Barack Obama New President of the United States

The day history was made.

Obama to Become First Black President
By Russell Goldman

November 4 2008

Barack Obama cruised to victory Tuesday night in an historic triumph that promised change, overcame centuries of prejudice and fulfilled Martin Luther King’s dream that a man be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character

Obama was projected to surpass the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency when polls closed on the West coast at 11p.m. ET.

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-lll, gather at Grant Park in Chicago, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008.

(Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo)

Obama, a first term senator will little experience on the national level, made history by defeating Sen. John McCain, one of the country’s most experienced politicians and a bona fide war hero.

Obama’s history making victory was fueled by his soaring rhetoric, his themes of change and hope in uncertain economic times, as well as deep dissatisfaction with the last eight years of the Bush administration.

Obama’s campaign was historic for reasons beyond his skin color. He raised more money than any other candidate in U.S. history, and had to first defeat Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the party’s favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

Voters from a broad swath of America’s diverse ethnic enclaves and economic communities celebrated Obama’s win Tuesday night, particularly those in the African-American community.

Thousand’s flocked to Chicago’s Grant Park to await the election results. In Harlem, New York the black community took to the streets to celebrate.

“I’ve been an Obama supporter from the beginning,” said Sophie Logothetis, an elementary school history teacher who waited an hour to get into Grant Par, “and I just had to be here.”

In Grant Park, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was seen crying when election results were announced.

In Harlem, Jeff Mann, a 51-year-old construction worker said, “You can’t be anything but joyful. Obama is going to change the world,” said Jeff Mann, 51, a construction worker in Harlem.

Crucial to Obama’s victory was winning all of the states that Democrat John Kerry won four years ago and flipping of Ohio, New Mexico Colorado, Virginia, Iowa and Florida states that all voted Republican in 2004.

Obama, 47, the son of a black man from Kenya and white woman from Kansas, served just two years in U.S. Senate before declaring his candidacy and ultimately taking on one of the most experienced politicians in America.

A moderate conservative who tried to stress his credentials as a maverick and distance himself from an unpopular president, McCain, 72, was unable to motivate his base and overcome his associations with Republican incumbent President Bush.

Obama built a coalition grounded on a base of near unanimous support from black voters, who made up 13 percent of the national vote. Obama also won nearly 70 percent of the vote of Hispanics. While John McCain was able to win white voters by 54-44 percent, Obama made inroads with them as well.

Voters shifted to the Democratic Party in this election, with Republican turnout falling to its lowest point since 1980.

By almost every quantifiable measure — from the $640 million Obama raised in the month of October, to the nearly $1 billion combined the campaigns have spent, to 9 million newly registered voters — records have been shattered.

Yet another record may fall once the number of voters is tallied. Turnout was heavy throughout the day and could surpass previous voting turnout records. The existing records were set in 2004 when more than 122 million Americans went to the polls, and in 1960 when 64 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot.

Each of the candidates was a dark horse who pundits predicted would never make it past the first weeks of their parties’ respective primaries. Obama ultimately beat out Democratic favorite Sen. Hillary Clinton for the nomination, the first glimmer of future success.

In perhaps the greatest and most calculated flip-flop of his campaign, Obama forwent public financing allowing him to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from donors contributing small amounts of money, proving that he was not just a neophyte who could make good speeches but a scrappy politician from Chicago.

McCain too changed course. In the final weeks of the campaign, the Arizona senator struck a more negative tone and along with Vice Presidential running mate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska began attacking Obama on his relationships and judgment. In the third and final presidential debate, McCain assailed Obama for his relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers and his campaign began aggressively using auto-dialed calls to voters, known as “robocalls,” to relay negative messages, frequently focusing on the Democrat’s experience and readiness for the White House. That strategy didn’t seem to achieve the desired effect, with voters responding in polls in the race’s final weeks that they were turned off by the negative ads and attack tactics. The economy is nationally the overwhelming issue for voters casting their ballots in today’s historic presidential election, according to early exit polls. Despite the possibility of Obama becoming the nation’s first black president, the turnout of black voters as a percentage of the national vote was at 13 percent, just slightly higher than in 2004, according to early exit polls. The economy has long dominated the campaign, and voters’ concerns became heightened when the major banks and credit markets needed a massive federal bailout to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. Four in 10 voters said their family’s financial situation is worse than it was four years ago, and eight in 10 are worried the current economic crisis will hurt their family finances over the next year.

McCain Votes and Keeps on Campaigning

Across the country voters are turning out in what could be historic numbers, in some cases spending hours in serpentine lines waiting for a chance to vote. In an indication of how intensely fought this campaign has been, both candidates kept holding large rallies and television interviews even as voters swarmed to their polling sites. In the past, presidential candidates have halted their campaigns on Election Day.

McCain voted early in Phoenix before heading off for some last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts in New Mexico and Colorado, two states where the GOP presidential pick had trailed but hoped to pull out narrow victories. “I promise you if I’m elected president I will never let you down,” an energized McCain told a crowd in Colorado. “I think we ought to hear one more time ‘drill, baby drill,'” he cheerfully suggested and the crowd obliged with the campaign’s chant.

Palin on Troopergate: “We Did Nothing Wrong”

After voting at a Chicago school, Obama spent the morning campaigning in Indiana before returning to Chicago to conduct television interviews broadcast via satellite to the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada and Missouri. Obama voted with his two young daughters in Chicago before he plunged into a final round of campaigning in Indiana. “I voted,” the Democratic presidential candidate said, holding up the validation slip he was given after turning in a ballot at the Shoesmith School in his Chicago neighborhood. Obama voted at the same polling station as William Ayers, the former 1960s radical who became a flashpoint in the campaign when McCain accused Obama of “palling around” with a domestic terrorist. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan also voted at that site. Farrakhan became a GOP target after he endorsed Obama.

Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, voted in her hometown of Wasilla and then joined McCain in Phoenix to watch the results. After voting, Palin noted that the result would be historic, implying that the voters would elect either the country’s first black president or the first female vice president. “It bodes so well the progress our country is making,” Palin said. She also said she was delighted that she was cleared of any wrongdoing in the firing of Alaska’s top police officer. “You didn’t believe us,” she told reporters. “I told you we’d done nothing wrong.” Today’s vote caps a long-fought and record-breaking campaign between two candidates who were both written off early in their candidacies and whose races for the White House have been nothing short of history making.

Record Setting Campaign Comes to an End

“The election is historic by any standard,” said Matthew Dowd, an ABC News political consultant. “We’re seeing a great generational shift.” By almost every quantifiable measure — from the $640 million Obama raised in the month of October, to the nearly $1 billion combined the campaigns have spent, to 9 million newly registered voters — records have been shattered. Yet another record may fall before the day is over as turnout is heavy and could surpass previous voting turnout records. The existing turnout records were set in 2004 when more than 122 million Americans went to the polls, and in 1960 when 64 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot.

Source

History was made in the US tonight.

McCain pledges to help Obama lead

Sen. John McCain on Tuesday urged all Americans to join him in congratulating Sen. Barack Obama on his projected victory in the presidential election.

Sen. John McCain congratulates Sen. Barack Obama on his projected victory.

“I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face,” McCain said before his supporters in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much, and tonight, I remain her servant,” he said.

McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, was standing with him, but she did not speak.

McCain called Obama to congratulate him, Obama’s campaign said.

Obama thanked McCain for his graciousness and said he had waged a tough race.

President Bush also called Obama to congratulate him.

With his projected win, Obama will become the nation’s 44th president and its first African-American leader.

Obama will address the country from a rally in Chicago, Illinois, at midnight.

Supporters in Chicago cheering, “Yes, we can” were met with cries of “Yes, we did.”

Obama’s former rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton said in a statement that “we are celebrating an historic victory for the American people.”

“This was a long and hard fought campaign but the result was well worth the wait. Together, under the leadership of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and a Democratic Congress, we will chart a better course to build a new economy and rebuild our leadership in the world.”

The Illinois senator is projected to pick up a big win in Virginia, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964.

Obama also is projected to beat Sen. John McCain in Ohio, a battleground state that was considered a must-win for the Republican candidate.

Earlier in the evening, senior McCain aides were growing pessimistic about the Arizona senator’s chances.

Going into the election, national polls showed Obama with an 8-point lead.

In addition to the presidential contest, voters were making choices in a number of key House and Senate races that could determine whether the Democrats strengthen their hold on Congress.

Former Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, will win a Senate seat in Virginia, CNN projects. He will replace retiring Republican Sen. John Warner.

Incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a Republican, is projected to lose her North Carolina seat to Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. 

Dole is the wife of 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole.

CNN also projects Democrats will win two other Senate seats currently held by Republicans. In New Hampshire, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen will win over incumbent John Sununu, and in New Mexico, Democrat Tom Udall will defeat Republican Steve Pearce.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell held onto his seat in Kentucky.

Delaware voters re-elected Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, to his seventh term.

CNN’s Ed Henry said there were lots of long faces in the lobby of the McCain headquarters at the Arizona Biltmore hotel as McCain allies watched returns showing Senate Republicans losing their seats. 

Voters expressed excitement and pride in their country after casting their ballots Tuesday in what has proved to be a historic election.

When the ballots are counted, the United States will have elected either its first African-American president or its oldest first-term president and first female vice president.

Poll workers reported high turnout across many parts of the country, and some voters waited hours to cast their ballots. 

Reports of minor problems and delays in opening polls began surfacing early Tuesday, shortly after polls opened on the East Coast.

The presidential candidates both voted early in the day before heading out to the campaign trail one last time. 

