. Jeremy Smith a crucial maintenance question: “Is the microwave working?”

Smith answers in the affirmative.

“Yeah, that’s almost a red ‘X’ [major maintenance issue] if it isn’t,” Plasterer grins.

Much of the crew are part-timers: Officially, the wing is part of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, although most of its missions are for Air Force Special Operations Command. The vice wing commander, Col. Jerry Otterbein, pictured here, is a commercial pilot for American Airlines in civilian life.

The day’s broadcast? Well, this is a training flight, so the crew is not playing a special, pre-packaged broadcast. Today’s broadcast during the four-hour flight is a double feature: First, a DVD of Transformers, followed by a screening of Hancock.

Not that the crew is enjoying the in-flight movie. Because this is a training exercise with lots of different events — Weapons Systems Officer Rice describs his checklist as a “sushi menu” of different procedures — the crew stays quite busy during the flight. Conditions in the back of the aircraft are quite cramped, and the aircraft has a pretty substantial cooling system to keep all the electronics from overheating.

Television broadcasts are limited to one analog channel; depending on where they are broadcasting, the crew has to re-tune the system, relying on international frequency guides. In the future, however, the system might eventually need an upgrade.

“With the world going to a digital format, we don’t have the capability,” Rice says. “It’s purely analog.”

Measuring the effectiveness of a bomber or a strike fighter is fairly straightforward: The art of bomb damage assessment, measuring the size of a bomb crater or effective blast radius of airdropped weapons. What about when your weapon is a television or radio signal, and your goal is the somewhat more nebulous aim of “influencing” a target?

“The biggest challenge is measuring our effectiveness,” said Rice. “We don’t have a way to look at it — we don’t have BDA.

In Haiti, however, “it was pretty evident that we were making a difference,” Rice adds. Many Haitian broadcasters were knocked out, and the military airdropped hand-cranked radios so Haitians could get timely information on relief efforts and food distribution. For example, Rice says they might change a delivery point for a delivery of humanitarian packages; a Commando Solo plane would broadcast the information; and within hours, Haitians would start forming queues at the new distribution point. “Haiti was one of the few times where we got clear feedback,” he said.

With operations like Iraq, the results are a bit more intangible. Rice says many of the Commando Solo broadcasts during early phase of Operation Iraq Freedom were simple rebroadcasts of the BBC: It was perceived as a more neutral, and therefore more trusted, outlet, by Iraqis. In Afghanistan, lots of the broadcasts post-9/11 were simple Afghan pop music. After years of rule by the Taliban, which forbade pop music, Afghans were eager to tune in.

Posted by Philip Dru on 5/19/10 •

May 18 (Bloomberg) — A telephone call between a financial adviser in Beverly Hills and a trader in New York was all it took to fleece taxpayers on a water-and-sewer financing deal in West Virginia. The secret conversation was part of a conspiracy stretching across the U.S. by Wall Street banks in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market.

The call came less than two hours before bids were due for contracts to manage $90 million raised with the sale of West Virginia bonds. On one end of the line was Steven Goldberg, a trader with Financial Security Assurance Holdings Ltd. On the other was Zevi Wolmark, of advisory firm CDR Financial Products Inc. Goldberg arranged to pay a kickback to CDR to land the deal, according to government records filed in connection with a U.S. Justice Department indictment of CDR and Wolmark.

West Virginia was just one stop in a nationwide conspiracy in which financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Wachovia Corp. and 11 other banks.

They rigged bids on auctions for so-called guaranteed investment contracts, known as GICs, according to a Justice Department list that was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24 and then put under seal. Those contracts hold tens of billions of taxpayer money.

California to Pennsylvania

The workings of the conspiracy — which stretched from California to Pennsylvania and included more than 200 deals involving about 160 state agencies, local governments and non- profits — can be pieced together from the Justice Department’s indictment of CDR, civil lawsuits by governments around the country, e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News and interviews with current and former bankers and public officials.

“The whole investment process was rigged across the board,” said Charlie Anderson, who retired in 2007 as head of field operations for the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond division. “It was so commonplace that people talked about it on the phones of their employers and ignored the fact that they were being recorded.”

Anderson said he referred scores of cases to the Justice Department when he was with the IRS. He estimates that bid rigging cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Anderson said prosecutors are lining up conspirators to plead guilty and name names.

“This will go on for a long time and a lot of people will be indicted,” he said in a telephone interview.

Bidding Encouraged

The U.S. Treasury Department encourages public bidding for GIC contracts to ensure that localities are paid proper market rates. Banks that conspired in the bid rigging for GICs paid kickbacks to CDR ranging from $4,500 to $475,000 per deal in at least 10 different transactions, government court-filed documents say.

A GIC is similar to a certificate of deposit, but its rates aren’t advertised publicly. Instead, towns rely on advisory firms such as CDR to solicit competing offers.

In the bid-rigging deals, CDR gave false information to municipalities and fed information to bankers allowing them to win with lower interest rates than they were otherwise willing to pay, the indictment says. Banks took their illegal gains from the additional returns and paid CDR kickbacks, according to the indictment.

Not Guilty Plea

Wolmark, 54, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan on antitrust, conspiracy and wire fraud charges, to which he pleaded not guilty, declined to comment when reached by telephone at CDR’s office. Goldberg, who hasn’t been charged, declined to comment, says his attorney, John Siffert.

Court records in the broadest-ever criminal investigation of public finance shed new light on how Wall Street’s biggest banks were cheating cities and towns during the same decade in which they were setting the stage for a global economic collapse.

As the banks were steering the world’s financial system to the brink of catastrophe by loading more than $1 trillion of subprime mortgage loans into opaque debt investments, they were also duping public officials across the U.S.

Many of the same bankers and advisers who sold public officials interest-rate swap deals that backfired for taxpayers are now subjects of the criminal antitrust investigation involving GICs.

The swaps are derivatives designed to keep monthly interest payments low as lending rates change. Municipal- derivative units of the largest U.S. banks also sold the contracts, public records across the nation show.

Key Witness

Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events like changes in the weather or interest rates. Options and futures are the most common types of derivatives.

A key witness in the government’s case is a former banker whom the government hasn’t named, according to a civil lawsuit filed by Baltimore, Maryland, and six other municipal borrowers against Bank of America, JPMorgan and nine other banks. The banker is providing evidence against his peers.

The witness, who was employed by Bank of America Corp. starting in 1999, has laid out the inner workings of the scheme in confidential meetings with investigators, according to the civil lawsuit.

Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has also been providing prosecutors with evidence since at least 2007. The bank voluntarily reported its own illegal activity and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, according to a press release from the company.

Amnesty Agreement

In exchange, the government promised in an amnesty agreement not to prosecute the bank. Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton in San Francisco said in an e-mail the firm is continuing to cooperate.

The banker who has been cooperating with the Justice Department said he overheard his colleagues change Bank of America’s bids after coaching from brokers or other banks bidding on the same deal, according to information that the firm provided to plaintiffs in the civil case filed by seven municipalities.

At least five former bankers with New York-based JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, conspired with CDR to rig bidding on investment deals sold to local governments, according to the Justice Department list now under seal.

At least three other former JPMorgan bankers are targets of the investigation, according to filings with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Six bankers with Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender, are also named in the sealed Justice Department list as participants.

16 Companies

Eighteen employees at 16 other companies, including units of General Electric Co., UBS AG and FSA, then a unit of Brussels lender Dexia SA, are also cited as co-conspirators by the Justice Department, according to the list under seal. None have been charged in the case.

Citigroup spokesman Alex Samuelson, Dexia spokesman Thierry Martiny, GE spokesman Ned Reynolds, JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony, UBS spokesman Doug Morris, and Ferris Morrison, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo & Co., which acquired Wachovia in 2008, declined to comment.

Former CDR employees Douglas Goldberg, Daniel Naeh and Matthew Rothman, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan in February and March to wire fraud and conspiracy to rig bids.

In October, CDR was charged with criminal conspiracy and fraud, along with Chief Executive Officer David Rubin, 48, vice president Evan Zarefsky and Wolmark. They pleaded not guilty. Rubin, who was also charged with making fraudulent bank transactions, faces as much as $3 million in fines and more than 30 years in jail if convicted.

No Law Broken

Rubin declined to comment in a telephone call.

“Mr. Rubin doesn’t think that CDR broke the law in any of these transactions,” said Laura Hoguet, his attorney in New York.

Daniel Zelenko, a lawyer for Zarefsky in New York, said he was confident his client will prevail at trial.

“The government continues to show that it simply doesn’t understand how this market operated,” Zelenko said in an e- mail.

During more than three years of investigation, federal prosecutors amassed nearly 700,000 tape recordings and 125 million pages of documents and e-mails regarding public finance deals.

$400 Billion

Municipalities and states raise $400 billion a year by selling bonds. They invest much of those proceeds in GICs, sold by banks or insurance companies. Those accounts hold taxpayer money and earn interest before public agencies spend it.

Banks and advising firms illegally siphoned money from taxpayers by paying artificially low interest rates in the GICs, the CDR indictment says. The money was intended to build schools, hospitals, roads and sewers and refinance higher-cost debt.

The bid-rigging schemes were orchestrated by CDR and other advisory firms, according to the indictment and the civil suits. Advisers are unregulated private firms hired by local governments to consult on public finance deals — and are almost always paid by the banks that arrange the transactions or manage the GICs.

Wilshire Boulevard

CDR, which was located on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, during the transactions under investigation, has provided advice on more than $158 billion in public transactions since it was founded in 1986, according to its website.

CDR helped arrange deals in which financial firms took millions of dollars in profits from GICs, Bloomberg News reported in October 2006. Almost all of the deals were shams: As much as $7 billion in bond-issue proceeds were invested in GICs but never spent for the intended purpose of providing services to taxpayers.

CDR signed off on interest-rate swaps to municipalities, as banks took hidden fees sometimes 10 times as much as they charged on fixed-rate bond deals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For the public, the swaps were fraught with risks.

In the past decade, banks have peddled swaps the world over, from Jefferson County, Alabama — which was forced to the brink of bankruptcy — to the hill towns of the Umbria region of Italy. Many of these swaps soured when the credit crisis began in 2007.

Getting Out

Dozens of municipalities have paid banks billions to get out of swap contracts. The agency that oversees the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge said it spent $105 million to escape its deal in July 2009.

“They were gouging the municipalities,” said retired IRS investigator Anderson, 59. “Beside the excessive fees, some of the swap deals just didn’t work. It was just awful. The same people were involved in the GIC end of the market.”

Bid rigging not only cheated cities and towns, it also illegally denied the IRS required taxes from GIC income, Anderson said. The evidence is clear in telephone recordings made on GIC desks, he said. “We could hear people talking about how everyone knew who was going to win the bid. You could tell it was just everyday business.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a probe of bid rigging from its Philadelphia office that’s parallel to the Justice Department investigation.

More Probes

State attorneys general in California, Connecticut and Florida are also investigating. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE, and Zurich-based UBS have disclosed in regulatory filings that they may be sued by the SEC.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has raided at least two of CDR’s competitors, Pottstown, Pennsylvania-based Investment Management Advisory Group Inc., known as Image, and Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Sound Capital Management. Neither has been charged.

Robert Jones, a managing director of Image, declined to comment, after answering a call to the firm’s office. Johan Rosenberg of Sound Capital didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Tape recordings cited in a letter by Justice Department prosecutor Rebecca Meiklejohn show how those deals worked. In two GIC bids for the Utah Housing Corp., CDR’s Zarefsky advised an unidentified trader that his firm could lower its offer by “a dime,” or 10 basis points (a basis point is 0.01 percentage point).

‘A Couple Bucks’

The West Valley City-based housing agency accepted contracts with GE’s FGIC Capital Market Services division for 5.15 percent and 3.41 percent in 2001, public records show. Zarefsky didn’t return calls seeking comment.

“I can actually probably save you a couple bucks here,” Zarefsky told the trader, according to the letter citing the tape recording.

The Utah agency, which finances mortgages for low-income residents, didn’t know that financial firms were cheating it out of money that could have been used to help home buyers, said Grant Whitaker, who runs the agency. “It sounds like somebody got a better deal than we did,” he said in a telephone interview.

Such deals could produce large illegal profits by banks, said Bartley Hildreth, public finance professor at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

A New Wrinkle

“Just a basis point on many of these deals is tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Wall Street has faced accusations of reaping excessive fees on investment deals with public officials. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy in 2008, Merrill Lynch & Co. and other securities firms agreed by 2000 to pay more than $170 million to settle SEC charges that they had sold overpriced Treasury bonds to municipalities.

The so-called yield burning drove down the returns that local governments earned and trimmed required payments to the IRS. The firms neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

Even as the banks were settling with regulators, they devised another way to burn yield, this time by skimming money from GICs, according to the indictment, which said the conspiracy went from 1998 to at least 2006.

In the lawsuit against Bank of America and JPMorgan filed in New York in June 2009, the city of Baltimore, two Mississippi universities and four other municipal borrowers say that bankers from those two companies colluded in bidding for GIC contracts in Pennsylvania.

Holiday Party

At a holiday party sponsored by advising firm Image at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan early in the past decade, the Pennsylvania deals were discussed by the Bank of America trader who is cooperating with prosecutors and Sam Gruer of JPMorgan, the civil antitrust lawsuit says.

The Bank of America trader told Gruer that he was happy that the two banks weren’t “kicking each other’s teeth out” on bidding for certificates of deposits for bond proceeds, the suit says. That information was provided by Bank of America to the plaintiffs.

Gruer, who was informed by prosecutors in 2007 that he was a target of the investigation, declined to comment.

Coaching a Bidder

The trader who is now a federal witness joined Bank of America after being recommended by Image, according to information that the bank turned over to the Baltimore-led plaintiffs. He was assigned by Phil Murphy, who headed the municipal trading desk, to be Bank of America’s point person for investment contracts bid by Image, the lawsuit says.

Image coached Bank of America in winning an investment contract in Pennsylvania, according to an internal e-mail exchange in May 2001 between Bank of America trader Dean Pinard and Image’s Peter Loughhead that was obtained by Bloomberg News. The e-mail was provided to Bloomberg by a person who got it from Bank of America and asked to remain unidentified.

Loughead, who ran bids for Image, advised Pinard on how much to offer for managing the cash fund for a $10 million bond issued by the sewer authority of Springfield Township, York County, 100 miles (161 kilometers) west of Philadelphia.