Tuesday also marked the end of the longest presidential campaign season in U.S. history — 21 months — and both candidates took the opportunity to make their final pitch to voters.

As McCain and Obama emerged from their parties’ conventions, the race was essentially a toss-up, with McCain campaigning on his experience and Obama on the promise of change. But the race was altered by the financial crisis that hit Wall Street in September.

Although most of the attention has been focused on the presidential race, the outcome of congressional elections across the country will determine whether the Democrats increase their clout on Capitol Hill.

Few predict that the Democrats are in danger of losing their control of either the House or the Senate, but all eyes will be on nearly a dozen close Senate races that are key to whether the Democrats get 60 seats in the Senate.

With 60 votes, Democrats could end any Republican filibusters or other legislative moves to block legislation.

Many political observers also predict that the Democrats could expand their majority in the House.

Voters will also weigh in on a number of ballot initiatives across the country, many of them focused on social issues like abortion and affirmative action.

Source

Last count

Obama 349   McCain 163

You need 270 to win the Presidency.

Congratulations  to Barack Obama.

Transcript of Obama’s Victory Speech

Sen. Barack Obama spoke at a rally in Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois, after winning the race for the White House Tuesday night. The following is an exact transcript of his speech.

Barack Obama speaks at a rally in Chicago, Illinois, after winning the presidency.

Obama:

Hello, Chicago.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.

A little bit earlier this evening, I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Sen. McCain.

Sen. McCain fought long and hard in this campaign. And he’s fought even longer and harder for the country that he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.

I congratulate him; I congratulate Gov. Palin for all that they’ve achieved. And I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation’s next first lady Michelle Obama.

Sasha and Malia I love you both more than you can imagine. And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.

And while she’s no longer with us, I know my grandmother’s watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight. I know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my sister Maya, my sister Alma, all my other brothers and sisters, thank you so much for all the support that you’ve given me. I am grateful to them.

And to my campaign manager, David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best — the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.

To my chief strategist David Axelrod who’s been a partner with me every step of the way.

To the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you’ve sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.

It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory.

And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education.

There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.

In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Let’s remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.

Those are values that we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those — to those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: We support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright: Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves — if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

Source

Video of Victory Speech

Icesave victims are about to get their frozen cash back

November 5 2008

By Angela Jameson

About 200,000 Britons whose savings were frozen because of the collapse of Icesave, the internet bank owned by Landsbanki, of Iceland, will be told this week how they will get their money back.

Savers will be sent a letter from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) explaining that most will be compensated before the end of the month.

Savers have been unable to access their accounts since October 7, when Landsbanki went into receivership in Iceland. The deposits will be paid into savers’ linked bank accounts, which they would have set up at the time that the Icesave account was opened.

The compensation will follow the formal approval by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of a $2.1 billion (£1.32 billion) two-year loan for Iceland within the next few days, which is expected to restore confidence to the country’s battered banking system.

The Government guaranteed that all deposits held by British retail savers would be returned, even those above the £50,000 limit.

The FSCS said that savers would receive an e-mail this week explaining what is happening. Soon after, another e-mail will be sent containing more details and instructions on how to use a short electronic procedure to complete the transfer.

The process is expected to be phased to manage the flow of payments through the system and for security reasons.

The Government has guaranteed an estimated £4 billion in savings held by the banks but local authorities, charities and police authorities are waiting to learn whether the protection will be extended to cover them.

Separately, the Conservative Party is stepping up the pressure for an independent inquiry into the Government’s handling of the Icelandic financial crisis.

The move follows claims that the Treasury had been secretly monitoring developments for six months before a banking collapse that threatened British savers and local authorities with heavy losses.

Mark Hoban, Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury, called for a wide-ranging independent inquiry into the way the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority reacted to the turmoil in the island’s banking business in the lead-up to the decision to intervene and protect retail depositors.

Source

Jobs in peril as the relationship between banks and companies worsens, says CBI

November 5 2008

Christine Buckley, Gary Duncan and Sam Coates

The CBI yesterday gave warning that the relationship between businesses and their lenders has deteriorated sharply and that job losses will be acute this winter if the banks fail to lend (see Commentary, facing page).

The warning came amid heightened tensions over banks’ lending and their apparent failure to supply enough credit to small businesses and to pass rate cuts on to mortgage borrowers.

John Cridland, Deputy Director-General of the CBI, told MPs that if businesses were denied adequate credit this winter, employers would be forced into sharp cuts in jobs and investment. Relations between banks and business had suffered badly because of the financial crisis, he told the Commons Business and Enterprise Select Committee.

MPs were told that the crisis had caused banks to be less willing to make lending decisions based on specific companies’ circumstances.

The Federation of Small Businesses said yesterday that there had been no improvement whatsover in bank lending since political pressure on the banks to maintain lending, led by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, began to build last month.

Alistair Darling has insisted that those banks being recapitalised by the Government should maintain the availability of lending at 2007 levels. However, bankers privately say that his assurance is virtually meaningless.

Mr Cridland said: “Over the winter, there will be significant refinancing by a high number of businesses and we really need to see banks become more open to business.”

He added: “One of the worst consequences [of the credit squeeze] is the relationship between businesses and their banks.”

Mr Cridland said: “Firms are unable to borrow their way through the downturn as in other slowdowns over the last decade.” The CBI is calling for a one-point rate cut by the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee tomorrow, but Mr Cridland said that CBI members were not expecting to see the benefits of cheaper rates immediately because interbank lending rates needed to fall further first.

Evidence of strains from the credit crunch emerged in Bank data revealing that businesses are drawing on deposits held with banks as they tap into reserves amid the loan drought. The Bank’s adjusted figures showed that funds on deposit from nonfinancial businesses fell by £7.5 billion in the third quarter, the third successive quarterly fall. The fall in companies’ cash on hand in bank deposits afflicted all the main sectors of the economy, with a record year-on-year fall of 5 per cent for services firms and a record 3.8 per cent drop for property companies.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, suggested UK banks were embarrassing Gordon Brown on the world stage by failing to pass on rate cuts. On a business delegation in Dubai with the Prime Minister, he said: “One of the things that has struck me going round the Gulf is the extent to which our own British PM is now being looked to as someone who will lead the rest of the world out of this mess. If we can’t even have a response in our own country to his moves, to his decisiveness, that will come as a surprise to many.”

The British Bankers’ Association said: “High street lending rates have to reflect what it costs banks to fund loans, whether from customers’ deposits or from interbank borrowing.”

Source

Also

• Banking crisis has roots in Brown reforms

• Brown gets tough over banks’ lending freeze

Afghan veterans more likely to suffer from mental illness

British frontline troops nine times more prone to psychological trauma

PA

Remembrance crosses placed at Westminster Abbey yesterday to honour the fallen

British forces who served in Afghanistan are nine times more likely to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder than comrades who have not been sent to war, a report from the Ministry of Defence shows. Iraq veterans are six and half times more likely to be affected by the condition than others who were not there.

The study found women in the armed forces suffer almost double the rate of psychological trauma than men, and other ranks are affected more than officers. Overall, nearly 4,000 new cases of mental health disorder were diagnosed last year and that figure, say officials, is expected to rise next year with service personnel now more willing to come forward to talk about their problems.

The study, by Defence Analytical Services and Advice (Dasa), also cautions that the statistics “do not cover the full picture of all mental disorders in the UK armed forces” because the support provided by the “strong culture of comradeship within the armed forces may have served to minimise the number and severity of symptoms experienced by some cases”.

The MoD acknowledged that “there was a statistically significantly higher rate of PTSD among those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan compared with those not deployed there”. Women in the services had mental health disorder assessment at 8.2 per 1,000, double that of male personnel at four per 1,000, and other ranks were diagnosed at 4.9 per 1,000, more than two and half times that of officers at 1.8 per 1,000. Surgeon-Commander Neil Greenberg, senior lecturer in military psychiatry, said he believed that the differences probably related to factors they brought into the services such as social background.

Women comprise 18,100 out of the total strength of 195,100 in the armed forces and have been involved in increasingly important roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five British female soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Sgt Sarah Bryant, of the Intelligence Corps, was killed in Afghanistan five months ago while with the SAS.

The MoD stressed that major progress had been made in diagnosing mental problems and the Medical Assessment Programme (MAP) provided assessments for veterans deployed on operations since 1982. But Gary Williams, 39, who served in the 1991 Gulf War as a 22-year-old sapper, said: “I did go to see the MAP people a few years ago but I got nothing from it. The Gulf Veterans Association has been very good and fixed it for me to have psychological examinations which have been very helpful. The problem is that you have to fight the state every part of the way to get something like disability benefits and your military pension.”

Mr Williams, from Weaverham, Cheshire, added: “We were told one in three of us would die. We were told to expect chemical and biological weapons and we used to look at each other and wonder who would make it home alive and who would go back in a coffin. And, of course, we had Scud attacks. I have been diagnosed with medical problems. I have aches and pains and dizzy spells. I can’t go far without a stick and I have flashbacks, snapshots of the things that happened to us. It is not a good way to live.”

Source

Mentally Ill Inmate Gets Nine Months in Solitary

October 30 2008

Frank Horton spent nine months in solitary confinement  — without getting exercise, taking a bath or seeing a doctor.

Word of what happened in the prison leaked out a few months ago.

But, until now, we could only imagine how horrible it must have been. Our chief investigative reporter Phil Williams obtained video from inside the walls.

And you can decide for yourself: was it punishment — or was it torture?