‘Don’t Fall on Any Swords’

Pinard said in the e-mail to Loughead that Bank of America was willing to pay the town as much as $40,000 upfront to win the deal. Loughead wrote that the bank didn’t need to pay that much.

“Don’t fall on any swords,” Loughead wrote to Pinard the day before bids were submitted. He suggested that the bank could win the contract with a bid of slightly more than $30,000. The next day, Bank of America offered $31,000. It won the bidding, authority records show.

Loughead didn’t return calls seeking comment. Pinard didn’t respond to telephone requests for an interview and no one responded to a knock on the door at his Charlotte home.

Image ensured that Bank of America would dominate GIC deals in Pennsylvania by soliciting sham bids from other banks to make the process look legitimate, according to testimony from the trader cooperating with the Justice Department.

Bank of America would return the favor to Image by submitting so-called courtesy bids at the adviser’s request, allowing JPMorgan to win some of the deals, according to information that Bank of America gave plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Switching Jobs

Bank of America has cooperated with the municipalities that were suing the bank as part of its 2007 amnesty agreement with the Justice Department.

Traders such as FSA’s Goldberg often had worked for several banks and insurance companies that had a role in GIC contracts, according to employment records with Finra, the self-regulator of U.S. securities firms. CDR employees went on to work in the derivative departments of Deutsche Bank AG and UBS, the records show.

Before joining Bank of America, Pinard, 40, worked at Wheat, First Securities Inc. in Philadelphia with two bankers who would later join Image, according to broker registration records.

“Few people understand this part of public finance,” Georgia State’s Hildreth said. “It is a very small band of brothers who know the market. So, of course, they are going to reap the benefits.”

34 States

For nearly a decade, CDR founder Rubin, Wolmark, and Zarefsky helped fix prices on investment deals that cheated taxpayers in at least 34 states, according to their indictments and records filed in the case.

FSA’s Goldberg, who received a bachelor’s degree in accounting from St. John’s University in Queens, New York, worked with CDR employees on GIC deals, according to the indictment and public records. Goldberg worked from 1999 to 2001 at GE, which gets 35 percent of its revenue from financial services.

Goldberg was referred to only as “Marketer A” in the CDR indictment. “Marketer A” was then later identified as FSA’s Steven Goldberg in the Justice Department list of co- conspirators.

At GE, Goldberg worked with Dominick Carollo, a senior investment officer for FGIC, and Peter Grimm, who worked there from 2000 until at least 2006, according to court documents and public records. GE sold FGIC in 2003 to a group led by mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc.

Funneling Kickbacks

Goldberg and Grimm worked with CDR to increase their gains on GIC deals, according to the CDR indictment and conspirator list. Carollo left GE in 2003, joining the derivatives unit of Royal Bank of Canada. Grimm and Carollo didn’t respond to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Goldberg continued to participate in the conspiracy after he left for FSA in 2001 and used swap deals with Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada and UBS to funnel kickbacks to CDR, according to the indictments and the Justice Department list of conspirators. Royal spokesman Kevin Foster said the company is cooperating the government.

FSA, Royal Bank of Canada and UBS all worked on public finance deals in West Virginia that prosecutors say involved bid rigging.

At least three times, Goldberg conspired with CDR to pick up deals with West Virginia agencies, according to a guilty plea by former CDR employee Rothman and other records filed in federal court in Manhattan. Among them was a $147 million investment contract with the West Virginia School Building Authority.

‘Raw Greed’

That state’s schools need every penny they can get, said Mark Manchin, executive director of the school authority. With 17 percent of West Virginians below the poverty line in 2008, the state was 45th among the 50 U.S. states, according to a 2009 Census Bureau report. Manchin said some students study in dilapidated, century-old buildings.

“It’s just raw greed at the expense of the most vulnerable,” he said in a telephone interview. “With deteriorating facilities all over the state, that money is what we use to build schools.”

Bank of America’s municipal derivatives division, which was formed in 1998, worked on the 14th floor of the Hearst Tower in Charlotte. The space was so tight that the banker who’s cooperating with the Justice Department said he could hear others in the office change their bids when they got word from financial advisers, according to information Bank of America gave Baltimore.

Bank of America’s Murphy told the banker helping prosecutors that Image would use sham auctions to steer deals to Bank of America if the employee told Image that he “wanted to win” and “would work with” Image, according to the civil suit filed by Baltimore. Murphy declined to comment.

Verbal Cues

They would use verbal cues to communicate. The banker would ask whether the bid was a “good fit” to get information on competing bids from Image. Sometimes Image’s Martin Stallone said Bank of America’s bids were “aggressive,” or too high, and had to be reworked.

At other times, Stallone would ask the banker to bid a specific number, according to the civil suit.

Stallone didn’t respond to messages left for him at work or to a list of questions faxed and e-mailed to Image.

Like Financial Security Assurance, Bank of America also paid kickbacks to brokers for their help in getting deals, according to the Baltimore lawsuit, which based its allegations on information provided by Bank of America.

On June 28, 2002, Douglas Campbell, a former municipal derivatives salesman at Bank of America, wrote in an e-mail to his boss, then managing director Murphy, that he had paid $182,393 to banks and brokers not tied to any particular deals.

‘Better Relationship’

Three payments totaling $57,393 went to CDR, which played no role in any transaction connected to that amount. A copy of the e-mail was contained in a North Carolina lawsuit filed by Murphy against Bank of America in 2003.

“The CDR fees have been part of the ongoing attempt to develop a better relationship with our major brokers,” Campbell wrote.

The bid rigging in GIC contracts has reduced public funding for schools and housing across the U.S.

“If this was going on in a small state like West Virginia, it must have been huge elsewhere,” the state’s Assistant Attorney General Doug Davis said.

The stinking rich are planning billion-dollar luxury liners that keep the land-based Americans they’ve plundered at a safe distance.

June 2, 2010  |

What happens when Americans plunder America and leave it broken, destitute and seething mad? Where do these fabulously wealthy Americans go with their loot, if America isn’t a safe, secure, or even desirable place to spend their riches? What if they lose faith in their gated communities, because those plush gated communities are surrounded by millions of pissed-off Americans stripped of their entitlements, and who now want in?

We finally have the answer, and you’re not going to like it: a new fleet of castles that float in the oceans. The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they’ve plundered at a safe distance.

The first such floating castle has been christened the “Utopia“–the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013. Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia’s 200 or so mansions for sale--which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot “estates.” The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square feet, and sells for $160 million.

It’s the first of its kind to offer permanent housing units to buyers, and there’ll be plenty on board the Utopia for the global elite inhabitants to keep themselves entertained: an outdoor movie theater, casino, miniature golf course, nightclubs, restaurants, shops, and a water park for the elites’ heirs (featuring a “Lazy River,” rock-climbing wall and water slides). At nearly 1,000 feet, the Utopia is almost as long as a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

The floating castle is a longtime dream of libertarian oligarchs — a place where they can live their lives in peace free from the teeming masses of starving losers and indebted parasites and their tax demands. Since they’ve grown so rich off of America, they have enough spare change to fund projects like the Seasteading Institute, run by Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, and financed by the bizarre right-wing PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. It couldn’t have come a moment sooner for Milton Friedman’s grandson, who was best known until recently for running a grotesque advice blog for married swingers, PUA4LTR (Pick Up Advice For Long-Term Relationships). Actually, Patri Friedman ran that pick-up advice blog with his wife–the two of them are apparent big-time cyber-swingers, apparently–posting blog entries saying things like “Why Should Husbands Become PUAs? Because otherwise, your wife will talk like those wives on the blog My Husband Is Annoying.”

Both Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson see democracy as the enemy–last year, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” at about the same time that Milton Friedman’s grandson proclaimed, “Democracy is not the answer.” Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries. Friedman’s answer for Thiel’s democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules. It’s probably better for everyone if Milton Friedman’s grandson and Peter Thiel leave us forever for their libertarian ocean lair–Thiel believes that America went down the tubes ever since it gave women the right to vote, and he was outed as the sponsor of accused felon James O’Keefe’s smear videos that brought ACORN to ruin.

By Felicity Carus

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: “Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.”

The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.

The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: “Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world’s crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides.”

Both energy and agriculture need to be “decoupled” from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: “Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation.”

The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, says the report, which has been launched to coincide with UN World Environment day on Saturday.

Last year the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said that food production would have to increase globally by 70% by 2050 to feed the world’s surging population. The panel says that efficiency gains in agriculture will be overwhelmed by the expected population growth.

Prof Hertwich, who is also the director of the industrial ecology programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that developing countries – where much of this population growth will take place – must not follow the western world’s pattern of increasing consumption: “Developing countries should not follow our model. But it’s up to us to develop the technologies in, say, renewable energy or irrigation methods.”

By Wendy McElroy

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, “[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want.” Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, “The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law - requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense.”

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the state’s electronic surveillance law - aka recording a police encounter - the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. In dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated, “Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals….” (Note: In some states it is the audio alone that makes the recording illegal.)

The selection of “shooters” targeted for prosecution do, indeed, suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate.

Glik captured a police action on his cellphone to document what he considered to be excessive force. He was not only arrested, his phone was also seized.

On his website Drew wrote, “Myself and three other artists who documented my actions tried for two months to get the police to arrest me for selling art downtown so we could test the Chicago peddlers license law. The police hesitated for two months because they knew it would mean a federal court case. With this felony charge they are trying to avoid this test and ruin me financially and stain my credibility.”

Hyde used his recording to file a harassment complaint against the police. After doing so, he was criminally charged.

In short, recordings that are flattering to the police - an officer kissing a baby or rescuing a dog - will almost certainly not result in prosecution even if they are done without all-party consent. The only people who seem prone to prosecution are those who embarrass or confront the police, or who somehow challenge the law. If true, then the prosecutions are a form of social control to discourage criticism of the police or simple dissent.

A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing.

On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III’s motorcycle was pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic stop.

The case is disturbing because:

1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents’ house (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a violation of wiretapping law.

2) Baltimore criminal defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said he had never heard of the Maryland wiretap law being used in this manner. In other words, Maryland has joined the expanding trend of criminalizing the act of recording police abuse. Silverman surmises, “It’s more [about] ‘contempt of cop’ than the violation of the wiretapping law.”

3) Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley is defending the pursuit of charges against Graber, denying that it is “some capricious retribution” and citing as justification the particularly egregious nature of Graber’s traffic offenses. Oddly, however, the offenses were not so egregious as to cause his arrest before the video appeared.

Almost without exception, police officials have staunchly supported the arresting officers. This argues strongly against the idea that some rogue officers are overreacting or that a few cops have something to hide. “Arrest those who record the police” appears to be official policy, and it’s backed by the courts.

Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an explanation: “For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man.”

When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.

Happily, even as the practice of arresting “shooters” expands, there are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested “shooter,” the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen.

As journalist Radley Balko declares, “State legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials.”

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Obama administration is considering changes to the laws requiring police to inform suspects of their rights, potentially pursuing an expansion of the “public safety exception” that allows officers to delay issuing Miranda warnings, officials said Sunday.

Attorney General Eric Holder, in his first appearances on Sunday morning news shows as a cabinet secretary, said the Justice Department is examining “whether or not we have the necessary flexibility” to deal with terrorist suspects such as the Pakistani-born U.S. citizen who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square last weekend.

“We’re now dealing with international terrorism,” Holder said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And if we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception.”

The announcement marked a potentially significant change by the administration as it tries to manage the politics of national security after repeatedly coming under fire, mainly from conservatives, for being too willing to read Miranda rights to terrorism suspects. The administration is trying to thread a difficult needle: of taking a harder line on terrorism while staying within the confines of the criminal justice system.

Holder and other administration officials said they would be engaging Congress on putting together a proposal for changes to the law, which requires suspects to be told that they have the right to remain silent and that their statements may be used against them in court. They did not provide specifics of possible changes.

Under the current public safety exception, statements obtained before issuing the Miranda warning may be used in court — including to charge suspects — if it is determined that police needed to obtain information quickly to prevent further crimes. Once an immediate threat is ruled out, the Miranda warning must be read, under current law.

The goal of revisions would be to give law enforcement officials greater latitude to hold suspects within the criminal justice system and interrogate them for long periods of time — without having to transfer them to a military system or designate them as enemy combatants, officials said.

That could mean seeking a change not to the public safety exception but to a separate statute that governs how long a suspect may be interrogated before being brought before a judge. Currently, there are limitations on how long that period may last.

Orin Kerr, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and expert in criminal justice, said it is unlikely the Supreme Court would defer to Congress if it sought changes to the scope of Miranda. But there would be more flexibility on the detention statute, he said. Changes, Kerr said, “make sense if you can define what a terrorism case is.”

“The devil is in the details in these sorts of things,” he said.

The public safety exception dates back to 1984, when New York police caught a man they believed was an armed rape suspect, only to discover that his loaded gun was missing from his holster. The Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for the police to question the suspect before reading him his rights because the loaded gun — which he had tossed in a grocery store as he fled — was a threat to public safety, and it was imperative that it be found immediately.

Holder referred to the case, New York v. Quarles, in his remarks Sunday, saying it was time for the law to be updated.

“That’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face,” Holder said.

As someone who has turned microchipping himself into a hobby, Amal Graafstra is a pioneer of so-called DIY implantation.

Graafstra implanted himself with two radio-frequency identification tags (RFIDs), similar to the sort of chips used in cats and dogs, five years ago.

The procedure was simple. The American IT department head bought the chips himself from a commercial outlet and a cosmetic surgeon inserted one through a scalpel cut in his left hand in March 2005.

His family doctor used a pet injector to insert the second one in his right hand later that year.

Unlike others who have implanted themselves for research, Graafstra, who was in Australia to address an international technology symposium at the University of Wollongong, says he did it for his own convenience.

The chips help him do things like open the door to his home, log onto his computer and start his motorbike.

“I have the skill to be able to utilise this technology in my daily life,” he says.

“It was basically a key replacement first and foremost.”

However, he admits he has been a ground-breaker.

“Pets have been getting implants of the same nature for many years,” he says.

“But in the non-commercial, private DIY space I’m the first person I know of who has used the technology in this way.

“This is kind of a do-it-yourself guerrilla-style approach to the technology.”

Graafstra doesn’t consider himself a cyborg, electrophorus or even homo electronicus - all terms that have been used to describe the new, microchipped breed of human.

However he says these terms all describe a future that humans are hurtling towards.

“I do not consider myself a cyborg because a cyborg is somebody that actually has a technological interface, something that interacts with the body like a pacemaker, or a cochlear implant,” he says.

“All I’ve done is move the RFID tag from my wallet, or my pants pocket, to a skin pocket.”

He prefers to describe himself as “an adventurous hobbyist” and “just a regular dude”.

And says he is no longer alone.

“When it got out on the news … several people contacted me and we started forming a little group and you can find people on YouTube having this procedure done.”

Several Australians are among those to have embraced the technology, he says.

The field of human implantation isn’t without risk, says British scientist Mark Gasson, who has been billed as the first person in the world to catch a computer virus.

Gasson, also in Australia for the conference, had an RFID-based implant put in his hand about a year ago, originally for access to his UK-based lab and mobile phone.

Later, as an experiment, he deliberately infected the chip with a virus and found he was able to pass the infection on to the laboratory’s security system.

“If we’re talking about an attack on the (implantable) technology, like a computer virus, then we can start to talk about the person being infected by a computer virus,” he says.

“We’ve shown that we can actually transmit a computer virus to the chip and use that to infect the security access database in our laboratory.”

It could also work the other way around, with a virus in a data system being transmitted to the wearer of an implant.

Gasson says this raises serious issues, especially with regard to implantable medical devices on which peoples’ lives may depend.

He described the experience of carrying a computer virus as “extremely violating”.

“It’s completely out of your control,” he says.

“It’s a device that’s in your body, you can’t just leave it on your desk and come back the next day to sort the problem out.

“I knew that I could walk around the building and potentially transmit this piece of malicious code back into the building.”

Like Graafstra, Gasson doesn’t consider himself a cyborg, though he admits “technically I probably should”.

He says carrying the implant feels like a natural evolution.

“It’s not like something in me has radically changed,” he says.

“I don’t feel it’s changed me as a person, it hasn’t changed my sense of self.

“It’s added a new dimension and a new set of experiences to my life.”

by John Taylor Gatto

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: “Stay in the class where you belong.” I don’t know who decides that my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.

In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make the kids like it – being locked in together, I mean – or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can’t imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.

The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me.) This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren’t trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too – the clothing business as well – unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way. For God’s sake, let’s not rock that boat!

In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly – down to a single percentage point – how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.

Self-evaluation – the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet – is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness, too.

I assign “homework” so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.

The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.

We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.

Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I’ve told you about and a few more I’ve spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.

None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no “international competition” that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located – in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy – then we would be truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these “schools,” come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration – and the Catholic religion – after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling’s original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.

Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult – by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.

With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.

“Critical thinking” is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.

Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children’s development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.

At the pass we’ve come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.

After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter’s schooltime. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love – and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

This originally appeared in the Fall 1991 issue of Whole Earth Review.

When it comes to the sustainable and organic food movement, the U.S. lags far behind many European countries, including Germany. 

Many German farmers and consumers are dedicated to producing and eating organic, as well as local, but recently it’s been revealed that the German government may not be so committed to organic food after all. Genetically engineered crops are banned in most of Europe, including Germany. But German scientists and researchers are still considered to be at the cutting edge of genetically engineered crop research, testing experimental crops with funding support from the government and in spite of vehement public protest.

While so much of the world regularly consumes large amounts of genetically modified staples such as corn, soy, rice, wheat, and potatoes willingly, the German public has been very proactive in making sure that the food they buy is GMO free. Even fast food restaurants in Germany like Burger King and McDonald’s won’t make fries with genetically engineered potatoes, for fear of tarnishing their image with German consumers. GMOs aren’t even approved for use in animal feed! The citizen-supported ban is pretty powerful, and speaks volumes in support for sustainable, organic food, but to the surprise of many, the German government is putting a lot of money into researching and testing GMOs at the same time that they have banned their use in food, which seems awfully contradictory.

Even more troublesome to many German organic food producers is that the test sites for genetically engineered crops is often in rural agricultural areas where farmers adhere to traditional and sustainable practices. The worry is that the proliferation of the “Frankenstein” plants will end up contaminating nearby fields that produce organic crops via cross-pollination. The outrage among German farmers and food activists is such that some of the premier scientists working on these research projects have been targeted with death threats, and violent acts, as well as more civil protests like uprooting genetically engineered plants or placing local bans on research.

Even though Germany has some of the strictest rules against using or growing genetically modified crops in all of the EU and appears to be so committed to high-quality, organic food, the government also wants to maintain a position of leadership in GMO research in the scientific world. Being on the cutting edge of genetically engineered crop research is the motivation behind providing and approving funding for about 60 university research programs and some of the very best scientists in the field. While the GMOs can’t be sold in Germany or in much of the European Union, they can be sold elsewhere. Furthermore, there is speculation among the scientific community in Europe that they won’t be able to insulate themselves from the use of GMOs forever, and if they need to be used in the future, they may as well be the very best, most advanced, and “safe” varieties. But if the Germany government is content to push the envelope and explore new GMO technology, at least for use in other countries, how strong is their commitment to sustainable agriculture and organic food?

On Sunday, March 14th two Americans were shot in a drive by shooting in the city of Ciudad Juarez which lies on the border between Mexico and United States. This violence is just one of many examples of the so called “Mexican Drug War” that is currently ongoing just south of the United States border. This represents one of the first national interests at play, the need for the United States to protect its citizens both at home and abroad. There have been a number of attacks that have crossed the border. In 2009 there were grenade attacks carried out in south Texas by the Zetas, a paramilitary organization within Mexico. This issue is complicated by the fact that the United States shares an almost 2,000 mile border with Mexico.

The second interest which ties into all of the others is the desire of the United States to have full control of their southern border. This touches on the root interest of all nations to have sovereign control over their territory.

The third interest at play is the United States restriction over mind altering substances which it has declared illegal. In the United States marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines are all classified as illegal, and it has made the control and eradication of these substances a clear objective. Columbia, a chief producer of cocaine is being provided $500 million USD to continue programs to eliminate production and capture producers. The United States wishes to promote a society in which these substances are not used by anyone, and as such considers it high enough of a priority to use militaristic and economic tools of power to achieve those ends. As such these are the three most prevalent interests of the United States relating to the Mexican Drug war.

The actors within Mexico:

The country of Mexico itself is a major source of marijuana and heroin, as well as a conduit for South American cocaine running. Mexico’s drug production capacity is quite large, with the ability to produce 18 metric tons of pure heroin annually, as well as an additional 50 metric tons of “black tar” heroin. Mexico’s marijuana production capacity falls just shy of 16,000 metric tons annually. Clearly it is not the Mexican government doing the running, so then who are the major actors within Mexico involved with the drug trade and violence.
Already mentioned are Los Zetas. They are a paramilitary organization originally hired to act as a private army for the Gulf Cartel in the late 1990’s. Members were initially recruited out of the Mexican Army’s airborne elite “Gafes” enticed by the offer of significantly better pay than they were receiving from the Mexican government. There were approximately 30 individuals who deserted. However the original members turned around and set up training camps to increase their numbers. It is estimated that Los Zetas number somewhere in the vicinity of 200 strong. These members constitute the core of the group. It is also estimated that there are approximately 2000 extended members. The core members constitute the original membership, and replacements that have been trained in the same special combat operations, where as the extended members constitute auxiliary forces, family members, contractors and support personnel. Their headquarters are in Nuevo Laredo and operate mostly within the northern and eastern portion of Mexico. There is a certain level of redundancy built into the organization, as the Gulf Cartel also has a headquarters in Matamoros, 120 miles away. The United States government considered both Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel if not the same entity, one that is closely aligned. However this has changed in recent months with the two beginning to war against each other for territory. Geographically this region borders the southeast most region of Texas and is one of their chief smuggling routes into the US.
The military capabilities of Los Zetas are significant. In the mid 1990’s the Gafes, which are the Mexican army airborne elites were trained by foreign specialists which included American, French, and Israeli instructors. This instruction gave the original members significant advantage over Mexican police and regular army when it comes to combat operations.
In weapons and armaments they are well armed with small arms and light weapons which include and are not limited to AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles, 50mm machine guns, 40mm grenade launchers, surface to air missiles and the use of limited air support via helicopters, primarily for insertion. They also have access to other non-weapon hardware as well. Los Zetas frequently use night vision equipment, bullet proof vests, and armored vehicles. They maintain the ability to wiretap phone lines at will and use encrypted radios with rolling codes. They are the best armed and equipped drug cartel among the various groups residing in Mexico.
There also should be a consideration of operational capability, and the variance between operations by Los Zetas in Mexico and their operations within the United States. Within Mexico, they engage on various levels of conflict. In some areas they operate as low as organized crime, and in others clearly in low intensity conflict. They are willing to shift modes of operation and the level of violence along with it to suit their needs and based on how easily they can control territory. Within the US, Los Zetas contracts to local gangs, and this is only confirmed when sting operations net arrests. They do not operate out in the open, they engage in quiet kidnappings and assassinations.
Then the question becomes a matter of intent for Los Zetas. Despite starting as a paramilitary organization, it has evolved into its own drug cartel just like many others. As such they have attempted to expand their markets for drug shipments and trafficking within America and Mexico. There is a marked expansion of Los Zetas activities, from simply enforcing from the Gulf cartel to running their own drugs, to then trafficking weapons and humans, kidnapping for ransom, and assassinations for hire. It is believed that they not only want to expand operations, but the territory in which they operate and have under their control. It is difficult to assess the intents of a criminal organization, though safe to assume that it has interests like any other organization in self preservation, and expansion. It is clear however that out of all of the various cartels and enforcer groups operating within Mexico today, Los Zetas is both the largest threat to United States interests, and representative of the threat that all the drug cartels represent.
The second actor that should be examined is the Sinaloa Cartel. As recently as April 2010, the Sinaloa Cartel had taken control of the border city of Juarez away from the Juarez Cartel. Juarez is the chief drug shipping corridor across the border from El Paso, Texas. Traditionally the Sinaloa Cartel has controlled the western portion of Mexico, leaving the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas to control the eastern portion. The Sinaloa’s also established their own enforcer gang, very similar to the establishment of Los Zetas. This group known as Los Negros has less military capabilities than the Zetas. They are similarly armed, using small arms and light weapons procured from around the world.
In February of 2009, the United States government managed to arrest 750 members of the Sinaloa cartel in Operation Xcellerator. Despite this mass blow, the Sinaloa cartel still maintains strong operation capacity both within Mexico and the United States.
Both of these cartels represent the same threat to the United States interests, and share very similar capabilities in regards to drug and weapon trafficking. The capability to smuggle weapons, drugs, and money across the border must also be examined. The cartels prefer to use ports of entry to smuggle their goods, as these border crossings are heavily trafficked with massive amounts of shipping, and thus the chaos makes for an easy way to bypass border security. One of the preferred routes is the Juarez-El Paso port of entry, thus the cause for the cartel fighting for control on the Mexican side of the border. The cartels will simply load semi-haulers filled with cocaine, heroin and marijuana and take it right across the border at this crossing into El Paso where warehouses wait to act as distribution centers.

Key Objectives:

In regards to this threat there are three main objectives that should be addressed and achieved. The first is to begin to eradicate production of these illegal substances to reduce the supply available for the market. It works out to simply if you reduce the supply, you reduce the amount that can be consumed, and have effectively begun eliminating the ability of the drug cartels to move product. The second objective is to secure the southern American border to prevent the illegal smuggling of goods and people, while still allowing for legitimate business to cross in the various ports of entry. There are 42 border crossing points between the United States and Mexico, many of which are on state and interstate routes. These must be adequately secured to prevent the inflow of illegal drugs. The third and final objective is outright elimination of the cartels themselves. It is important to note that this will only be effective as long as the first two objectives are achieved. Once effective control over the ports of entry and destruction of the ability to grow the crops has occurred, then elimination of the cartels will have an effect. Otherwise elimination of one cartel will just give room for another to seize territory and continue where the previous left off.

America’s Response:

The United States has already begun to combat the cartels and the threat they pose via the Merida Initiative that was begun in 2008. The initiative is a primarily economic and informational program, where the United States is providing $450 million USD to Mexico in 2010 to combat the drug cartels. Use of this massive economic aid has not stemmed the flow of drugs into the United States. Reliance on Mexican counter-narcotics or Mexican military to handle the issue has not worked, thus the focus should be shifted from using the Mexican government to combat the cartels. Instead funds sent to the Mexican government should be specifically used to eradicate growing fields. Any further financial aid delivered to Mexico must be earmarked specifically for programs in identifying and eliminating growing fields, leave cartel eradication to the United States.
If the United States it is going to effectively combat the growing drug problem, it needs to begin applying more military pressure on the drug cartels. As explained these cartels are not simply drug organizations, but rather paramilitaries and as such, a shift must take place from traditional crime fighting and counter-narcotics to special operations and conventional military use.
The first aspect of military power that should be employed in Mexico is the use of Predator drones for reconnaissance purposes, both on the United States border, and within Mexico as well. Drone patrols will be used in border areas that have high levels of illegal entry and suspected drug trafficking. It will require cooperation between United States Air Force, the Air National Guard and Army National Guard units as well as local law enforcement officials. It is an estimated $4.5 million USD per drone to produce. Procurements will need to be made for Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California with an additional five drones per state. This will result in an estimated cost of $90 million. These drones can be used to patrol the border and spot illegal crossings, as well as scope out Mexican territory and easily hunt for marijuana and opium fields. Intelligence gathered from these missions can be then delivered to Mexican authorities. The drones allow us to achieve both the first and second key objectives, of eradicating the source of the drugs, as well as securing the border.
As well as the use of Predator Drones for patrol and reconnaissance there is a need for regular Army soldiers to be stationed along the US/Mexican border. A minimum of an additional army division is required to help stem the tide of smugglers. This division could be supplemented with an army National Guard division. The primary purpose of these soldiers would to work in conjunction with the Border Patrol and capture individuals crossing the border illegally. They would also provide additional personnel at the Ports of Entry for inspections and detection procedures to try and catch drug shipments as they are coming in from Mexico.
These first policies only deal with the securing of the border and the beginning of the eradication of the fields. As the Mexican government has been completely incapable of dealing with these cartels it is time the United States take a more active role in their outright elimination. In that pursuit the President will need to redirect the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to begin using agents of the Clandestine services to identify the cartels and their members, infiltrate them and where possible eliminate high ranking members.
To combat the paramilitary Los Zetas and its counterparts in other cartels, the United States will need to employ special operatives under the Special Command, specifically the employment of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. These units are specifically tasked with counter-terrorism purposes. Due to their training, they are uniquely suited for rapid response missions to strike at cartels.
There are some clear downsides to the heavy use of military power just south of the border. The first is that by militarizing the US-Mexican border, there will be criticism from the Mexican government. As demonstrated whenever the United States or one of the various border States pass legislation having to do with border control, there will be an outcry from the Mexican President. In the same vein public opinion is likely to decrease among the Hispanic population. We have seen this when states have passed immigration control legislation to try and reduce the problems of drug runners and illegal immigrants within their own borders. This political damage could be very damaging during the midterm elections as such it would be best to wait to implement this until after they are over.
With any sort of military action there are the inherent risks of casualties. However the use of classified special operatives and CIA special agents should keep it out of the public eye leaving the cost at strictly human, taking the political element out of it. The benefits from taking this route are clear. It allows for the dismantling of the cartels without the risk of public official corruption that has been so rampant within the Mexican government. It will put the cartels on the defensive and hinder their ability to transport drugs. With the cartels out of the way, the Mexican government can re-establish control over its own territory.