It occurred at the Metro Nashville Detention Facility. Operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, it’s home to some 1,100 inmates.

The video shows one of those inmates, a mentally ill man emerging after nine straight months of solitary confinement — no longer able to speak a language anyone could understand.

“The man’s hair, his beard was matted up,” said Patrick Perry, the correctional officer who blew the whistle. “I had never seen an inmate live in those kinds of conditions.”

Originally convicted on drug charges, Frank Horton failed to check in with his parole officer.  That’s how he ended up at the CCA facility in December 2005.

Horton’s mother couldn’t believe her ears when she heard about her son’s condition. “They could be talking about someone else, not my son,” Cytherea Braswell said.

His grandmother was equally shocked. “We never heard nothing else other than ‘Well, he’s in there and he’s doing OK,'” said Mary Braswell.

But one video clip — a month after his arrival — shows the first signs of trouble. After a fight with a then-cellmate, CCA reports show that the cellmate told officers that Horton was “hearing voices” and believed people were “trying to kill him.”

“An actual CCA intake form noted that Mr. Horton had had a history of psychological and mental illness and probable schizophrenia was noted on those forms,” said the family’s attorney, John Ray Clemmons of the law firm Blackburn & McCune.

So guards locked him up in solitary, and Horton became more and more difficult to control. Finally, as another video clip shows, he began to refuse to leave his cell at all.

Clemmons said, “Instead of treating Mr. Horton for the illness which was causing him to act in this manner, they punished him.  They sprayed him with chemical agents. They put him in solitary and segregated confinement for extended periods of time with no medical treatment.”

Video clips — obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates — show Horton repeatedly being sprayed with inflammatory chemical agents.

Then, in May 2007, they stopped trying to force him out.

“Frank Horton went from being a beast to being, you know, barely able to speak to me,” the former correctional officer, Patrick Perry, testified in a videotaped court deposition.

Perry was CCA’s overnight supervisor at the facility. He says the inmate spiraled downward, as the days in his darkened, filthy cell turned into months.

Still, prison officials refused to forcibly remove him. Perry claimed it was because they feared too many incidents involving force could jeopardize their yearly bonuses.

“They would go to Frank’s door, look in on Frank, [ask] ‘Frank, you all right?’ As long as he was living and breathing in that cell, they kept moving.”

Horton’s grandmother, Mary Braswell, added, “I would call every so often and talk to the counselor. And she always said, ‘Well he’s doing OK.'”

She said that Horton’s family kept being told he had not authorized them to visit him.

Then, one night, Perry stopped by Horton’s cell. “I tried to converse with him, and he was speaking gibberish to me.  And, at that time, that’s when I made up my mind to go the Health Department.”

Finally, Horton was brought out of solitary — after health officials intervened and after the family, who’d gotten wind of the situation, hired an attorney to go see him.

Clemmons recalled, “Mr. Horton was walking in circles around the cell, completely nude with nothing but what I would call an old barn quilt, just a thick blanket draped over him.”

CCA officials refused to answer questions about exactly what happened.

But get this: after Perry went outside the company to get help for Horton, CCA suspended him — eventually giving him a choice to accept a transfer or resign.

Perry resigned, and CCA paid him a severance to keep quiet.

“Frank’s situation was the tip of the iceberg,” Perry said, under oath. He explained that there were also other mentally ill inmates who, like Horton, were neglected.

Still, prison bosses pressured guards to keep secrets from the government monitor assigned to the facility. “Yeah, I made a mistake of talking to [Davidson County Sheriff’s Department monitor] Jimmy Hale one time about something. I got my ass chewed for it royally,” Perry added.

Mary Braswell echoed, “To me — they didn’t want anybody in there to see.”

And Frank Horton’s family said they believe there’s a good reason CCA didn’t want anyone to see what become of their loved one.

“They was treating him worse than an animal because if it was an animal somebody would have went to his rescue,” Braswell said.

CCA has replaced the warden at that facility. But a spokesperson said that, because the company faces a lawsuit, they can’t comment on whether they think what happened to this inmate was right or wrong.

Horton’s lawyer got a court order to have him moved to a state prison hospital.  He’s now on medication and, the family said, showing signs of recovery.

Source Video at the site.

No US assurance to halt missile strikes in Pakistan

November 4 2008

Attacks difficult to explain, says Zardari

* Petraeus meets Gen Kayani and Gen Majid
* Pakistan seeks help for Bajaur displaced
* US team informed about security needs

ISLAMABAD: United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus did not guarantee an end to US drone attacks in Pakistani in a meeting with Pakistan’s top leaders on Monday.

Pakistan’s most high profile protest yet came as Gen Petraeus met with top civil and military leaders in his first visit here since he took over his new position last week, amid claims that it could signal a shift in strategy in Afghanistan.

“Pakistani leaders told General Petraeus it is not possible to ask our people to support the war on terror when our sovereignty is violated every day,” sources familiar with the interaction told Daily Times. US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher accompanied Petraeus.

According to an official statement, Zardari warned the US general the missile strikes were ‘counterproductive’ and “difficult to explain by a democratically-elected government”. “It is creating a credibility gap,” he said.

“The president said that US leadership has affirmed respect for Pakistan’s territorial integrity,” the statement said.

Boucher and Petraeus also met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and National Security Adviser Mehmood Ali and senior US and Pakistani officials were also present.

An Inter-Services Public Relations statement said Petraeus separately met with Gen Kayani and Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Tariq Majid.

Gen Majid told the US delegation the two countries needed a “consensus strategy to deal with violent extremism” that “keeps in view the local perspective”, the statement said.

Earlier, Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar and Petraeus “stressed the need for enhanced co-operation to eliminate the scourge of terrorism”.

Bajaur displaced: Sources said Mukhtar also sought international help for the people displaced because of the military operation in Bajaur Agency.

Security needs: The American delegation was also briefed on Pakistan’s security needs to enhance its operational capability to fight terrorism.

Gen Patraeus said that they would consider the requests. sajjad malik/agencies

Source

NATO must stop violation of airspace

November 1 2008

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said in Istanbul that NATO forces in Afghanistan must stop violation of Pakistan’s airspace, terming it counter-productive that negatively impacts Pakistan’s efforts in the war on terror.The Prime Minister was talking to Foreign Minister of Belgium, Karel De Guelt who called on him on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

They discussed matters of mutual interest, including means for enhancing bilateral cooperation. Karel De Guelt, on behalf of the government and people of Belgium, extended heartfelt condolences and sympathies to the prime minister over the loss of precious human lives and damage to property caused by the devastating earthquake in Balochistan.

He said his government and people share the grief and sorrow of Pakistani people in this hour of tragedy.

The Prime Minister expressed his gratitude to the Belgium Foreign Minister for these sentiments and said that the government of Pakistan is mobilizing all available resources to provide speedy relief to the affected people.

During the meeting, they exchanged views on further promoting the existing bilateral relations.

They also discussed regional and global issues particularly the problem of terrorism and extremism being faced by Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The prime minister said that Pakistan was paying a heavy price for being a frontline state in the war on terror.

He pointed out that because of the two million Afghan refugees in the country, Pakistan was facing a severe socio-economic and law and order situation.

He called upon the world community to fully cooperate with Pakistan in its efforts in the war on terror.

Source

No more US attacks to be tolerated

November 1 2008

MIRANSHAH: A tribal elder of Pakistan People’s Party in North Waziristan has asked the United States to stop incursions in the agency, saying no more US drone missile attacks in the agency will be tolerated.

The party’s agency vice president Malik Ghulam Khan Madakhel said this on Friday while addressing a press conference here.

The PPP tribal leader also urged the federal government to implement parliament’s in-camera session declaration and start dialogue process in the tribal areas for ending the ongoing unrest.

He said during the USSR-Afghan war, Russian army had carried out several missile attacks in the tribal areas but did not succeed in fulfillment of its nefarious designs. Like Russian army, the US forces had also started missile attacks in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan but it, too, would never succeed in its wicked designs, he said.

He called the US drone attacks in tribal areas as challenge to the government of Pakistan and its sovereignty. He called upon the government to take practical steps for stopping US attacks in tribal areas and end military operation there. to pave way for resolution of the ongoing unrest in the tribal region through dialogues.

Source

UK Opposes US incursions inside Pakistan

ISLAMABAD,

October 31 2008

Once again strongly opposing persistent US incursions inside Pak territory the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw Friday urged the United States to respect the sovereignty and integrity of vital allies.

Talking to ARY One World, he said United Kingdom believes that the consent of Pakistan is must before initiating any action inside its territory.

Strongly favouring the continuation of Indo‑Pak dialogue process, he added that his country fully supports the negotiated settlement of disputes.

“United Kingdom applauds Indo‑Pak endeavours to extract an acceptable resolution of disputes especially the resolution of Kashmir issue through peaceful means,” he said.

He expressed heartfelt sympathies with the victims of earthquake on behalf of UK’s Queen, government,people and vowed to provide all possible help to affectees of natural disaster.

Responding to a question he said his country favours establishment of independent judiciary in Pakistan.

Source

£1.5bn bank cuts – but where will axe fall?

November 4 2008

By Lindsay McIntosh

LLOYDS TSB has been warned not to disregard the “human consequences” of the planned HBOS takeover, after revealing the deal will bring an extra £500 million of cuts – but refusing to give details of job losses.

Branches, call centres and entire subsidiaries are likely to disappear, increasing synergy savings to 50 per cent more than the expected £1 billion but provoking the wrath of the unions.

Lloyds issued a document to shareholders yesterday, revealing the name of the superbank to be Lloyds Banking Group.

The circular also proposes raising directors’ pay by £1 million – although this is to cover an expanded board. And it states that, although the bank will take government financing to boost its capital, it plans to be free of this by next year, allowing it to pay dividends to shareholders.

In a separate trading statement, the bank warned of a sharp fall in profits and said it expected to write off a further £300 million, while HBOS reported total write-downs of more than £5 billion from its risky assets in its statement.

Sir Victor Blank, the chairman of Lloyds and the new entity, says in the circular: “Whilst Lloyds TSB believes that the combination with HBOS will generally provide enhanced opportunities for employees, there will inevitably be some rationalisation of the combined workforce as a result of these initiatives, and consultation will take place with, among others, the recognised trade unions in respect of how this can be best achieved.”

There will be £790 million of cost cutting in UK retail banking, £235 million in insurance and investments, £430 million in wholesale and international banking, and £45 million in other areas, including central and support functions.

However, Eric Daniels, Lloyds TSB’s chief executive, refused to be drawn on job losses – which analysts have predicted could number up to 40,000. HBOS employs about 17,000 in Scotland, and Lloyds about 7,200.

The trade union Unite reacted angrily to the failure to “give any clarity on job security for staff”. Derek Simpson, its joint general secretary, said: “It is now time to start thinking about the human consequences of this takeover. None of the staff at these two banks should be forced out.”

Tavish Scott, the Scottish Liberal Democrats leader, said: “The UK government must ask why losing 20,000 jobs is compatible with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being put in Lloyds TSB’s piggy bank.”

He also claimed a rival offer for HBOS was being dealt with in a “ramshackle and chaotic way” by ministers.

Alex Neil, the SNP MSP who has campaigned against the takeover since it was proposed, described the prospectus as “dishonest”.

He said: “I only hope shareholders will not be hoodwinked into voting for this takeover, which will be bad for Scotland, bad for shareholders, bad for customers and which will jack up unemployment by up to 40,000 people across Britain.”

Investment bank advisers close to the Scottish Government are exploring ways in which a legal challenge could be mounted against the decision by Business Minister Lord Mandelson to waive aside Office of Fair Trading concerns about the effects of the takeover in reducing competition. A key reason for a legal challenge would be to allow time for other possible contenders to work on bids.

The Scotsman told yesterday how Mr Neil was involved in an alternative bid for HBOS, after the newspaper reported on Saturday that a foreign bank was also interested in the group.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, said: “Legally, there is nothing to stop any third party coming through and putting in a bid. If they want to talk to the government about it, they can do that.”

Both Lloyds and HBOS remained insistent the deal would go ahead, with Mr Daniels denying knowledge of any other bids, beyond what he had “read in the newspapers”.

The circular says the Treasury and the Lloyds board will work together to appoint two new independent directors. The Treasury says “it currently has no intentions or strategic plans concerning the enlarged group or its business or employees”.

Brown calls for strong leadership from the US

THE incoming US president must offer more leadership if the world is to bounce back from financial turmoil, Gordon Brown said yesterday.

The Prime Minister insisted that retreating to isolation and protectionism could wreck chances for a quick and sustainable recovery. Delivering a keynote speech in Abu Dhabi on the eve of the vote, he also highlighted the importance of the Middle East peace process to achieving co-operation.

Mr Brown said American influence had been “vital” for moves such as co-ordinating an international 0.5 per cent interest rate cut last month.

“I know that leadership will and must continue,” he said. “The next stage of globalisation will require even more international co-operation, with American leadership crucial to its success.

“In the coming weeks and months, the whole world will want to work closely with America on a shared common agenda to bring growth and jobs back to our economies; to give greater stability to our financial system; to defeat protectionism in favour of free trade; and of course to work for a more secure world – and in the Middle East, peace.”

Mr Brown stressed that all governments had a duty to work together to tackle the fallout from the credit crunch. “Because no country, no matter how big, can solve these challenges alone,” he said. “And people in every country want to know that every possible course of action is being pursued.”

Source

Iceland and Norway criticise UK Labour Party for Scotland jibes

November 4 2008

By Alex Elliott
Icelandic officials urged Labour ministers to stop using Iceland’s financial problems to “undermine the case for Scottish independence”, TimesOnline.co.uk reports.

Even top level politicians have got involved in the bitter slanging match. Cameron Buchanan, Iceland’s honorary consul to Scotland believes Labour has been cultivating the impression that Iceland’s banking crisis proves that small countries cannot manage their financial affairs. Buchanan calls such notions “objectionable”. Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde is said to be “incensed”.

“Politicians are using Iceland’s predicament for their own political ends rather than for the benefit of the Scottish and Icelandic people,” he said.

“The comments from UK ministers about Iceland being insolvent and bankrupt are unmerited and they are not helping the already frosty relations between the two countries.”

The issue centres on SNP leader Alex Salmond’s proud assertion over recent years that an independent Scotland could form part of an ‘Arc of Prosperity’ with other northern neighbours, especially Norway and Iceland.

Ministers, including Gordon Brown, have since lined up to ridicule Salmond’s comments. Scottish secretary, Jim Murphy described it as more like an “arc of insolvency”.

The Norwegian government is also said to be angry at the Labour Party’s apparent use of sensitive international matters to score points against domestic political opponents.

Source

Drugs Commonly Used for Sexual Assault-Rape Prevention Tips

Drugs Commonly Used for Sexual Assault

Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB)

Flunitrazepam (Rohypnol)

Ketamine Hydrochloride (Ketamine)

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or Ecstasy)

Alcohol.  This one of the oldest rape drugs on the market.

Rape Prevention Tips

Protect yourself at home

1. Keep entrances well lit.  If normal lighting is not functioning in an entryway, approach with extreme caution.  It is not uncommon for a criminal to remove, unscrew, or break bulbs in entryways.

2. Check the identification of any sales or service persons before letting them in.  Ask for a photo ID.  If you have any doubts phone the company for verification.

3. Equip your home with peepholes, dead bolts, and chain locks.  If you have a child, add a second peephole at their eye level.

4. Never give the impression that you are at home alone if strangers telephone or come to your door.   Advise your children to do the same.

5. Beware of potential hiding places and avoid them.

6. Keep outside bushes and shrubbery trimmed. Overgrown bushes and trees often provide excellent hiding places for criminals.

7. Plant defensive shrubbery around your home, especially beneath windows. Bushes that feature thorns, such as bougainvillea, or stiff, spiky leaves are not good hiding places for criminals.

8. If you come home and find a door or window open or signs of forced entry, do not go in. Go to the nearest phone and call the police.

Protect yourself in your automobile

1. Keep your car in good working order and gas tank at least half full. Make a practice of filling up your vehicle during the daylight hours. Never let it get so low that you are forced to stop for fuel, particularly at night in an area with which you are unfamiliar.

2. Always have your keys out and ready before leaving a building to approach your car. Fumbling through your purse for keys after you’ve reached your car provides criminals with an opportunity to sneak up on you.

3. Look around and in your car before entering. If you are concerned for any reason, simply walk past your car instead of getting into it.

4. Lock your car door immediately after entering the vehicle. Make this your first action – even before putting the key into the ignition.

5. When stopped in traffic keeps doors locked as usual and leave yourself enough distance from the vehicle in front of you should a criminal attempt to walk alongside your vehicle and gain entry or attack you.

6. Park in well lighted areas and lock the doors, even if you’ll be gone a short time. Check your surroundings before getting out of your car. If something or someone strikes you as out of place or threatening, drive away.

7. When you return to your car, have the key ready and check the front and rear seats and floors before getting in.

8. If you are accosted in a parking lot, away from your own vehicle, consider rolling underneath a nearby auto. It is difficult to force anyone out from under a car.

9. If an attacker does manage to get into your car while you are in it, do everything in your power to exit the automobile.  If you are still behind the wheel, steer your vehicle into a barricade, a pole, a wall — any object that will create a minor accident.  Take advantage while your attacker’s attention has been diverted and exit the automobile.   Run, yell, scream.  Attract attention.

10. Don’t stop to assist a stranger whose car has broken down. Instead, help by driving to the nearest phone and calling police to help.

11. If you get a flat tire, drive carefully on it until you reach a safe, well lighted and well traveled area.  If necessary, better to ruin a tire than gamble with your safety.

12. If you are involved in an accident, stay in your car until police arrive. In minor accidents where the other driver suggests you exchange insurance information, simply hold up your driver license and insurance card against the window.

13. If you are being followed, don’t drive home. Go to the nearest police or fire station and honk your horn. If that is not possible, drive to an open gas station or other business where you can safely call the police. DO NOT leave your car unless you are certain you can get inside the building safely. Try to obtain the license plate number and description of the car following you.

14. If possible, have a cellular phone in your car for use in emergencies.

Protect yourself while walking or jogging

1. Always be alert to your surroundings and the people around you. Walk confidently and at a steady pace.

2. When on the street, walk facing oncoming traffic. A person walking with traffic can be followed, forced into a car, and abducted more easily than a person walking against traffic.

3. Walk close to the curb or on the sidewalk. Avoid doorways, bushes, and alleys.

4. Don’t walk alone at night and always avoid areas where there are few people.

5. Be careful when people stop you for directions. Always reply from a distance, and never go too close to the car. Stay far enough away from the car that you can turn and run easily. An alternative is to simply state, “I don’t know” and keep walking.

6. If you feel you are being followed, walk to a well populated area.

7. If you are in trouble, attract help any way you can. Scream, blow a whistle or yell for help.

8. Trust your instincts. If a particular place, person, or group of persons make you feel uneasy, go a different direction, do not approach.