Are there any other options?

We have seen with the Merida Initiative the use of primarily economic aid to Mexico and information sharing. We have not seen a substantial drop in either the drug trafficking or the violence as a result. Each year the United States is spending over $400 million in support of Mexico to achieve no noticeable gains. If we cannot reasonably expect the Mexican government to take care of its own territory we should take care of it for them.
As such it has fallen to the use of military power then to end this issue. If the situation has not improved within five years of initial implementation, it may then fall to the United States to take on a full scale counter-insurgency within the Mexican borders to counter-act Los Zetas and the other cartels. After assessing Los Zetas and Sinaloa Cartel we can draw parallels to the militias that have at one point or another run around Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States should then consider the Mexican government to either be failed, or in severe danger of failing and intervene using large quantities of U.S. troops to establish and maintain effective counter insurgencies in regions currently held by the cartels.

Posted on May. 19th, 2010 at 10:36 pm 

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
June 23, 2009

It’s the 2009 presidential election in Iran and opposition leader Mir-Houssein Mousavi declares victory hours before the polls close, insuring that any result to the contrary will be called into question. Western media goes into overdrive, fighting with each other to see who can offer the most hyperbolic denunciation of the vote and President Ahmadenijad’s apparent victory (BBC wins by publishing bald-faced lies about the supposed popular uprising which it is later forced to retract). On June 13th, 30000 “tweets” begin to flood Twitter with live updates from Iran, most written in English and provided by a handful of newly-registered users with identical profile photos. The Jerusalem Post writes a story about the Iran Twitter phenomenon a few hours after it starts (and who says Mossad isn’t staying up to date with new media?). Now, YouTube is providing a “Breaking News” link at the top of every page linking to the latest footage of the Iranian protests (all shot in high def, no less). Welcome to Destabilization 2.0, the latest version of a program that the western powers have been running for decades in order to overthrow foreign, democratically elected governments that don’t yield to the whims of western governments and multinational corporations.

Soros henchman Evgeny Morozov is extolling the virtues of the new Tehran Twitter revolution.

Ironically, Iran was also the birthplace of the original CIA program for destabilizing a foreign government. Think of it as Destabilization 1.0: It’s 1953 and democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh is following through on his election promises to nationalize industry for the Iranian people, including the oil industry of Iran which was then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA is sent into the country to bring an end to Mossadegh’s government. They begin a campaign of terror, staging bombings and attacks on Muslim targets in order to blame them on nationalist, secular Mossadegh. They foster and fund an anti-Mossadegh campaign amongst the radical Islamist elements in the country. Finally, they back the revolution that brings their favoured puppet, the Shah, into power. Within months, their mission had been accomplished: they had removed a democratically elected leader who threatened to build up an independent, secular Persian nation and replaced him with a repressive tyrant whose secret police would brutally suppress all opposition. The campaign was a success and the lead CIA agent wrote an after-action report describing the operation in glowing terms. The pattern was to be repeated time and time again in country after country (in Guatemala in 1954, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Serbia in the 1990s), but these operations leave the agency open to exposure. What was needed was a different plan, one where the western political and financial interests puppeteering the revolution would be more difficult to implicate in the overthrow.

Enter Destabilization 1.1. This version of the destabilization program is less messy, offering plausible deniability for the western powers who are overthrowing a foreign government. It starts when the IMF moves in to offer a bribe to a tinpot dictator in a third world country. He gets 10% in exchange for taking out an exorbitant loan for an infrastructure project that the country can’t afford. When the country inevitably defaults on the loan payments, the IMF begins to take over, imposing a restructuring program that eventually results in the full scale looting of the country’s resources for western business interests. This program, too, was run in country after country, from Jamaica to Myanmar, from Chile to Zimbabwe. The source code for this program was revealed in 2001, however, when former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz went public about the scam. More detail was added in 2004 by the publication of John Perkin’s Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which revealed the extent to which front companies and complicit corporations aided, abetted and facilitated the economic plundering and overthrow of foreign governments. Although still an effective technique for overthrowing foreign nations, the fact that this particular scam had been exposed meant that the architects of global geopolitics would have to find a new way to get rid of foreign, democratically elected governments.

Destabilization 1.2 involves seemingly disinterested, democracy promoting NGOs with feelgood names like the Open Society Institute, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy. They fund, train, support and mobilize opposition movements in countries that have been targeted for destabilization, often during elections and usually organized around an identifiable color. These “color revolutions” sprang up in the past decade and have so far successfully destabilized the governments of the Ukraine, Lebanon, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, among others. These revolutions bear the imprint of billionaire finance oligarch George Soros. The hidden hand of western powers behind these color revolutions has threatened their effectiveness in recent years, however, with an anti-Soros movement having arisen in Georgia and with the recent Moldovan “grape revolution” having come to naught (much to the chagrin of Soros-funded OSI’s Evgeny Morozov).Now we arrive at Destabilization 2.0, really not much more than a slight tweak of Destabilization 1.2. The only thing different is that now Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media are being employed to amplify the effect of (and the impression of) internal protests. Once again, Soros henchman Evgeny Morozov is extolling the virtues of the new Tehran Twitter revolution and the New York Times is writing journalistic hymns to the power of internet new media…when it serves western imperial interests. We are being asked to believe that this latest version of the very (very) old program of U.S. corporate imperialism is the real deal. While there is no doubt that the regime of Ahmadenijad is reprehensible and the feelings of many of the young protestors in Iran are genuine, you will forgive me for quesyioning the motives behind the monolithic media support for the overthrow of Iran’s government and the installation of Mir-Houssein “Butcher of Beirut” Mousavi.

• By Michael Kanellos, greentechmedia

Intel showed off an experimental device last week in China that could someday substantially cut the costs of wiring homes and offices for energy efficiency, one more step in the company’s foray into energy.

The device is a server/sensor that monitors the power consumption of the various appliances in a home or small commercial building in real time. The device then sends the data, via Wi-Fi, to a phone, PC or a home energy management console, like the one Intel showed off at CES earlier this year.

“Turn-on and turn-off signatures are like fingerprints,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer in an interview. “Compressors, motors, TVs, stereos — all of them have a unique signature. It is relatively easy to train the system to recognize these things.”

Intel’s new device can read your dryer’s mind

In the first stage, these devices will merely provide data to home energy consoles, but over time, remote control capabilities will be added so that lights can be turned off or thermostats turned down — either by a person or a computer — to save energy. Think of it as a Digital Mom (“Did you turn the lights off in your room…,” etc.) without the guilt.

Intel will work with Flextronics to get the first commercially available versions out later this year.

Ideally, these sorts of devices and the pattern recognition software that powers them will curb the amount of hardware that will be required for home automation. Everyone loves the idea of home automation. The problem is the cost: outfitting lights and appliances with sensors and radios scares white-goods makers. With devices like this, manufacturers might be able to get away with inserting only basic computing functions into appliances and letting a central server conduct more of the computing tasks needed. In other words, forget intelligent appliances and say hello to the merely competent refrigerator.

A million homes or small office buildings rigged with automation equipment could curb the need to build a good number of 600 and 700 megawatt power plants, Rattner said.

“We believe that 30 percent of energy consumption is controlled by the consumer,” he said, who will show off the device and conduct other demonstrations during a speech at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing this week.

Part of Intel’s interest in home automation stems from the lopsided nature of energy consumption when computing is compared with the rest of the world. Computers and IT equipment only account for two percent of the world’s power consumption.

“If we were to hugely succeed and cut IT power in half, we’d only improve things by one percent,” he said.

A bigger motive, however, lies in the opportunity to sell more chips. Intelligent appliances will need processors, boards and communications silicon.  Last year, Intel began to vaguely discuss the opportunity in home automation (see the story we broke on the effort here) before coming out with its energy console and making it official.

Some of the technology behind these energy management applications to some degree can be traced back to sensor research Rattner and others showed off at IDFs in the early 2000s. (Here’s a walk down memory sensor lane for you silicon fans.) With energy, remote sensors are finally finding a lucrative application to exploit.

Sensor servers and management consoles in some ways could also allow consumers and even utilities to postpone or downgrade smart meter rollout. Who needs a smart meter if your DSL router can already control your home? These devices, however, need data to work; hence, Intel is part of a coalition to get utilities to give third parties access to consumer energy consumption data.

Here’s a laundry list of some of Intel’s other energy efforts:

• Smart grid. Intel is working with the State Grid Corporation in China. It is also a big supporter of Grid Net, the company that wants to use WiMax in the grid. Intel has been behind the WiMax concept since the beginning.
• Wind. There are ten processors in the average wind turbine. Intel sells to some large vendors already.
• Demand response and efficiency. The company is already an investor in CPower.
• Green IT. Intel in 2001 kicked off an effort to reduce power consumption in chips. That was to prevent computers from melting. The company shifted its emphasis to power savings as electricity prices climbed.
• Solar. Intel has spun out a few startups in solar already and Intel Capital has invested in some as well. Solar cells are basically just semiconductors. Intel may not ever produce solar cells itself, but expect it to try to get its technology for chips more integrated into solar.
• Talent. A growing number of green startups are headed by Intel alums. The company has a knack for producing people well-versed in technology and marketing, running employees ragged and wearing down anyone that tries to resist their sales pitch. VCs love that. Others not listed in that link are Carlos Perea, CEO of Miox, Dan Russell, CEO of PowerMand, and First Solar president Bruce Sohn.

Henry Makow
June 23, 2009

On March 20, 1969, Dr. Richard Day, the National Medical Director of the Rockefeller-sponsored “Planned Parenthood” told a meeting  that American industry will be sabotaged and shown to be uncompetitive.

In view of the recent bankruptcy of General Motors, his remarks are especially pertinent.

“The stated plan was that different parts of the world would be assigned different roles of industry and commerce in a unified global system. The continued preeminence of the United States and the relative independence and self-sufficiency of the United States would have to be changed… in order to create a new structure, you first have to tear down the old, and American industry was one example of that.”

“Each part of the world will have a specialty and thus become inter-dependent, he said. The US will remain a center for agriculture, high tech, communications, and education but heavy industry would be “transported out.”

These remarks to the Pittsburgh Pediatric Society were reported by Dr. Lawrence Dunegan, a Pittsburgh pediatrician who died in Jan. 2004. The speech described “A New World System” already in place which would permanently transform the world.

Dr. Day wanted the 80 or so physicians present to be prepared. The transcript of Dunegan’s recollections has been posted here and should be read in full. However, I’ll provide a summary here.

OMINOUS OMISSIONS

Much of what Day promised in 1969 is looking like a rear-view mirror today. But ominous events have yet to transpire. They do want to implant a chip in us so they can find and identify us, as well as monitor and control our purchases.

They are weaning us off national allegiance and will resort to terrorism to win our assent to their global police state. They may use “one or two nuclear bombs to convince people we mean business,” Day said.

He refrained from mentioning who “we” are but said the names are recognizable. Given that he worked for the Rockefellers, I assume he meant the Rockefellers and their bosses, the Rothschilds.

This adds weight to the widely-held view that the central bankers are responsible for most terrorism, using MI-6, Mossad and the CIA. Dr. Day also said that “war is obsolete” given the danger of nuclear exchange so terrorism would be used instead. This was 1969.

He said that there are always two reasons for anything the Rockefellers do: the pretext which makes it palatable to the gullible public and the real reason. Thus, as I argued in my book “Cruel Hoax” (2007), we are being turned into homosexuals in the name of “women’s and gay rights.” Gender-neutered and promiscuous, fewer people are able to bond permanently with a member of the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation.

Dr. Day said sex will be separated from marriage and reproduction ( i.e. “sexual liberation”) to break up the family and reduce population. Abortion, divorce and homosexuality will be made socially acceptable.

“Homosexuals will be given permission to act out. Everyone including the elderly will be encouraged to have sex. It will be brought out into the open. Anything goes.” [The “Stonewall Riots” which unleashed the “gay rights” movement, took place three months later.] The ultimate goal is to have sex without reproduction. Reproduction without sex will occur in laboratories. Family size will be limited as in China.It will be made more difficult for families to stay together. More women will work outside the home and more people will remain single. Sports instead of dolls will be promoted to girls so they will seek achievement instead of family. Girls will be taught they are the same as boys.

In general, international sports like soccer and hockey will be pushed so Americans will see themselves as “world citizens.” American sports like baseball and football will not be similarly encouraged.

BRUTALIZATION

Pornography, violence and obscenity on TV and in movies will be increased. People will be desensitized to violence and porn and made to feel life is short, precarious and brutish. Music will “get worse” and will be used for indoctrination.

There will be unemployment and mass migration in order to uproot long established (conservative) communities. Social change will be introduced in port cities and work its way to the heartland. (Thus, the east and west coast are liberal.)

He said a cure to cancer exists in the Rockefeller Institute but is kept secret for purposes of  depopulation. He said there will be an increase in infectious man-made diseases.

Dr. Day, who worked in weather modification during the war, said weather can be used to wage war or create drought and famine. The food supply will be monitored so no one can get enough food to “support a fugitive from the New System.” Growing your own food will be outlawed under the pretext of it being unsafe.