Protect yourself from date rape drugs

1. Never leave a drink unattended. NEVER.

2. Do not accept a drink from anyone you would not “put your life into their hands.” Remember, any stranger or casual acquaintance could be suspect. Even those people who are mixing or pouring drinks.)

3. If you are feeling sick or dizzy while out socially, go to someone you KNOW and TRUST. If there is no person you can talk to about your condition, call someone on the phone. Never leave alone. NEVER. (The intent of date rape drugs is to get you isolated and then to assault you.)

4. If you think you have been drugged and cannot tell or call someone, call 911. A blood sample can be collected and appropriate tests run.

5. Remember, alcohol greatly increases the effects of these drugs. The mixture could be lethal.

Why Rohypnol, GHB and Ketamine are used in Date Rapes:

1. They are easy to administer. (Stir and dissolve)

2. When victims feel the effects, they often leave and are caught alone and vulnerable.

3. If victims ‘come to’ during an assault, the drugs render them totally helpless and unable to do anything.

4. When victims are raped, they doubt their experience because of the impaired memory of it.

If You Are Attacked

There is no single strategy that always works, so remember these tips:

1. Keep your head. Stay as calm as possible, think rationally and evaluate your resources and options.

2. It may be more advisable to submit than to resist. You will have to make this decision based on the circumstances. Be especially careful if the attacker has a weapon.

3. Keep assessing the situation as it is happening. If one strategy does not work, try another. Possible options, in addition to non-resistance, are negotiating, stalling for time, distracting the assailant and fleeing to a safe place, verbal assertiveness, screaming to attract attention and physical resistance.

4. Stay alert and observant so that you can better describe the attacker and the assault to the police.

5. If forced to get into a vehicle, your life is in danger, so resist at all cost. Attract attention, cause a disturbance or try to disable your suspect, but DO NOT get into the vehicle. Scream, gouge his eyes, kick or knee him in the groin, stomp on his feet, use your elbows. Fight like you never have before. This is the fight for YOUR life and it could become your last one.

General Security Tips

1. Always let someone know where you are and where you may be going. You should report all unusual stalking or following of you by any suspicious persons.

2. Maintain your personal space. Stay alert! If a person moves inside your comfort zone, move away. If that person persists, run.

3. Be alert when leaving stores or shopping malls. This is a time when criminals know you are carrying cash, checkbooks, credit cards, or valuable merchandise.

4. Don’t use outside ATMs at night, or in unfamiliar or unsafe surroundings. This is another time when criminals know you are carrying cash.

5. Avoid filling your arms with packages. You might have to make more trips, but keep one arm and hand free whenever possible.

6. When friends drop you off at home or work, ask them to wait until you are safely inside before leaving. Extend this courtesy to your own friends when driving them to a destination.

Source

Never leave your drinks unattended. Use the Buddie system. I recommend you always have someone who is sober and drug free to watch over you.

Abuse often begins when men batter their pregnant wives

Male batterers use physical violence to win in disagreements and to exercise power and control in their relationships, according to a violence prevention educator.

“They throw a line out and when he knows that she loves him, it’s about reeling her in,” said Stephen McArthur, also a hotline crisis worker with the Battered Women’s Services and Shelter in Washington County, Vt.

He addressed about 20 local professionals and law enforcement officials Friday at the Frederick County Public Safety Building during a domestic violence training program.

The program, hosted by the Council Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, addressed a variety of topics, including gender-based violence, cultural diversity, and the resources of the Winchester-Frederick County Child Advocacy Center.

McArthur, also a certified facilitator for the Intensive Domestic Abuse Program, a batterer intervention program, served as the keynote speaker.

Mark Haufrect, attorney for the Tahirih Justice Center, and Kelly Bober, executive director of the Winchester-Frederick County Child Advocacy Center, were also speaking to the group.

McArthur’s discussion focused on ways to engage men in ending violence against women, as well as the effects that domestic violence can have on children.

He said women often report that the abuse starts during pregnancy. “There are all kinds of reasons why abuse can begin when a woman gets pregnant.”

The feeling of jealousy a man experiences — knowing he is no longer the center of a woman’s attention — is a major factor in domestic violence, he said.

But McArthur stressed that not all batterers are men.

Although some studies show a 10-1 ratio in the severity of men’s physical violence compared to women’s, he said women can also exercise physical, emotional, sexual, and economic abuse over their partners.

Children exposed to a batterer, whether male or female, can be affected just as much by domestic violence.

“Kids who are under this kind of violence are under stress,” McArthur said.

Even when children are not the direct victims, they can be affected physically, emotionally, and socially, he added.

McArthur and the program participants discussed the numerous side effects domestic violence can have on children.

Potential consequences include depression, bed-wetting, lying, becoming withdrawn, and physical and intellectual developmental delays.

“We know that these kinds of behavior happen because of the stress they’re under,” McArthur said.

Providing a sense of safety can help in the healing process for children who have been exposed to domestic violence, he said.

Source

Censoring victims makes them victims again

November 4 2008

By Kimberly Tsao

Movie theaters cut out the racy scenes from the “Sex and the City” movie. Radio stations change James Blunt’s “Beautiful” song lyrics from “I’m fucking high” to “I’m flying high.” Theme parks blur pictures taken during rides because someone gave the camera the finger. Censorship has even infested courtrooms.

Nebraska Judge Jeffre Cheuvront prohibited prosecutors and witnesses from using the words, “rape,” “sexual assault,” “assailant” and “victim” during Tory Bowen’s alleged rape trial, according to 2008 People magazine and Associated Press articles.

Censorship isn’t a power given to judges – it’s an abuse of power in itself.

Bowen’s alleged rapist got off on a mistrial – twice. Perhaps it was because juries at censored trials aren’t notified of judges’ restrictions.

Or perhaps it was because Bowen had to take long pauses so she didn’t violate the judge’s order, thus appearing unsure of herself during her 13-hour testimony. In the end, Bowen took her fight to the Supreme Court, but the justices refused to hear her case last week.

Unfortunately, Bowen’s trial isn’t an isolated case. According to the People magazine article, every state has similar legal principles. In California and Utah, prosecutors aren’t allowed to say “victim” during criminal trials.

What else are they suppose to call them?

According to Merriam-Webster, a “victim” is “one that is subjected to oppression, hardship or mistreatment.” People who’ve been raped undeniably fall under that definition.

Insert “alleged” here. Did those countless years at law school teach defense attorneys nothing? They can say “alleged victim.” Duh.

Censorship is a slippery slope. If the prosecutors can’t say “assailant,” what about “aggressor,” “assaulter,” “goon” or “bushwhacker”? The aforementioned words are all synonyms, so shouldn’t judges ban those terms as well?

If you’re ever raped, forget the law – study the thesaurus. It’ll be your best weapon if you decide to go to court.

In Bowen’s case, Cheuvront permitted the accused and the defense attorneys to call the alleged rape “sex” and “intercourse.”

Perhaps “sex” and “intercourse” aren’t complete opposites of “rape” and “sexual assault,” but they are definitely not synonymous with each other. So why are defense lawyers allowed to substitute the terminologies?

Say “alleged rape” if you want, but call it what it is and in most cases, that isn’t “sex.”

Besides, if we strictly adhere to the law’s so-called rationale, then we could say that thieves only take what they need and that murderers send the dead to a better place. Murderers are population controllers and thieves are Goodwill employees – minus the tax write-offs.

Even if you could disregard the fact that this, like all censorship, is a First Amendment violation, it’s a clearly unfair legal practice.

In a 2007 Slate magazine article, Dahlia Lithwick wrote, “It’s precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently.” Reverently, yes. Justly, no.

The question of fairness should apply to both the accused and the accuser in all criminal trials.

This could be on a Snapple bottle cap: Did you know that most societies still don’t understand rapes?

If they did, they would deal with rapes the same way they deal with robberies and homicides. The fact that most courts don’t even give the words equal treatment speaks volumes about modern societies’ outdated perception of rapes.

However, the argument for censored trials is that words, such as “rape kit,” are “unfairly prejudicial to a defendant,” according to the same articles.

Following that reasoning, judges should censor the defendants from saying “sex” and “intercourse” because those words are unfairly prejudicial to the victim.

“Sex” and “intercourse” imply consent, which isn’t always the case and is often tricky to determine, especially if the victim was intoxicated.

That’s why we have jurors – all 12 of them. They’re smart enough to be registered voters, so they can certainly sift through evidence. If the judge has trust issues, then a viable alternative to censorship would be jury instruction.

Censorship is blind. It has crossed the line without even realizing it.

To the enforcers of censorship, draw a line. It doesn’t need to be straight.

On behalf of Tory Bowen and other women like her, I cry, “Rape.”

To the judges who rape the victims all over again, take a good look at my middle finger.

Source

I think what was done by the judge is to say the very least appalling. Rape  is an act of violence nothing less and should not be censored especially in a court room. If they want to censor anything how about the on line porn sites, there are thousands upon thousands of them and many actually promote rape. Tory deserved a fair trial and obviously didn’t receive it. Rape is Rape. It is a horrid crime. She is a victim. “Victim” isn’t a dirty word.

What about Free Speech?  I guess that only applies to criminals or hate groups like the KKK or Skinheads. The rest of Americans especially victims are not granted the same right obviously.  Rape victims have been  re victimized for years and this practice should be stopped. Justice should be for all, including “VICTIMS”.

How sad that anyone like Tory, should have to censor her testimony to suit the judge or the state.

They should be able to tell the truth as it happened.
Rape reported on campus; sixth of semester
November 4 2008

By Matthew Kimel and Andrea Frainier
The sixth reported rape case at San Jose State University of the Fall semester was filed on Oct. 24, according to the University Police Department media log.

The latest report occurred on the sixth floor of Campus Village Building C, according to two of the reported victim’s roommates.

“She brought up two guys, and she didn’t know them,” said one of the reported victim’s freshman roommates.

The roommates said the two men were first brought into their suite by the reported victim around 9 or 10 p.m. on Oct. 22, and the incident occurred around midnight or 1 a.m. Oct. 23.

“We were (present) but we didn’t hear anything,” said one of the roommates who was informed of the incident at the UPD station the next day.

UPD Sgt. Mike Santos said there have been no found links to any of the six reports this semester.

“The main connection,” he said, “is that all but one are alcohol-related and have occurred in the dorms.”

Santos said the case is still under investigation and no arrests have been made.

Meeghan Harrington, resident life coordinator in Campus Village Building C, said she was not allowed to comment on the situation that occurred in her building. She said University Housing Community Relations Coordinator Kevina Brown was the spokesperson for the situation.

Brown said she could not comment on the situation and anything that “regards to sexual assault should be deferred to University Police.”

Brown, however, said efforts are being made to make sure the assaults don’t continue.

“I would suggest (students) use a buddy system and have someone with them at all times,” Brown said. “We’re really trying to get the word out that students should protect themselves.”

Santos said a safety alert was sent to housing after the third or fourth report was taken for students to become “aware of what’s going on around them.”

Students in Building C were not given a direct notice of the safety alert.

The alert has been posted on a bulletin board and within the elevators.

“I saw some in the elevators,” said one of the reported victim’s roommates, “but there’s not any in the dorm’s hallways or stuff like that.”

Brown said the recent assaults are not “far out of the ordinary from what we have seen in the past.”

“It’s an unusually high number,” she said. “I don’t know if I would say it alarms me, but we want to do anything we can do to make sure it doesn’t continue.”

Julianne Aiello, an undeclared freshman and resident of Building C, said she didn’t see the safety alert, but she said she feels safe on campus, especially in the building.

Dan Shively, a junior psychology major, said he wasn’t aware of the Oct. 24 incident.

“I’m pretty sure most people heard about it though,” he said. “It’s being talked about a lot, being safe and whatnot.”

Even though Building C is a dry building, where alcohol is prohibited, Shively said there have been incidents of people abusing this policy. He said he doesn’t think the situation is out of control.

Shively said students from Campus Village are thinking about starting an escort program in which students could call resident advisers to walk them to and from the dorms.

Source

How McCain Could Win- How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps

November 3 2008

by: Greg Palast

It’s November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the “Bradley effect”: Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats’ Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.

That’s the nightmare. Here’s the cold reality.

Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!

Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year’s Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they’re still “disappeared” from the lists this week.

Swing state Indiana. In this year’s primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state’s new voter ID law. They had drivers’ licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they’d let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn’t cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don’t have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.

Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state’s Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new “verification” process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).

And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.

The Ugly Secret

Here’s an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don’t count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: “spoiled,” unreadable and blank ballots; “provisional” ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.

This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.

That’s what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.

Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation’s vote registries. And that’s just the start of the steal.

If the noncount were random, it wouldn’t matter. But it’s not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter’s ballot will “spoil” or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter’s.

Does that mean the election’s stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot (there’s a link at the end).

How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps

Here’s how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.

Step One: The “Dumpster” Vote – Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots

Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?

The answer is the GOP’s secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he’s going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn’t. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this “reform” law would prevent “another Florida.” Instead, “Help America Vote” Floridated the entire nation.

Here’s how: Help America Vote empowered secretaries of state to remove fraudulent and suspicious voters from the voter registries. It was the trick used by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 when she purged “felon” voters. Except they weren’t felons. And now her GOP confrères are doing it in dozens of states, calling folks felon voters, “inactive” voters, suspect voters, whatever.

Take Colorado. The GOP didn’t exactly trumpet it’s erasing 19.4 percent of voters’ names. It was, as detectives say, “hidden in plain sight,” buried deep inside a US Elections Assistance Commission administrative report, among tables of mind-numbing stats through which I was trawling some months ago. (I used to teach statistics at Indiana University, so I enjoy reading matrices like others enjoy novels.)

For BBC TV and Rolling Stone, I asked the current Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, “Why all the purging?” No answer, not a word, stonewalled even when I flew into Denver and stood outside his door. He was, I guess, too busy preparing to count his own votes as Republican candidate for Congress.

So, where are the Democrats? That’s the really scary part. I spoke with Paul Hultin, appointed by Colorado’s Democratic governor to the state’s Election Reform Commission. Hultin’s a terrific attorney. He knows, and says, that Help America Vote was a law “born in corruption,” but he’s spent his time on Colorado’s voting machines, which he knows are busted. He’s the Democrats’ expert, and he didn’t know that a fifth of his state’s voters had vanished from the voter rolls.

Well, don’t worry. Hultin’s official committee will be holding hearings on the voting debacle in Colorado … on November 19.

Then there’s New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

The company and state choose the purging “algorithms,” those mathematical formulae that, depending on how you tweak them, can go through a voter roll like a hot knife through cream cheese.

So, what happens to the purged voters? They’re told to scram when they arrive to vote or, if they squawk, they get a “provisional” ballot on which they can pretend to vote.

Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don’t get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That’s what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.

Whatever keeps you from getting a real ballot – purged name, for example – keeps you from having the provisional counted as well. That’s because Democrats won the right of every voter to get a provisional ballot, but not the right to have that ballot counted. And how many will go uncounted? Double the 1.1 million loss in 2004 – not just because of the GOP’s purge-mania, but because of a vicious little codicil in Help America Vote that went into effect since the last election …

Step Two: “Verification” (and Elimination) of New Voters

For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say “new” voters, let’s be clear – we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).

So, the Republican game plan is simple: don’t let new voters vote. There are three steps to this block-and-steal tactic. First, under the new law, states can deny new voters registration on the grounds their names can’t be verified against government data files. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not, because we don’t have Soviet-style citizenship files in the US. The Social Security Administration is rejecting nearly half of the names submitted because there is no multi-state compatible tracking system. Of course, the Republicans know that.

New voter verification losses are huge. In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations, a trick discovered by his Democratic successor, Debra Bowen. She told me most of the rejected vote applicants had Hispanic, Vietnamese, Islamic and other “odd” names – odd, that is, for Republicans.

It used to be that you filled out a registration card and, bingo, you were registered. Not any more. That’s also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants. They were victims of strict “matching” algorithms. Other states are also playing the “match” game. The result is voters will find themselves simply missing (or in some states, required to show extra ID – another horror show we’ll discuss below). But don’t worry, a of couple million new voters will get provisional ballots. That way, they can practice filling out their ballots for the day when democracy returns to America.

Step Three: New ID Laws

Karl Rove said, “I go to the grocery store and I wanna cash a check to pay for my groceries I gotta show a little bit of ID. Why should it not be reasonable … at the voting place they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID.” And so, while buying his Pampers, Rove came up with a game-winner for the GOP.

Karl, let me answer your question. The reason, according to several studies by the Bush administration itself, is that lots of folks don’t have government ID. Some are nuns, some are poor, lots are brown or old. I was on Fox TV with Lady Rothschild a couple of weeks ago. The lady, a McCain supporter, approved of the ID requirement – and was truly surprised to find out that some poorer Americans don’t have passports. “Why don’t they?” her Fox-mates asked, incredulous. Well, not every barrio kid has just returned from his estate outside London.

Rove knows that. He certainly knows that, for example, Professor Matthew Barreto of the University of Washington found that 10 percent of white voters in Indiana don’t have the needed ID. And, for blacks, it’s about double – 19 percent lack the ID required to vote. New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million – and that’s way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana’s.

Step Four: Spoiling Ballots

Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn’t like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.

In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, “spoiled,” because the machines lost them, couldn’t read them, mangled them or simply didn’t register them. But it’s not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts – a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican “victory” margin in that state.

Another study shows that Hispanics’ vote choices are six times as likely to fail to be recorded when they vote on computers versus paper ballots.

In the primaries and in 2006, the “spoilage” and blank (”undervote”) totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the “spoilage” total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. (”Spoilage” is not the same as vote tampering. There is a the concern that “black-box” computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That’s another matter completely – and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I’m not including here.)

Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots

You’ve mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.

This time, the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn’t know that. They’re counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope – Got that? – or your vote is toast. I’ve spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes – though he only received one. (Have a mail-in ballot in hand? Then, for God’s sake, walk it in to the polling place or local board of elections. Sign, seal and deliver it in person.)

You may get it right, but historic data suggest that, when combining the FTF games with the usual mail-in cock-ups, Obama will lose another million votes to mail-in disqualifications.

Exit Polls and Exit Stratagems

These millions of uncounted ballots – spoiled ballots, provisional ballots rejected, absentee ballots disqualified – fully explain the difference between exit polls (which, for example, gave Kerry Ohio in 2004 and Gore a win in Florida in 2000) and the official count. Exit pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” They never ask, and can’t know, “Did your vote count?”

How would they get away with it? Well, they begin explaining away how the “pollsters” get it wrong, how pollsters didn’t figure the “Bradley Effect” of lying, racist voters. They’ll tell us the new, young and Black Obamaniacs gave money, went to rallies – but never bothered to vote. But the real reason will never be whispered: They cast votes that just weren’t counted.