He said people are controlled by means of the information they are given. Thus, information will be selective. Not everyone will be allowed to own books. “Certain books will disappear from libraries.” Literary classics will be subtly altered. People will spend longer in school but not learn anything. There will be restrictions on travel; and private home ownership will disappear.

He said people who don’t want to go along will be “disposed of humanely.” He said there will be no martyrs–”people will just disappear.”

CONCLUSION

Our political and cultural “leaders” are accomplices in a plot to re-engineer humanity to serve the Judeo-Masonic central banking cartel. Wars, terrorism, depressions, political and social change, entertainment and fads are all contrived to gradually bring about an Orwellian police state.

Dr. Day says politicians are manipulated “without their even knowing it.” Their failure to protect us from this Satanic conspiracy is a betrayal of the first order. We have to alert the sincere ones and reach soldiers and police too. Civilization hangs in the balance. We are in real danger and should organize in small independent units.

People are hurting now and are more receptive to this information. This “economic downturn” is deliberate and part of the police state agenda. We have to educate people who think these events are random. The Rockefellers and their traitorous lackeys won’t bring this off if the intelligentsia and masses are aware of the truth.

Progressives and Leftists need to learn that “progress” and “change” really refer to totalitarian world government. This is the change they “believe in.” Dr. Day said in 1969, “people will have to get used to constant change.”  I used to be a Liberal-Leftist myself. If I can see the real meaning of “changing the world,” others can too.

We also have to take practical steps to defend ourselves, our families and our freedom.

Our society and culture are a fraud based on one central fraud, the monopoly over government credit in the hands of Cabalist private bankers. They are using this power to extend their monopoly over every aspect of our lives by manipulating world events and social behavior. The only way to save civilization from failure is to nationalize the Central Banks.

Liam Bailey | 10.07.2006

The growth of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), particularly the meetings emphasis on security and defence and the new membership applications, are creating worldwide tensions similar to the standoff before the Second World War.

The Presidents of the six permanent member countries of the SCO: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan met in Shanghai on the 15th of June, along with ministers from the recently invited observer countries: India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas, and the presidents of Pakistan, Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan. Iran’s observer status at the meeting attracted more attention from the world community than the meeting itself, particularly because of the current tension over its expanding nuclear programme. The latest statements from Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki sound increasingly agreeable to the latest incentive package offered by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States. Including transfer of peaceful nuclear technology and support for Iranian membership to the World Trade Organisation, although both are careful always to state that the Iranian government has not yet reached a decision. The cause of my fears is responses to the offer from other prominent members of the Iranian government, particularly threats of U.N sanctions if Iran continues its uranium enrichment programme. Most notably the response of Iran’s supreme leader and staunch U.S enemy Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quoted by state media as saying: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not succumb to these pressures.”

These mixed signals coming from Iran, and first the U.S precondition of Iranian enrichment cessation to bring the U.S into the first direct discussions in 27 years, which, abandoned will now allow Iran some nuclear enrichment capabilities providing it suspends its enrichment activities before and during the talks, Condoleezza Rice giving them weeks to make a decision. Which brought the response from the Iranians that a response would be giving by August 22nd, all giving me the impression that both sides are being seen to favour a diplomatic solution, but neither is willing to sufficiently compromise for such a solution, leading to some analysts including ex C.I.A and Presidential adviser Ray McGovern predicting military action from the U.S as early as July or as late as October. Personally, I think the possible consequences of military action against Iran are too politically suicidal for even Bush to contemplate seriously, but as I have said before, the prominence of Cheney and Rumsfeld and other supporters of the PNAC ideologies in the Bush administration, leading America’s foreign policy from behind the scenes continue to make anything possible. The meetings closing statement from Chinese president and chair of the ten-country meeting, accounting for half the human race: “We hope the outside world will accept the social system and path to development independently chosen by our members and observers and respect the domestic and foreign policies adopted by the SCO participants in line with their national conditions.” Following all SCO members vowing to defend each other’s sovereignty and the alliance in general, was undoubtedly a warning to the U.S and others who seek to interfere in the internal affairs of the SCO’s sovereign states, which the U.S didn’t like to hear, in the current intensive-care of diplomatic efforts with Iran, and will increase the tension of any potential military standoff ensuing if diplomatic solutions aren’t reached.

A large majority of the SCO countries are oil rich, including Iran if their application for full membership is granted, meaning China will fight their corner to ensure it can continue its massive oil consumption; securing its path of becoming the world’s second superpower on a par or even superseding previous U.S domination. This complicates things, on the one hand making military action against Iran less likely because of Chinese and Russian support. On the other hand Chinese and Russian Veto’s make UN sanctions against Iran almost impossible, which, according to statements from the Bush administration like, Iran getting the bomb is not an option and military action is always on the table, may make military action the only option. During the Shanghai meeting Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly invited the SCO members to meet in Tehran to discuss energy exploration and mutual development, which lead to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin calling for the creation of an SCO energy club, further strengthening ties between the SCO member and observer countries. The expansion and unification of the SCO is very worrying for the U.S, who applied for observer status at the same time four of the above were granted, the U.S’ application was denied because it shares no fluvial or land frontiers with any of the SCO member or observer countries. The U.S’ strongest Asian ally is also concerned by the fortification of the SCO to rival the U.S alliance, a senior spokesperson for Japan said: “The SCO is becoming a rival block to the US alliance; it does not share our values. We are watching it very closely.” The stage is set for World War 3, two major alliances butting heads in much the same way as the powder keg of Baltic and European alliances erupted into World War 2. All it would take is a terrorist attack(s) with Iranian trademarks, which some analysts, again like Ray McGovern, predict may be staged.

Mixed signals from Iran; the president seeming to back diplomatic efforts, while the man who will ultimately make the decision maintains the hard-line stance of not giving up Iran’s definite right to nuclear energy, seems like a show to ensure support from their allies in the event of military action looking likely. While similar conflicting U.S messages create the same impression of doing everything in their power to reach a diplomatic outcome, so they can attack Iran without fear of Russian and Chinese interference should Iran decline the six-nation incentive package. The trouble is China, Russia and many of the world’s (Islamic) countries agree with Iran that their compliance with the non-proliferation treaty gives them the right to nuclear energy, leaving the burden of proof on the EU and U.S that Iran are attempting to gain nuclear weapons. Therefore, Iran undoubtedly have the upper hand in this situation, which I believe will mean them continuing to create the impression of willingness to compromise for a diplomatic settlement, when in reality they (especially Khamenei) have no intention of giving in to their long running (U.S) enemy, making U.S military action a certainty.

Any form of military action against Iran will erupt into a massive global conflict, whether Russia and China get involved or not, not least in the reawakening of the military wing of the Lebanese Hezbollah, who would attack parts of Israel within range of their, now large quantities of surface-to-surface missiles. These attacks on north Israel would bring Israel into the conflict resulting in at the very least, air strikes, naval bombardment and the use of artillery and battlefield missiles, possibly even border crossings by Israeli infantry and armoured units. Iran would also, at the very least step up its support and armament of Iraq’s insurgency, possibly sending over several divisions of the revolutionary guard, already linked with Iraq’s substantial Shia militias undoubtedly creating a force of serious reckoning, furthering the already severe consequences of the Iraq Pandora’s box. As well as increasing the substantial global problem of Islamic extremist terror by awakening the many dormant Iranian terror cells, unleashing a wave of terror across Europe to make Al Qaeda look like girl scouts. Not to mention support of Iran from other Islamic states, such as Morocco unleashing further waves of terror from Al Qaeda and other terror cells and networks. Possible international support from their strong allies Russia, China and India would turn a catastrophic global conflict into World War 3 and possibly lead to the second use of the world’s deadliest nuclear weapons. Analysts also believe military action against Iran’s nuclear programme may lead to their withdrawal from the, then undermined non-proliferation treaty and the stepping up of the programme, concentrated on creating weapons, meaning any parts of the programme still being managed covertly could be turned into an Iranian-underground-nuclear arsenal aimed at the west, or in the worse case scenario weapons could be bought from China or Russia, at the very least as deterrent against U.S use of the weapons, due to Bush’s alleged itchy nuclear trigger-finger.

In closing, America’s use of the understandably significant public fear of Islamic Jihad terrorism after 9/11 to justify first the war in Afghanistan, rightly an Islamic extremist terrorism base, but also necessary for future U.S oil supply security, then Iraq, which has now proved to have been invaded primarily for U.S hegemony. If the war on Iraq hadn’t proved so costly in everyway for the Bush administration, I believe Iran would have been invaded shortly after. These invasions are the initiation of the first stages of the Project for The New American Century’s plans under Bush Jnr, very similar to the Nazi plans for a new world order based on the superiority of the Aryan race. Another similarity is that the war on Terror, having done nothing to combat the many terrorist cells across Europe and around the world, which are actually increasing, instead invading two third world Muslim Countries, one with no ties to terrorism and atrocities like Fallujah and Haditha, which must bring some Muslim’s to the conclusion it is a war on Islam. Nazism was also a war for domination, or, was it a war on Judaism, given the numbers killed in the holocaust; the same conclusions could be reached. President Bush is waging the war on terror, while at times portraying a misguided belief he is working on behalf of god, whereas Hitler and many of his associates believed the Fuhrer to be possessed by the devil. In conclusion, the selfish imperialism under the rouse of fighting terrorism and spreading human rights and democracy through forceful regime change, are steadily leading the more of the world into conflict, take the Al Qaeda allied Islamic courts Union gaining a large power base in Somalia for instance. An Iran invasion could well be the final trigger for the catastrophic beginning of World War 3.

By Daniel Tencer

ExxonMobil’s sabotage of some 100 Texas oil wells in the past 17 years — going so far as to plug up some wells with explosives — means the world’s largest oil company could be liable for penalties of up to $1 billion, the Texas General Land Office says.

Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the state’s land office, released a report earlier this week asking the Texas Railroad Commission — which regulates the state’s oil industry — to investigate “ExxonMobil’s intentional sabotage of oil wells in Refugio County as well as the company’s fraudulent reports covering up the damage.”

“Exxon committed irrefutable, intentional and flagrant violations of state rules regulating the oilfield,” Patterson said in a statement (PDF).

The allegations stem from a lease the company signed with a Texas family, the O’Connors, back in the 1950s to exploit oil fields on the family’s land. When the relationship “went sour,” Patterson states, the energy giant had the oil wells plugged up in such a way that no one else could use them.

Patterson says the company’s reports on the sealing of the oil wells was “fraudulent.”

“When the relationship turned sour in the 1990s, Exxon-Mobil terminated the lease and plugged the wells,” states Patterson’s report. “As per state rules, Exxon filed paperwork with the Railroad Commission outlining its well-plugging procedures and filed sworn affidavits as to the final condition of the wells. The O’Connor family soon learned those reports to the Railroad Commission were fraudulent.

“When an independent producer, Emerald Oil, attempted to capitalize on new legislative incentives to reopen abandoned wells, they found the old Exxon-Mobil wells hadn’t been plugged but sabotaged — filled with junk, cut well casings, contaminated oil tank sludge and even explosives. Many of the wells were left unrecoverable.”

Under Texas state rules, ExxonMobil could be fined as much as $10,000 per sabotaged oil well per day, or some $1 billion in all.

“The allegations paint a false and misleading picture of Exxon Mobil’s involvement in the O’Connor oil and gas leases,” ExxonMobil spokeswoman Margaret Ross stated in a Bloomberg article. “The area in which the wells are located has a water table very close to the surface. It was critical that Exxon protect the groundwater by plugging the wells solidly and thoroughly.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Texas Railroad Commission’s attorney “sent a letter to Exxon Mobil’s attorney, asking the company to reply to the complaint by July 31 and stating that the agency would take no action pending receipt of the response.”

Vincent Fernando, CFA | May 5, 2010, 6:25 AM

A month ago we looked at how population trends would allow the U.S. economy to keep expanding at a relatively rapid rate for the next few centuries… just as China’s population trends would be hurting China’s economic growth.

Population dynamics alone argue that it will be a challenge for Chinese GDP to overtake America’s, though this challenge is likely to be met.

Yet even once Chinese GDP is larger than America’s, raw aggregate GDP is not enough to become a world super power, and Harvard Professor Joseph Nye gives an explanation why in an interesting opinion piece in Caixin.

Caixin:

Even if Chinese GDP passes that of the United States around 2030, the two economies would be equivalent in size, but not equal in composition. China would still have a vast underdeveloped countryside, and it will begin to face demographic problems from the delayed effects of the one child per couple policy it enforced in the 20th century. Moreover, as countries develop, there is a tendency for growth rates to slow. Assuming a 6 percent Chinese growth and only 2 percent American growth after 2030, China would not equal the United States in per capita income until sometime in the second half of the century.

Per capita income provides a measure of the sophistication of an economy. In other words, China’s impressive growth rate combined with the size of its population will surely lead it to pass the American economy in total size at some point. This has already provided China with impressive power resources, but that is not the same as equality. And since the United States is unlikely to be standing still during that period, China is a long way from posing the kind of challenge to American preponderance that the Kaiser’s Germany posed when it passed Britain at the beginning of the last century. The facts do not at this point justify alarmist predictions of a coming war.

Essentially, he’s arguing why America won’t be displaced as the world’s primary super power any time this century.

His point isn’t to cheer American power but rather highlight why the U.S. should embrace rather than fear a rapidly developing China. One important point he makes relative to China’s influence in East Asia is that while China’s economic rise is welcomed by its neighbors, its military rise isn’t. He believes that other Asian nations would be more likely to join the U.S. as a countervailing force should China try to flex its military muscles in the region. China also lacks the ’soft power’ of U.S. culture and its global influence.

The fact that China is not likely to become a peer competitor to the United States on a global basis, does not mean that it could not challenge the United States in Asia, and the dangers of conflict can never be completely ruled out. But basically, Bill Clinton was right when he told Jiang Zemin in 1995 that the United States has more to fear from a weak China than a strong China. Thus far, the United States has accepted the rise of Chinese power and invited Chinese participation as a responsible stakeholder in the international system. Power is not always a zero sum game. Given the global problems that both China and the United States will face, they have much more to gain from working together than in allowing overwrought fears to drive them apart, but it will take wise policy on both sides to assure this future.

For more, read the rest at Caixin here, but overall Mr. Nye provides a balanced view about America’s future status as a superpower relative to the emerging nation.