Will the election be stolen on Tuesday? No, it’s already been stolen. That is, several million voters are doomed to lose their ballots; most won’t even know it. Overwhelmingly, they are the poor, minorities, new voters – Obama voters. Does that mean McCain’s got it in the bag and you’re helpless? Not at all.

Don’t Steal Your Own Vote

In 2004, I and other investigators wrote, long before Election Day, “Ohio’s stolen.” We were deadly right.

It’s happening again. For six years, the Democratic Party has been snoozing through a quiet, brilliantly executed Republican operation to block, stop and purge voters by the millions. As New Mexico voting rights attorney John Boyd put it, “I don’t think the Democrats get it. All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”

Karl Rove once said, “We have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored glasses.” He wasn’t complaining; he was boasting.

I know that the Obama campaign is not happy that I bring up the issue of a possible theft of the election. They fear voters will be “discouraged” by the possibility that the election is fixed.

Well, frankly, if you’re too bummed out by this recitation of facts and statistics to vote, then maybe you don’t deserve to vote, or to drive or to reproduce. Did Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream … so I’m going back to sleep”?

Votes can’t be saved by “hope” alone. There are simple ways to protect your own vote, from walking in your “mail-in” to refusing a provisional ballot. (You can download the list at StealBackYourVote.org, written with Bobby Kennedy, a professor of law.)

It comes down to this: Can the margin of trickery, vote suppression and ballot destruction – three to six million votes – be overcome? Yes. Because they can’t steal all the votes all the time. Two days before the election, John McCain is down by only 4 percent in some polls. But these are polls of “likely” voters. They exclude first-time and many low-income voters.

So, the answer to vote suppression is for something unlikely to happen – for the “unlikely” voters to simply overwhelm the statistical assumption of their laziness. As I’m sure Mr. Obama, a professor of constitutional law, could tell you: the best legal response to systematic vote suppression is to get off yo’ ass!

Source

Theft of Election 2008 Videos Part 1 and Part 2

Candidates turn tail as Bush legacy leaves Republican brand poisonous

George W Bush

November 2 2008

The spotlight in the US is on the presidential campaign, but it is not the only election taking place there on Tuesday.

Senators in 33 states are fighting for their jobs, and some Republican candidates are doing all they can to distance themselves from their own party.

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, some are turning their tails on the party that got them elected.

It seems George W Bush’s legacy is proving poisonous. Across the country from Norm Coleman in Minnesota to Senator Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina, once secure Republican seats are looking vulnerable.

It has got so bad, some Republican politicians are aligning themselves with the Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

In a video obtained by an American political website, the wife of one Republican congressional candidate tells supporters their campaign has taken a dramatic turn.

With Bush’s approval rating in freefall and Obama’s lead over John McCain hitting double figures, it is not easy being a Republican. Dino Rossi, the candidate for governor of Washington, removed the word ‘Republican’ next to his name and put the less well known initials ‘GOP’ instead.

So if the politicians themselves do not want anything to do with the Republican brand, why should the voters when it is time to choose their president?

Source

A short list of  a few things Bush will be remembered for.

Great management of taxpayers money will not be one of them.
Bush’s Legacy Of Squandering Taxpayer Money

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION

–$142 million wasted on reconstruction projects that were either terminated or canceled. [Special Inspector General for Iraq, 7/28/08]

–“Significant” amount of U.S. funds for Iraq funneled to Sunni and Shiite militias. [GAO Comptroller, 3/11/08]

–$180 million payed to construction company Bechtel for projects it never finished. [Federal audit, 7/25/07]

–$5.1 billion in expenses for Iraq reconstruction charged without documentation. [Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report, 3/19/07]

–$10 billion in spending on Iraq reconstruction was wasteful or poorly tracked. [GAO, 2/15/07]

–Halliburton overcharged the government $100 million for one day’s work in 2004. [Project on Government Oversight, 10/8/04]

KATRINA

–Millions wasted on four no-bid contracts, including paying $20 million for an unusable camp for evacuees. [Homeland Security Department Inspector General, 9/10/08]

–$2.4 billion in contracts doled out by FEMA that guaranteed profits for big companies. [Center for Public Integrity investigation, 6/25/07]

-An estimated $2 billion in fraud and waste — nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June. [New York Times tally, 6/27/06]

–“Widespread” waste and mismanagement on millions for Katrina recovery, including at least $3 million for 4,000 beds that were never used. [GAO, 3/16/06]

DEFENSE CONTRACTS

–A $50 million Air Force contract awarded to a company with close ties to senior Air Force officers, in a process “fraught with improper influence, irregular procedures, glaring conflicts of interest.” [Project on Government Oversight, 4/18/08]

–$1.7 billion in excessive fees and waste paid by the Pentagon to the Interior Department to manage federal lands. [Defense Department and Interior Department Inspectors General audit, 12/25/06]

–$1 trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon, including 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. [GAO, 5/18/03]

Given Bush’s history of gross fiscal mismanagement — including an unprecedented number of no-bid contracts and Bush’s resistance to closing fraud loopholes or increasing oversight of contracts — why should Americans trust another $700 billion to his care? Paul Krugman writes, “Let’s not be railroaded into accepting an enormously expensive plan that doesn’t seem to address the real problem.”

Source

Well the Bailout went through.  Many countries around the world have been affected by a Bush and company made problem.

He leaves a  Debt of about 11 trillion dollars. My he has done well. Hasn’t he?

That would be the tip of the Bush Legacy Iceburg.

Obama’s grandmother dies just before election

By HERBERT SAMPLE

November 3, 2008

This photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows Obama in 1979 during his high school graduation in Hawaii with his grandmother, Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham. Sen. Obama says his grandmother died Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008.

HONOLULU – Barack Obama’s grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, 1 day before the election. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died peacefully late Sunday night after a battle with cancer. They said: “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances.” Obama learned of her death Monday morning while he was campaigning in Jacksonville, Fla. He planned to go ahead with campaign appearances.

The family said a private ceremony would be held later.

Last month, Obama took a break from campaigning and flew to Hawaii to be with Dunham as her health declined.

Obama said the decision to go to Hawaii was easy to make, telling CBS that he “got there too late” when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at 53, and wanted to make sure “that I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

The Kansas-born Dunham and her husband, Stanley, raised their grandson for several years so he could attend school in Honolulu while their daughter and her second husband lived overseas. Her influence on Obama’s manner and the way he viewed the world was substantial, the candidate himself told millions watching him accept his party’s nomination in Denver in August.

“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he said. “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.”

Obama’s nickname for his grandmother was “Toot,” a version of the Hawaiian word for grandmother, tutu. Many of his speeches describe her working on a bomber assembly line during World War II.

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham married in 1940, a few weeks before she graduated from high school. Their daughter, Stanley Ann, was born in 1942. After several moves to and from California, Texas, Washington and Kansas, Stanley Dunham’s job landed the family in Hawaii.

It was there that Stanley Ann later met and fell in love with Obama’s father, a Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama Sr. They had met in Russian class at the University of Hawaii. Their son was born in August 1961, but the marriage didn’t last long. She later married an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro, another university student she met in Hawaii.

Obama moved to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather at age 6. But in 1971, her mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. He stayed with the Dunhams until he graduated from high school in 1979.

In his autobiography, Obama wrote fondly of playing basketball on a court below his grandparents’ 10th-floor Honolulu apartment, and looking up to see his grandmother watching.

It was the same apartment Obama visited on annual holiday trips to Hawaii, a weekling vacation from his campaign in August, and his pre-election visit in October. Family members said his grandmother could not travel because of her health.

Madelyn Dunham, who took university classes but to her chagrin never earned a degree, nonetheless rose from a secretarial job at the Bank of Hawaii to become one of the state’s first female bank vice presidents.

“Every morning, she woke up at 5 a.m. and changed from the frowsy muu-muus she wore around the apartment into a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps,” Obama wrote.

After her health took a turn for the worse, her brother said on Oct. 21 that she had already lived long enough to see her “Barry” achieve what she’d wanted for him.

“I think she thinks she was important in raising a fine young man,” Charles Payne, 83, said in a brief telephone interview from his Chicago home. “I doubt if it would occur to her that he would go this far this fast. But she’s enjoyed watching it.”

Stanley Dunham died in 1992, while Obama’s mother died in 1995. His father is also deceased.

When Obama was young, he and his grandmother toured the United States by Greyhound bus, stopping at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, Disneyland and Chicago, where Obama would years later settle.

It was an incident during his teenage years that became one of Obama’s most vivid memories of Toot. She had been aggressively panhandled by a man and she wanted her husband to take her to work. When Obama asked why, his grandfather said Madelyn Dunham was bothered because the panhandler was black.

The words hit the biracial Obama “like a fist in my stomach,” he wrote later. He was sure his grandparents loved him deeply. “And yet,” he added, “I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”

Obama referred to the incident again when he addressed race in a speech in March during a controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he said.

When Obama was young, he and his grandmother toured the United States by Greyhound bus, stopping at the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, Disneyland and Chicago, where Obama would years later settle.

It was an incident during his teenage years that became one of Obama’s most vivid memories of Toot. She had been aggressively panhandled by a man and she wanted her husband to take her to work. When Obama asked why, his grandfather said Madelyn Dunham was bothered because the panhandler was black.

The words hit the biracial Obama “like a fist in my stomach,” he wrote later. He was sure his grandparents loved him deeply. “And yet,” he added, “I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”

Obama referred to the incident again when he addressed race in a speech in March during a controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he said.