Noor Javed, The Toronto Star
May 12, 2012

They make you smell like an exotic flower, mask the most offending smells, or simply give you a fresher feeling. But popular perfumes and body sprays could also be dousing you with small amounts of chemicals that trigger allergic reactions and disrupt hormones, according to a study released Wednesday.

Toronto-based Environmental Defence and Campaign for Safe Cosmetics in the U.S tested 17 popular fragrance products and found they contained a total of 38 secret chemicals not listed on the label. On average, each product had 14 of these chemicals.

The problem, says Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, is that cosmetic companies can lump ingredients together under the generic term “parfum” or “fragrances.”

“This is a really worrisome loophole in Canadian law where a company can claim that their fragrance compilation is a trade secret, and then they are not obligated to disclose to anyone what’s in that fragrance,” said Smith.

The report found that on average, the products contained 10 chemicals known to cause allergies and four with “the potential to disrupt the hormone system.” Many of these chemicals are classified as allergens by the European Union, said Smith.

Findings like this concern Sherry Adams, who runs a store in Toronto, and struggles with multiple chemical sensitivities.

Adams, who suffers headaches, nausea and skin reactions from strong scents, believes Health Canada has a duty to require more transparency from perfume companies.

Currently, perfumes are allowed on the market before manufacturers disclose the ingredient list to Health Canada. If a product is deemed unsafe, the government can issue warning letters, public advisories or recall orders. It can’t ban a product altogether. A review of the law governing cosmetics is expected soon.

Michael Patton, spokesman for the Canadian Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association, said the labelling is transparent enough.

He said the amount of secret chemicals is so minimal, they pose no health risk that would require labelling.

If there was a risk, fragrance companies would work with Health Canada to ensure products are safe, he said.

Non scents

Number of chemicals not listed on fragrance product labels

American Eagle Seventy Seven – 24

Chanel Coco Mademoiselle – 18

Britney Spears Curious – 17

Giorgio Armani Aqua Di Gio (for men) – 17

Old Spice After Hours Body Spray (for men) – 16

Quicksilver (for men) – 16

Calvin Klein Eternity for Men – 15

Bath & Body Works Japanese Cherry Blossom – 14

Calvin Klein Eternity (for women) – 14

Halle by Halle Berry – 13

Hannah Montana Secret Celebrity – 13

Victoria’s Secret Dream Angels Heavenly – 13

Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce (for men) – 11

Jennifer Lopez JLO Glow – 11

AXE Body Spray for Men Shock – 10

Clinique Happy Perfume Spray – 9

Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue – 7

Posted by Philip Dru on 3/27/09 •

Is the U.S. about to lose its status as the dominant global superpower? Will the dollar collapse? If so, what would become the new global reserve currency and what would replace U.S. hegemony in a new world order?

American troops are currently stationed in over 150 countries around the world and have been actively engaged in combat since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan was provided by the 9/11 attacks.

A second front in the U.S. “war on terror” was opened in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. As well these military expenditures, the U.S. has an outstanding national debt of $10.8 trillion and rising.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama has outlined a timetable for complete U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq by 2011, he has ordered an increase of 17,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. With no clear end in sight to U.S. military engagement and with the U.S. national debt growing at an accelerating rate, it seems reasonable to ask whether or not the U.S. might be irreversibly overextending itself.

What does “new world order” mean? There are two distinct variations. Both expressions – a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power and the advent of a cryptocratic or totalitarian world government – have relevance.

The global geopolitical climate is changing rapidly and appears to be on the verge of a realignment. This has become more apparent since the start of the world financial crisis, which finds its roots in the U.S. economic downturn.

So how would a new world order emerge? It seems that the global population would only be willing to accept the implementation of a new world order, in either form, in the event of a major global crisis, such as the complete economic collapse of the United States of America.

The U.S. is at the heart of the global economy because the U.S. dollar is currently the reserve currency of the world. Oil, gold and all major commodities are measured in U.S. dollars. If the U.S. were to collapse in the same way that Iceland and Latvia already have, the whole world would be affected. A new world order would need to be formed that no longer relied on U.S. global hegemony.

Many experts believe that this is not only possible, but likely. According to Professor Willem Buiter, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee who is now at the London School of Economics, “There will, before long … be a global dumping of U.S. dollar assets, including U.S. government assets… The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the U.S. materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally.”

Other economic gurus agree. Peter Schiff, an American economic commentator and president of the stock brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital Inc. was mocked by economist Art Laffer, when he accurately predicted, in 2006, that the U.S. housing market “bubble” would burst. Schiff now predicts that gold will climb to $2,000 per ounce in response to the U.S. dollar dropping “like a stone” and losing its status as the global reserve currency.

Schiff was also an economic adviser to Ron Paul during his 2008 presidential campaign. Paul has been articulating similar concerns regarding the U.S. financial system for over 30 years, and advocates the legitimization of gold and silver as currency, as well as the elimination of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. This he says, “will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy.”

Paul sees the Federal Reserve as the main culprit in perpetuating and exacerbating the current U.S. financial crisis: “Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people.” He has repeatedly introduced a bill to the U.S. Congress that would allow for the auditing of the Federal Reserve Board and provide transparency into its dealings, to no avail.

Meanwhile, the man who accurately predicted the stock market crash of 1987 and the collapse of the Soviet Union has an intriguing prediction that goes even further. Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, has forecast that by 2012 there will be a revolution in the U.S., accompanied by food riots and tax rebellions.

So, with this in mind, who or what could replace the United States as the world’s dominant player?

One possibility is that the United Nations will take on the role of a global government. This theory seems to be supported in a speech by then-president George H. W. Bush before Congress on March 6, 1991, following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

“…We can see a new world coming into view,” said Bush. “A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘world order’ in which ‘the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …’ A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”

Until recently, the advent of a global government seemed unrealistic, and reserved for conspiracy theorists. But since the acknowledgement by then-president George W. Bush in September 2008 that the United States is indeed “in the midst of a serious financial crisis”, there have been numerous calls for a “new world order” by global leaders and prominent intellectuals.

In January, Henry Kissinger told CNBC reporters that the current world economic crisis is a “great opportunity” for President Barack Obama to help form a “new world order.”
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown actually began the call for a new world order before the acknowledgement of the current financial downturn.

Speaking in June 2007, Brown said: “I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created.”

The British leader has continued to press for a new world order since that speech. Even a few weeks ago he declared the need for a “global new deal.”

“Britain and America may be separated by the thousands of miles of the Atlantic, but we are united by shared values that can never be broken. And as America stands at its own dawn of hope, I want that hope to be fulfilled through us all coming together to shape the 21st century as the first century of a truly global society.”

Could this “truly global society” be the same society that Bush Sr. spoke of, with the UN fulfilling “the historic vision of its founders”?

It is certainly possible, but would be rather difficult to implement. The government of every nation in the world would either have to willingly surrender sovereignty to the United Nations or be forced into doing so by the use of military force. Both options are utterly improbable -unless an unpheaval on a massive scale resulted in a new-found willingness by the big players in the global arena to submit to an international body.

The only such event that seems even remotely likely is the end of Western global dominance and the transfer of global hegemony to the Eurasian powers. Perhaps it would not be a “global government”, but a “new world order”, with the central power of the world residing in Asia.

This seems to be the most realistic scenario, particularly as China is the largest creditor to the U.S. If the Chinese government decided to dump all of its U.S. dollars, the entire U.S. economy would collapse overnight.

But would China do that? The motivation would be two-fold; firstly, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s “inflationary policies” (as described by Ron Paul) devalue the U.S. currency to the point that China no longer has an incentive to hold U.S. dollars, and secondly, China sees an opportunity to become the dominant player in the new world order.

Perhaps this is the scenario that Buiter envisions when he describes a “global dumping of U.S. dollar assets.” If the Chinese government were to abandon the U.S. dollar it would certainly trigger such a “dumping” of U.S. assets.

In fact, just last week China’s premier hinted that Beijing is concerned about its creditor-debtor relationship with the U.S.:

“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States. I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”

In addition, the Kremlin last week called for the creation of a “supranational reserve currency” to be on the agenda at the upcoming G20 meeting in London. Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, has expressed a similar desire for a new global reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.”

China and Russia have both experienced severe economic downturns since September 2008, but both blame the U.S. for initiating the global crisis.

If such a currency were to be formed, one that was “disconnected from individual nations,” it is possible that some form of global bank would be the creditor. According to Zhou Xiaochuan, the International Monetary Fund is one potential candidate for this role. The U.S. president, meanwhile, has said that he does not support a global currency.

Looking at history, there is only one circumstance under which a very large and diverse population would be willing to accept such a massive override and restructuring of the global order. That circumstance is chaos.

The collapse of the United States of America would certainly create the chaos necessary to justify the formation of a new global reserve currency and ultimately a new world order, with its central power residing in Eurasia.

By Brendan O’Neill

It is UN World Population Day on Saturday 11 July, when various United Nations bodies will try to convince us that population growth is the cause of much of the planet’s economic and environmental crises. Here, we publish an edited version of a speech given by spiked editor Brendan O’Neill in London on 3 July, in which he argued against all attempts to curb human numbers.

Today, I want to argue that there should be absolutely no limits on population growth and no attempt whatsoever to cajole, coerce or convince people into having fewer children. I hope that in my lifetime the human population on Earth will reach the tens of billions, and it will not be a problem if, in the future, it rises to hundreds of billions.

The reason I say this is because our attitudes to the population level fundamentally reflect our attitudes to human ingenuity. The population debate is frequently dressed up in demographic and scientific clothing, but really it is a political issue, reflecting different political attitudes. Where you stand on population today tells us a lot about where you stand on the idea of progress, of civilisation, and of humanity itself.

It’s worth asking what drives the population-control and population-reduction lobby. These people have been around for a few centuries and their arguments have changed over time. For one of the first population scaremongers, Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century, the main problem was that if too many people were born then there wouldn’t be enough food to feed them. He vastly underestimated the ability of industrialised society to create more and more food.

In the early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments: some claimed that there were too many Africans and Asians, who might weaken the power of white European nations.

More recently, the population-control lobby has adopted environmentalist arguments. It now says that too many people are demanding too much of Mother Earth, using up all of her resources and destroying her biodiversity. Some greens even refer to humans as a ‘plague on the planet’ and a ‘pathogenic organism’. In other words, humanity is a disease making the planet Earth sick.

The fact that the presentational arguments of the population-reduction lobby can change so fundamentally over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows that this is a political outlook in search of a social or scientific justification. It is an already-existing prejudice, held by certain kinds of people, which looks around for the latest trendy or respectable ideas to clothe itself in.

It is time we questioned, if not demolished, some of the supposedly respectable ideas that today’s Malthusians surround themselves with. There are three areas in particular I want to look at: the question of resources, the question of space, and the idea that human numbers cause poverty and destitution.

First on resources: the argument frequently made by Malthusians is that there is a fixed, finite amount of resources on this ball of gas and water that we call Earth, and that if the human population reaches a certain number then those resources will be all used up.

This is a deeply disingenuous depiction of what a resource is. There is little fixed about resources. The question of what is a resource and what isn’t a resource changes over time, depending on the level of development reached by any particular human society.

Resources are not some numerically measurable thing; they have a history and a future. For example, for much of human history the oceans were considered a terrible obstacle. People looked at them as barriers, as the unpredictable destroyers of human communities; the most they dared to do was live on the coastlines of seas and oceans. But when humans reached a higher level of technological and social development, really from the sixteenth century onwards, the oceans came to be seen as a means of travel and a deep well of resources. Today we travel across the oceans and fish and mine within them for food and oil.

Similarly, coal was previously seen as the key resource for Western industrialised societies. Now it is seen as less important. However, it is still important for a developing society like China. The nature of that resource has changed. Likewise, for the vast majority of human history, uranium was not a serious resource. There was very little that people could do with it. Ancient human communities, going back 2,000 years, used uranium to make glass look more yellow. That was all! Today, in our potential nuclear age, uranium can be used to create vast amounts of light and energy and to power whole cities.

Resources are not in any serious sense fixed; their discovery and usage depends on the nature of society itself. Who knows what we will consider to be a resource in the future? Who knows how much further we can push our use of uranium or when we will discover that other elements, too, might transform human existence?

On space, it is simply not true that the Earth is overcrowded, as you will frequently hear Malthusians argue. Humans inhabit only tiny parts of this planet.

Take Britain as an example. Lots of people, from environmentalists to the British National Party, describe Britain as overcrowded, with too many people, too many migrants, too many chavs, or whatever your prejudice is.

In fact, only about seven to eight per cent of Britain is ‘settled’ - that is, only about seven to eight per cent is built environment. Forty-six per cent of British land is used for agriculture (and much of this could be done far more intensively), 29 per cent of it is semi-natural, and 11 or 12 per cent of it is woodland. There is plenty more space in Britain for more people, if we were serious about building new cities across the country.

On a worldwide scale, one American writer has estimated that you could fit every human being on Earth into the Former Yugoslavia, where they could live quite comfortably. This planet is not remotely overcrowded. With the right vision and determination, and with a view of resources not as finite things that don’t really belong to us but as elements we should fully explore and exploit, we could comfortably multiply the current human population 100 times over.

Paul Joseph Watson
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Billionaire globalist George Soros told the Financial Times during an interview that China will supplant the United States as the leader of the new world order and that America should not resist the country’s decline as the dollar weakens, living standards drop, and a new global currency is introduced.

Asked what Obama should discuss when he visits China next month, Soros stated, “This would be the time because I think you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, financial world order,” adding that China was a reluctant member of the IMF who didn’t make enough of a contribution.

“I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in, they have to own it in the same way as the United States owns…the current order,” said Soros, adding that the G20 was a move in this direction.

Soros said that there was a flight from currencies across the board, and that this is why the price of commodities, notably gold and oil, were generally rising. He also stated that an orderly decline of the dollar was “desirable” and that the entire system needed to be reconstituted towards a global currency.

“You need a new currency system and actually the Special Drawing Rights do give you the makings of a system and I think it’s ill-considered on the part of the United States to resist the wider use of Special Drawing Rights, they could be very useful now when you have a global shortfall of demand, you could actually internationally create currency through Special Drawing Rights,” said Soros, explaining that this was already in process after the IMF injected an allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) equivalent to $250 billion into the global economy.

Soros also stated that richer countries were already transferring wealth to poorer countries via SDR’s, with the IMF paying for the half per cent transaction cost.

Soros said the world would have to go through a “painful adjustment” following the decline of the dollar and the introduction of a global currency. Reading between the lines, he essentially threatened to kill the dollar completely if the United States did not get on board with the global currency.

Soros predicted that China would become the new engine of the global economy, replacing the U.S., and that this would slow economic growth and reduce living standards. Soros characterized the United States as a drag on the global economy because of the declining dollar.

Time Magazine’s coverage of the swine flu scare has a noticeable subplot - preparing Americans for draconian measures to combat a future pandemic as well as forcing them to accept the idea of mandatory vaccinations.

In an article entitled How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes of 1976, the piece discusses how dozens died and hundreds were injured from vaccines as a result of the 1976 swine flu fiasco, when the Ford administration attempted to use the infection of soldiers at Fort Dix as a pretext for a mass vaccination of the entire country.

Despite acknowledging that the 1976 farce was an example of “how not to handle a flu outbreak,” the article still introduces the notion that officials “may soon have to consider whether to institute draconian measures to combat the disease.”

Later we discover exactly what this will entail, namely “when to institute mass vaccination programs,” according to Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and a historical consultant to the CDC on flu pandemics.

Markel notes that the less politically combustible situation in America today compared to the post-Watergate era of Ford would make such draconian measures more achievable.

[efoods]

“Even so, he says, citizens still need to trust that the government is working for the greater good,” adds the article. “The American public has to be forgiving and patient and do [their] part too,” according to Markel.

Americans would indeed have to be very trustworthy and ultimately forgiving in taking a vaccine by government decree manufactured by a company that was been caught red-handed contaminating their vaccines with far deadlier viruses than swine flu.

As we reported yesterday, Baxter International confirmed over the weekend that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the deadly swine flu virus that is blamed for scores of deaths in Mexico and has emerged as a threat in the U.S., reports the Chicago Tribune.

As reported by multiple sources last month, including the Times of India, vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus were distributed to 18 countries last December by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

Since the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible, this leaves no other explanation than that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to weaponize the H5N1 virus to its most potent extreme and distribute it via conventional flu vaccines to the population who would then infect others to a devastating degree as the disease went airborne.

These are the people we are supposed to “trust” and “forgive” according to Time Magazine and Markel when the federal government breaks down our door, guns drawn and dripping needle in hand.

• By Nicholas Thompson 

The Wall Street Journal has a wham-bam headline Wednesday morning: Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies.

Scary stuff! The story, while quite interesting, doesn’t give much direct evidence, however, that would allow us to evaluate how real the threat is. All the specific quotes and information about the danger  (”Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system”) come from unnamed officials — who could easily be hyping the threat to generate business for the companies, because they always hype the threat of Chinese hackers, or because they want to spur Congress into increasing budget outlays for their departments.

The one specific quote, from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, is so vague that it’s essentially meaningless: “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

Still, the issue is fascinating and worth pursuing. As it happens, as part of Wired’s April cover story on the grid, we also investigated some of the dangers faced — particularly asking whether making the grid smart would make it more vulnerable. If everything is interconnected, and if it communicates by IP, it may be both easier and more tempting to hack. The journalist who did this, Bryant Urstadt, found some fascinating stuff.

For starters, there have already been some frightening episodes:

• Last January, a CIA analyst confirmed that in an unnamed country, multiple-city blackouts were caused by hackers in an attempted blackmail scheme. [This sounds like the same attack mentioned in the middle of the WSJ piece.]
• Ira Winkler, a former NSA employee, and now a security consultant who specializes in simulating terrorist attacks on networks, has been breaking into the power grid for years. In 2007, at the request of one power company, he compromised its system in a day. The simulation, he says, was called off because it was “too successful.”
• In 2007, the Associated Press obtained a Homeland Security video which showed a small electric generator being disabled remotely. In the video the generator coughs, sputters, and then dies in a smoky paroxysm. HS
  labeled it an example of “the Aurora vulnerability,” but declined to elaborate on what exactly that vulnerability was, though more details were given to power-plant operators.

And here’s how Urstadt describes the problem:

The grid is going to introduce a huge host of unknowns, primarily with the roll-out of wireless, networked smart meters able to monitor and control appliances, and to talk to utilities and to one another over their own protocols and through an IP-based standard.
These meters will likely be built from off-the-shelf components, and will be vulnerable to compromise. One fear, for example, is a hacker setting a meter to tell the utility that it needs more power, and also telling other meters to say the same. Or a hacked network could turn on every air conditioner in a city at the same time. Too many power requests, real or fake, could trip a shutdown at a utility, and then lead to a “cascade” of shutdowns at other utilities, such as caused the
2003 blackout.

So what can we do to prevent that? Urstadt reports on one very interesting solution: “[R]esearchers like Mike Assante, the chief security officer for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry group, are working to make sure that when a control computer makes a decision, it assumes that some portion of the meters are compromised. Other lines of defense will include ‘dissimilar’ protocols for wireless meters in a neighborhood, which is roughly like making sure that not everyone in town uses the same cellphone carrier; the ability to quarantine meters; and the design of firmware that can easily be reset to a normal state.”

Another possible danger is what’s called a “man-in-the-middle” attack. This is where

an invader gets between a conversation, purposely changing messages. Hackers might take an alarm from a voltage sensor in the field and convert it into an all-clear message, so that an operator screen reads normal, when, in fact, all hell is breaking loose.
Stopping such hits will require the usual authentication codes, but also redundant meters. On the power-delivery end, it will require systems that can differentiate a normal request for increased power from an orchestrated series of requests.

Urstadt’s ultimate conclusion is that: “In the long run, a few hacker-generated blackouts may be a fair price of the expected increase in efficiency and decrease in pollution from the smart grid — though it’s going to be hard to feel that way when some dork kid blows out the power on the Eastern Seaboard.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/china-and-russi/#ixzz0iqyDkxbV

Posted by Philip Dru on 5/03/09 • 

The ongoing swine flu epidemic may have you wishing you had taken that flu shot this season, but some doctors say you may be better off without it.

“Since the 12th century, the most commonly used treatment for a cold or the flu is chicken soup,” said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, one of the guest speakers at the U.S. Autism & Asperger Association’s regional conference on Saturday at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill. “If you think we have anything more sophisticated now, think again.”

Eisenstein, who addressed conference attendees from Illinois through video conferencing, discussed the effectiveness of vaccines and their theorized connection to autism.

“The more people receive the flu vaccine, the more deaths there are,” said Eisenstein, citing various scientific studies. “Now that doesn’t mean that the two are related, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”

Eisenstein didn’t limit his criticism to the flu shot.

“We perpetuate the myth that vaccines are the answer,” Eisenstein said.

Although vaccines have been credited with the virtual elimination of various diseases, Eisenstein said there’s no evidence to support vaccines were the cause.

Among the diseases that have virtually disappeared are measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis and whooping cough and vaccines are not available to prevent any of them, Eisenstein said.

What has an impact, he said, is vitamin D and probiotics.

“We started using it at our practice this year and we got amazing results,” Eisenstein said. “I met doctor after doctor who have had the same results.”

Eisenstein said that patients who got a high dose of vitamin D for three days at the onset of a cold recovered much faster than patients who didn’t.

He cited a study in which vitamin D was administered to some of the 104 participants. About 24 of the participants in the group that had received no vitamin D reported having a cold during the winter months, Eisenstein said. Only two to three participants who had a received a lower dose of vitamin D reported having a cold and none of the participants who was given a higher dose of the vitamin became ill, he said.

Unlike vitamin A, which is readily obtained from a variety of foods, vitamin D is harder to come by, Eisenstein said.

That’s why he recommends that children get vitamin D supplements.

Exposure to the sun for 15 to 20 minutes every day, without sunblock, can give the body a much needed vitamin D boost, Eisenstein said.

“Vitamin D is clearly part of the answer, but I can tell you the complete answer is not vaccinations,” Eisenstein said.

Nancy Gualario, of Colts Neck, runs an advisory group for parents with special needs children.

“I like to come to these things and bring the information back to the parents,” Gualario said.

One of Gualario’s triplets was diagnosed with autism at age 2, she said.

“I’ve been doing some of these therapies and have had tremendous success,” she said.

Lisa McLaughlin also has a son with autism and came from Virginia to attend the conference, which concludes today.

“I read about some of these interventions online and I wanted to find out more,” McLaughlin said.

Posted by Philip Dru on 7/25/09 •

The Bush administration in 2002 considered sending U.S. troops into a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb to arrest a group of terror suspects in what would have been a nearly unprecedented use of military power, The New York Times reported.

Vice President Dick Cheney and several other Bush advisers at the time strongly urged that the military be used to apprehend men who were suspected of plotting with al Qaida, who later became known as the Lackawanna Six, the Times reported on its Web site Friday night. It cited former administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The proposal advanced to at least one-high level administration meeting, before President George W. Bush decided against it.

Dispatching troops into the streets is virtually unheard of. The Constitution and various laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

According to the Times, Cheney and other Bush aides said an Oct. 23, 2001, Justice Department memo gave broad presidential authority that allowed Bush to use the domestic use of the military against al-Qaida if it was justified on the grounds of national security, rather than law enforcement.

Among those arguing for the military use besides Cheney were his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials, the Times reported.

Opposing the idea were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

Bush ultimately nixed the proposal and ordered the FBI to make the arrests in Lackawanna. The men were subsequently arrested and pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.

Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, told the Times that a U.S. president had not deployed the active-duty military on domestic soil in a law enforcement capacity, without specific statutory authority, since the Civil War.

By Paul Craig Roberts

President Obama called on the Iranian government to allow protesters to control the streets in Tehran.  Would Obama or any US president allow protesters to control the streets in Washington, D.C.?

There was more objective evidence that George W. Bush stole his two elections than there is at this time of election theft in Iran.  But there was no orchestrated media campaign to discredit the US government.

On May 16, 2007, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Bush regime official John Bolton  told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

We are now witnessing in Tehran US “attempts to foment a popular revolution” in the guise of another CIA-orchestrated “color revolution“.  

It is possible that splits among the mullahs themselves brought about by their rival ambitions  will aid and abet what the Telegraph (May 27, 2007) reported were “CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”  It is certainly a fact that the secularized youth of Tehran have played into the CIA’s hands.

The Mousavi protests have set up Iran either for a US puppet government or for a military strike.  The mullahs are in a lose-lose situation. Even if the mullahs hold together and suppress the protests, the legitimacy of the Iranian government in the eyes of the outside world has been damaged.  Obama’s diplomatic approach is over before it started.  The neocons and Israel have won. 

The US intervention and the orchestrated disinformation pumped out by the western media are so transparent that it is impossible to believe than any informed person or government is taken in.  One cannot avoid the conclusion that the West wants the 1978 Iranian Revolution overthrown and intends to use deception or violence to achieve that goal.

It has become increasingly difficult to believe that facts and truth motivate the western news media.  For the record, I would like to point out a few of the most obvious oversights, to use a euphemism, in the Iran reporting.

According to a wide variety of news sources (for example, London Telegraph, Yahoo News, The Globe and Mail,  Asbarez.com, Politico),  “Before the polling closed Mr. Mousavi declared himself ‘definitely the winner’ based on ‘all indications from all over Iran.’ He alleged widespread voting irregularities without giving specifics and hinted he was ready to challenge the final results.” 

Other news sources, which might not have been aware that the polls were kept open several hours beyond normal closing time in order to accommodate the turnout, reported that Mousavi made his victory claim the minute polls closed. 

Mousavi’s premature claim of victory before polling was over or votes counted is clearly a preemptive move, the purpose of which is to discredit any other outcome.  There is no other reason to make such a claim. 

In Iran’s system, election fraud has no purpose, because a small select group of ruling mullahs select the candidates who are put on the ballot.  If they don’t like an aspiring candidate, they simply don’t put him on the ballot. 

When the liberal reformer Khatami ran for president, he won with 70% of the vote and served from 1997-2005. If the mullahs didn’t defraud Khatami of his win, it seems unlikely they would defraud an establishment figure like Mousavi, who was foreign minister in the most conservative government, and is backed by another establishment figure, Rafsanjani.

As Mousavi was seen as Rafsanjani’s man, why is it “unbelievable” that Ahmadinejad defeated Mousavi by the same margin that he defeated Rafsanjani in the previous election?

Neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman let the cat out of the bag that there was an orchestrated “color revolution” in the works.  Before the election, Timmerman wrote: “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.”  Why would protests be organized prior to a vote and announcement of the outcome?  Organized protests waiting in the wings are not spontaneous responses to a stolen election.

Timmerman’s organization, Foundation for Democracy, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for the explicit purpose of promoting democracy in Iran. According to Timmerman, NED money was funneled to “pro-Mousavi groups who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”

The US media has studiously ignored all of these highly suggestive facts.  The media is not reporting or providing objective analysis.  It is engaged in a propagandistic onslaught against the Iranian government.

We know that the US funds terrorist organizations inside Iran that are responsible for bombings and other violent acts.  It is likely that these terrorist organizations are responsible for the burning buses and other acts of violence that have occurred during the demonstrations in Tehran.

A writer on pakalert.wordpress.com says that he was intrigued by the sudden appearance of tens of thousands of Twitter allegations that Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian election.  He investigated, he says, and he reports that each of the new highly active accounts were created on Saturday, June 13th. “IranElection” is their most popular keyword. He narrowed the spammers to the most persistent: @StopAhmadi @IranRiggedElect @Change_For_Iran. He researched further and found that on June 14 the Jerusalem Post already had an article on the new Twitter.

He concludes that the new Twitter sites are propaganda operations.

One wonders why the youth of the world, who do not protest stolen elections elsewhere, are so obsessed with Iran.

The unexamined question is Mousavi and his motives.  Why would  Mousavi unleash demonstrations that are obviously being used by a hostile West to discredit the government of the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the US puppet government?  Are these the actions of a “moderate”?  Or are these the actions of a disgruntled man who kept his disaffection from his colleagues in order to gain the opportunity to discredit the regime with street protests?  Is Mousavi being manipulated by organizations funded with US government money?

John Bolton laid out the US strategy.  First we try to destabilize the regime.  Failing that, we strike them militarily. 

As this strategy unfolds, Iranians will pay in lost independence or in blood for the naiveness of its secularized youth and for the mistake the mullahs made in trusting Mousavi.

It’s the 2009 presidential election in Iran and opposition leader Mir-Houssein Mousavi declares victory hours before the polls close, insuring that any result to the contrary will be called into question. Western media goes into overdrive, fighting with each other to see who can offer the most hyperbolic denunciation of the vote and President Ahmadenijad’s apparent victory (BBC wins by publishing bald-faced lies about the supposed popular uprising which it is later forced to retract). On June 13th, 30000 “tweets” begin to flood Twitter with live updates from Iran, most written in English and provided by a handful of newly-registered users with identical profile photos. The Jerusalem Post writes a story about the Iran Twitter phenomenon a few hours after it starts (and who says Mossad isn’t staying up to date with new media?). Now, YouTube is providing a “Breaking News” link at the top of every page linking to the latest footage of the Iranian protests (all shot in high def, no less). Welcome to Destabilization 2.0, the latest version of a program that the western powers have been running for decades in order to overthrow foreign, democratically elected governments that don’t yield to the whims of western governments and multinational corporations.

Ironically, Iran was also the birthplace of the original CIA program for destabilizing a foreign government. Think of it as Destabilization 1.0: It’s 1953 and democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh is following through on his election promises to nationalize industry for the Iranian people, including the oil industry of Iran which was then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA is sent into the country to bring an end to Mossadegh’s government. They begin a campaign of terror, staging bombings and attacks on Muslim targets in order to blame them on nationalist, secular Mossadegh. They foster and fund an anti-Mossadegh campaign amongst the radical Islamist elements in the country. Finally, they back the revolution that brings their favoured puppet, the Shah, into power. Within months, their mission had been accomplished: they had removed a democratically elected leader who threatened to build up an independent, secular Persian nation and replaced him with a repressive tyrant whose secret police would brutally suppress all opposition. The campaign was a success and the lead CIA agent wrote an after-action report describing the operation in glowing terms. The pattern was to be repeated time and time again in country after country (in Guatemala in 1954, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Serbia in the 1990s), but these operations leave the agency open to exposure. What was needed was a different plan, one where the western political and financial interests puppeteering the revolution would be more difficult to implicate in the overthrow.

Enter Destabilization 1.1. This version of the destabilization program is less messy, offering plausible deniability for the western powers who are overthrowing a foreign government. It starts when the IMF moves in to offer a bribe to a tinpot dictator in a third world country. He gets 10% in exchange for taking out an exorbitant loan for an infrastructure project that the country can’t afford. When the country inevitably defaults on the loan payments, the IMF begins to take over, imposing a restructuring program that eventually results in the full scale looting of the country’s resources for western business interests. This program, too, was run in country after country, from Jamaica to Myanmar, from Chile to Zimbabwe. The source code for this program was revealed in 2001, however, when former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz went public about the scam. More detail was added in 2004 by the publication of John Perkin’s Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which revealed the extent to which front companies and complicit corporations aided, abetted and facilitated the economic plundering and overthrow of foreign governments. Although still an effective technique for overthrowing foreign nations, the fact that this particular scam had been exposed meant that the architects of global geopolitics would have to find a new way to get rid of foreign, democratically elected governments.

Destabilization 1.2 involves seemingly disinterested, democracy promoting NGOs with feelgood names like the Open Society Institute, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy. They fund, train, support and mobilize opposition movements in countries that have been targeted for destabilization, often during elections and usually organized around an identifiable color. These “color revolutions” sprang up in the past decade and have so far successfully destabilized the governments of the Ukraine, Lebanon, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, among others. These revolutions bear the imprint of billionaire finance oligarch George Soros. The hidden hand of western powers behind these color revolutions has threatened their effectiveness in recent years, however, with an anti-Soros movement having arisen in Georgia and with the recent Moldovan “grape revolution” having come to naught (much to the chagrin of Soros-funded OSI’s Evgeny Morozov).

Now we arrive at Destabilization 2.0, really not much more than a slight tweak of Destabilization 1.2. The only thing different is that now Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media are being employed to amplify the effect of (and the impression of) internal protests. Once again, Soros henchman Evgeny Morozov is extolling the virtues of the new Tehran Twitter revolution and the New York Times is writing journalistic hymns to the power of internet new media…when it serves western imperial interests. We are being asked to believe that this latest version of the very (very) old program of U.S. corporate imperialism is the real deal. While there is no doubt that the regime of Ahmadenijad is reprehensible and the feelings of many of the young protestors in Iran are genuine, you will forgive me for quesyioning the motives behind the monolithic media support for the overthrow of Iran’s government and the installation of Mir-Houssein “Butcher of Beirut” Mousavi.

What’s going on here is not the “magic of the marketplace,” but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers.

June 25, 2009  |

Like a Fourth of July crescendo of fireworks, our gasoline prices are rising higher and higher. While this is tough on consumers, we’re assured by a covey of tongue-clucking industry analysts that nothing can be done about it, for it’s simply the law of supply and demand in action — so suck it up, and pay up.

But hold your BPExxonMobilShellChevron horses right there. Supply and demand? The supply of crude oil has risen this year to its highest level in nearly two decades, even while the demand for gasoline has dropped dramatically, having fallen this month to a 10-year low. Let’s see — supply up, demand down. That’s a classic market formula for cheaper prices at the pump. Yet our prices have steadily moved up, rising by two-thirds since the beginning of the year (and by 60 cents a gallon in the past two months alone).

What’s going on here is not the “magic of the marketplace,” but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers. What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don’t operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands — but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil. They’re playing an electronic casino game in a global “dark market” of exotic derivatives and credit swaps.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because this is the same game that Wall Street played with subprime mortgages, leading to the present crash of our economy. And, yes, these are the exact same banksters that you and I are presently bailing out with our trillions of tax dollars.

Yet, there they go again. By pooling money from sheltered hedge funds, sovereign state funds, offshore accounts and other super-wealthy investors, speculators like Goldman and Morgan have quietly been buying trillions of dollars worth of oil derivatives — which essentially are bets that oil prices will rise to a certain level by a certain date.

Unlike those investors who actually purchase contracts for future delivery of oil, there is no limit on how much money these gamblers can put into the oil market. Nor do they have to report to anyone how much they have bet, even though their massive infusion of money is totally and artificially distorting the real value of petroleum.

As CNBC television’s top energy correspondent, Sharon Epperson, reported last month, “It’s this money flow — rather than the fundamental supply-demand data — that’s driving oil prices higher.”

Why is this allowed? Because the Commodity Futures’ Modernization Act of 2000 included a provision that was quietly tucked into the law by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, specifically prohibiting any regulation of such commodity-based derivatives. Among the enthusiastic backers of this legalized thievery were Robert Rubin, the Wall Streeter who was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, and his protege, Larry Summers, who is now Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor.

This bipartisan cabal created a speculative mechanism that’s presently sucking money out of your pocket with every gallon of gas you pump. Meanwhile, every dollar that Goldman, Morgan and the rest use to inflate oil prices is a dollar they are not investing in real economic activity that could create middle-class jobs.

Of course, Wall Street culprits are trying to keep their involvement hush-hush. When a McClatchy newspaper reporter approached Goldman Sachs about it, the response was terse: “Goldman Sachs declines to comment for your story.”

As Woody Guthrie wrote in a song about outlaws: “Some’ll rob you with a six-gun/Some with a fountain pen.” It’s time to regulate Wall Street’s gas-pump thievery — and to put a few of the perpetrators in jail.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Lesley Wroughton

The International Monetary Fund denied media reports on Wednesday that it had discussed possible loans with Lebanon’s Hezbollah before parliamentary elections next month.

The Financial Times and New York Times on Wednesday reported that Hezbollah had held talks with the IMF and the European Union to secure financial support for Lebanon if its alliance won the election.

“The IMF has not negotiated with Hezbollah members or sympathizers in Lebanon over a possible loan,” the IMF said in a statement.

It said an IMF mission visiting Beirut in March for annual consultations on economic policies met with the country’s main political parties as part of standard outreach activities that also include talks with nongovernmental groups.

During the talks, it met with Abed Al-Halim Fadlalah, then deputy director of an economic research center that has close ties with Hezbollah, to explain the IMF’s visit and “gather support toward economic reforms,” the IMF said.

The IMF conducts annual economic consultations with all of its 185 member countries.

“The Fund has a long history of meetings with political parties and/or parliamentarians,” the IMF said. “Many Fund missions do this as part of their outreach activities.”

“By no means were future Fund arrangements discussed,” it added.

Lebanon votes on June 7 in a poll that pits an alliance including Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, which Washington classifies as a terrorist organization, against an anti-Syrian coalition now holding a majority in parliament.

Many experts predict gains for Hezbollah and its allies. Russia on Wednesday said the international community must recognize the result of Lebanon’s general election regardless of who wins a majority.

Hezbollah is the only Lebanese faction to remain armed after Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war and that has involved itself in domestic politics.

In a statement at the end of the visit on April 15, the IMF mission said Lebanon’s financial system had so far weathered the global financial crisis and shown a “remarkable resilience” to the global downturn.

The IMF has supported the country under an Emergency Post-conflict Assistance program since 2007.

(Editing by Will Dunham)

by Tristan McConnell in Berbera, Somalia

The first time Farah Ismail Eid set out to hijack a ship off the coast of Somalia his boat was easily outrun. On the second occasion he kept pace but his boarding ladder was too short. On the third attempt he was captured.

Eid, 38, from Eyl on the Somalia coast, is one of an estimated 1,500 fishermen-turned-pirates who have made the seas between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean the most dangerous shipping route in the world.“I believe the title of pirates should be given to those who come to our waters illegally,” he told The Times after shuffling into a room at the British colonial-era Mandheera prison, 40 miles south of Berbera, wearing plastic sandals, a T-shirt and a length of printed material wrapped around his skinny waist.

Eid may have not proved himself much of a pirate, but others have attacked at least 114 ships this year, 29 successfully. About 20 ships and 300 crew are being held hostage, while dozens of international warships now patrol the Gulf of Aden.

International forces have been wringing their hands over how to deal with captured pirates. In many cases they are simply released after their equipment is destroyed — but Eid and his four-man crew were tried and given 15-year prison terms. “When we capture the pirates we bring them to justice,” said Ahmed Ali, the deputy head of the ill-equipped Somaliland Coastguard.

Mandheera prison is straight out of a spaghetti western: hot wind blows dust devils across a scorched plain surrounded by rocky, scrub-covered hills. A few eucalyptus trees offer scant shelter from the 40C (104F) heat. Barred windows in the 6m (20ft) walls let little light into the sweltering cells that are home to 633 prisoners, including the five pirates caught in September last year. Another 31 have been captured and brought here since.

Eid blamed foreigners for the rise of piracy. He said he had a couple of boats and a fish-trading business in Eyl until illegal trawlers ruined the fishing: “The fish we caught used to be enough for the local people and enough to sell, but now there is not even enough to eat.”

Foreign ships started dumping toxic waste in Somali waters, he said, and one day he found shoals of fish floating. “We thought we were lucky. We collected the fish and stored them in refrigerators, then later we discovered they were like plastic.

“These problems fell on us like rain,” he said, his right leg twitching as he chewed on a mouthful of qat, a narcotic leaf enjoyed by many Somalis.

Eid said that fishermen bought guns and set out to exact informal taxes on the foreign owners of illegal trawlers. The kidnapping business proved lucrative, with ransoms of hundreds of thousands of dollars regularly paid out — and any noble motives were soon forgotten as pirate gangs launched attacks on cruise liners and cargo ships, including those carrying food for Somalia’s starving millions.

He justified the attacks as a way of highlighting their concerns. “We are quite aware that what we are doing is wrong, but this is a way of shouting to the world,” he said. “The world should ask: ‘Are these people wrong or were they wronged themselves?”

Eid has his own solution to the problem. “The international community should come and talk to us; they should compensate us for the problems caused to our waters by illegal fishing and toxic waste,” he said. “Then, until the government is in place in Somalia, we could protect the ships as they cross our waters.”

The international community is unlikely to take him up on the offer.

August 23, 2009|Bob Drogin

RICHMOND, KY. — Behind armed guards in bulletproof booths deep in the Kentucky woods, workers have begun pouring the foundations for a $3-billion complex designed to destroy America’s last stockpile of deadly chemical weapons.

The aging arsenal at the Blue Grass Army Depot contains 523 tons of liquid VX and sarin — lethal nerve agents produced during the Cold War — and mustard, a blister agent that caused horrific casualties in World War I.

The Obama administration has pushed to speed up the disposal operation after decades of delay, skyrocketing costs and daunting technical problems. The arms must be destroyed by April 2012 under international treaty and by December 2017 under federal law. But the Pentagon notified Congress in May that, even under what it called an accelerated schedule, it would not finish the job until 2021.

A senior administration aide downplayed the diplomatic fallout of missing the arms control deadline.

“No one accuses the United States of willfully seeking to violate the treaty for purposes of maintaining our chemical weapons arsenal,” said Gary Samore, the White House coordinator for weapons of mass destruction. “Everyone understands this is a technical problem.”

For now, more than 100,000 poison-filled munitions are stacked like bottles of wine in 44 dirt-covered concrete bunkers beside the construction site. Intruders are kept out by a double row of chain-link fences topped with cameras, coiled razor wire and signs warning, “Use of Deadly Force Authorized.”

About a third of the World War II-era igloos are so dilapidated that green plastic sheeting was recently draped over them to keep the rain out. Some of the rockets, warheads, mortar rounds and artillery shells inside are just as old — and are leaking as well.

On Monday, trace amounts of mustard vapor were detected inside a munitions bunker. That followed a sarin leak in another igloo in June, and separate sarin and mustard leaks in May.

“We do experience leakers from time to time at very, very low levels,” said Lt. Col. David Musgrave, commander of the Blue Grass Chemical Activity, as the storage site is called. He said no toxic plumes have escaped the igloos or threatened the surrounding community.

Local emergency response officials, however, have stepped up precautions.

Madison County recently obtained federal funds to give 40,000 special radios to residents and businesses here in the lush, rolling hills of central Kentucky, home to horse farms and tobacco fields. The radios will sound an alarm if a major accident occurs.

I’m happier now,” said Kent Clark, the county judge-executive. “People have finally stood up and noticed that we live next to the country’s deadliest stockpile.”

Blue Grass is one of six Army installations where chemical weapons are stored. Four currently are incinerating their stockpiles. In the 1980s, Pentagon officials estimated a $600-million price tag to eliminate the toxic arsenals. The estimated cost today: $40 billion.

“We wound up having to build many more destruction facilities than originally planned,&#