Source

How sad for him to have to go through this at this time. My heart goes out to him and his family.

Norwegian loan to Iceland confirmed

By Alex Elliott

November 3 2008

Details are emerging that the anticipated Norwegian loan to Iceland will take place.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store is in Reykjavik at the moment on an official visit. Following a meeting with Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde today, Store confirmed that a NOK 4 billion (USD 606 million) loan will be extended to Iceland.

The loan will have a maturity of up to five years and the existing currency exchange swap agreement will be extended to the end of 2009.

MBL.is also quotes Norwegian media as saying Norway has offered to mediate in the dispute between Iceland and the United Kingdom over repayments of British savers and the UK government’s controversial reaction to the Iceland crisis.

The news of the Norwegian loan comes after weeks of uncertainty over who will step in to save the Icelandic economy. Despite the IMF agreeing a loan of USD 2 billion, it still has not been officially approved by the board.

The Faroe Islands were the only country to have yet firmly granted Iceland a loan. Sources in Reykjavik hope the Norwegian loan will spur on negotiations with the other Nordic countries and Russia.

Source

Mortgage repayments may fall by €150 if rates cut

By LAURA SLATTERY

November 3 2008

MORTGAGE BORROWERS could see their loan repayments fall by a further €50-€150 in time for Christmas if the European Central Bank (ECB) responds to global pressure to cut interest rates on Thursday. EU and British monetary policymakers are facing mounting pressure to slash interest rates to historic lows.

The ECB’s governing council and the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee meet this week amid a clamour for rate cuts which are unprecedented in their brief histories.

Surveys suggest that economists expect cuts of at least half a percentage point, which would take the ECB rate down to 3.25 per cent and the Bank of England’s rate down to 4 per cent.

Both the Bank of England and the ECB cut rates on October 8th by a half-point as part of a globally co-ordinated move to spark economic activity.

However, dire economic news in recent data releases mean that they will probably be forced to move again.

That rate cut, which brought the ECB base rate down to 3.75 per cent, was the first decrease in euro-zone interest rates in more than five years.

It meant that Irish homeowners with typical-sized variable-rate mortgages saw their monthly repayments fall by €50-€150, as the main lending institutions passed on the rate cut.

Homeowners with a mortgage of €200,000 being repaid over 20 years saw their repayments fall from €1,381 to €1,325, assuming they were charged interest at a typical margin of 1.3 points above the ECB rate.

Some lenders waited until this month to pass the rate cut on, while others gave borrowers the benefit of the rate cut for a portion of October.

A further half-point cut would see repayments on such a mortgage shrink to €1,271, meaning the household would be better off by an extra €100 a month as a result of the two rate cuts. For homeowners repaying a mortgage of €500,000 over 30 years, the fall in their loan repayments would be more than three times that amount.

On Saturday, the Reserve Bank of India took emergency action to cut interest rates and pump liquidity into the country’s banking system amid concerns that the global financial crisis would significantly cut India’s growth. The measures followed rate cuts by the central banks of Japan and China last week. Meanwhile, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister Gordon Brown have struck up an unlikely partnership ahead of next week’s summit in Washington aimed at overhauling the global financial system.

But Paris fears Mr Brown is committed to preserving a light-touch regulatory regime for the City of London. French officials say the strongest message that should come out of the Washington meeting on November 15th would be a broad commitment from the US, the UK and other European countries to abandon competition between regulatory systems in favour of convergence. However, they acknowledge this is unlikely.

Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy want agreement from the leaders of the G20 group of advanced and emerging economies in the US capital for a “new Bretton Woods”, a redesign of the post-war global financial architecture.

Source

Prison statistics call U.S.’s priorities into question

by Matt Petryni

PUBLISHED ON 3/4/08
As of last Thursday, the United States, land of the free, is on record as the world’s leader in imprisonment. A report released by the Pew Center last week calculated that 2.3 million Americans are behind bars, about one percent of our adult population. Russia and the former Soviet Union countries follow, while the northern Europeans – Sweden, Finland and Denmark – imprison only around ten percent of our number. We’re also a major player in executions, killing more of our citizens per capita than such tasteful governments as those of Syria and Sudan.

All of these shocking statistics, though, must come with some qualifications (as do all shocking statistics, I find). Ranking us below regimes like China’s is difficult, due to the trouble in getting accurate information on how many people they incarcerate. And while we might “officially” execute more people than Sudan does – something we should probably stop doing, no doubt – it must be acknowledged that many of the tragic deaths in Darfur could probably be added to Sudan’s number.

Further, the sheer number isn’t enough to evaluate the “oppressiveness” of a country’s prison policies. While we might lock up the most people, it could be argued that we do so with more respect for some kind of substantive due process and civil rights than more repressive regimes do. And while we’re undoubtedly efficient at killing people who have been convicted of murder, many countries use execution as an explicit means to eliminate political enemies and minority ethnic groups.

Nonetheless, it is important that we look at our incarceration numbers with concern. It does appear, by some accounts, that our increased incarceration rate has corresponded nationally with a drop in crime rates. Yet this has more trouble translating to the state level, as many states that have thrown more of their residents in jail have had trouble keeping control over their crime rate. Some states have even experienced significant drops in crime despite having released more of their prison population than other states. This is not to suggest that we could reduce crime by freeing criminals. But it does point out that it may not be as simple as “increasing incarceration means decreasing crime.”

As primitively “fun” as it may be to lock up the sinners and whatnot, it is also incredibly expensive. Oregon spends more of its general fund on corrections than does any other state – a number that has increased 4.6 percent in the last 10 years. These numbers are rising fast across the country. Statistics suggest that, inflation adjusted, nationwide spending on prisons has more than doubled from roughly $19.4 billion (today’s dollars) in 1997 to $44.1 billion last year. Each prisoner, it is estimated, costs taxpayers about $24,000 per year (compared to $8,700 invested per student on schools).

Why so much imprisonment? In the United States, we tend to use incarceration as an indirect answer to many social problems: drug addiction, mental illness, poverty. This is not to say that the crimes of criminals are by any means “excusable” due to their circumstances. Criminals are still responsible for their personal actions and should be held accountable. But for those of us who aren’t just interested in the satisfaction of casting the first stone, and would actually like to see fewer homes broken, fewer women raped, and fewer people killed, the policies that result in widespread incarceration and their relation to crime rates must be critically examined.

Drug addicts, for example, cycle through prisons at an alarming rate. As recently as 2004, state prisons incarcerated 249,400 criminals for drug offenses, roughly 20 percent of all state prisoners. This doesn’t even include federal prison numbers, where more than half are incarcerated for drug offenses. It is estimated that every dollar invested in the treatment of drug addiction returns $4 to $7 to taxpayers in the reduction of drug-related crime. I’m not a financial expert, but if I could get a 400 to 700 percent return on my investment, I’d take it.

And putting the practicality of a Puritanical drug policy aside, a better question might be the ethicality. Drug addicts are not simply criminals in the classic sense. It doesn’t work, statistically or ethically, to “punish” them for a serious disease. Even some of the staunchest advocates of drug addiction “punishment” have ended up being users and abusers themselves, making clear that recognizing the fear of punishment for the “crime” of drug addiction seems no deterrent to “committing” drug addiction.

With so much money being spent treating the ills of society by locking them up in our prisons, and with our incarceration rate so high, it’s well past time to consider more effective, more productive and more ethical means of driving our crime rate down. It isn’t about letting criminals off easy: It’s about keeping them from hurting others in the first place.

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Imprisoned vets tell their war stories for history

By DAVID DISHNEAU

October 17 2008

As U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam in early 1974, Seaman Apprentice Frederic D. Jones was fighting his own battles.

The cocky Baltimore teenager spent nearly three months AWOL in the Philippines. There, he said, he played cat-and-mouse with shore patrol while fending off a murderous drug dealer, romancing the sister of a militia leader and robbing other servicemen to feed his heroin habit.

Eventually caught, Jones negotiated an honorable discharge but couldn’t stay clean. An armed robbery spree in 1995 got him a 45-year sentence in the Maryland Correctional Institution near Hagerstown.

While Jones, now 52, is locked away from society, his war story has been preserved for posterity. He is among the first incarcerated veterans to tell his military service tale to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.

Video recordings of more than 30 inmates at the medium-security prison are archived at the library’s American Folklife Center, along with those of nearly 60,000 other veterans. Just one other prison, the Fairton Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, N.J., has collected veterans’ stories, said Bob Patrick, director of the Veterans History Project.

Congress created the oral history program in 2000 to document the personal wartime experiences of American service members. The library doesn’t try to verify their stories, but The Associated Press confirmed the service records of the inmates mentioned in this report.

Patrick said that by recognizing their roles in history, the project dignifies the service of veterans who take part. Jones was so proud of his videotape that he had a copy sent to his elderly mother.

“She was so overjoyed and surprised,” he said.

Since any veteran, no matter how decorated or disgraced, can contribute to the archive, Jones’ story was as welcome as that of any admiral. And it’s hard to imagine one more colorful.

On his nearly 90-minute recording, Jones recounts his adventures as a “young, wild, impulsive,” 18-year-old in and around the Subic Bay Naval Base. There, he said, a female gang called the Black Stockings helped him steal cash and watches from drunken sailors and aided him in avoiding a drug dealer he had wronged.

“I ended up getting a contract on my life,” Jones says. “I felt like I had never left home.”

Jones, who is black, said he enlisted in the Navy seeking structure and style — he liked the bell-bottomed uniforms — but he quickly grew disenchanted by the racism and drug use he found.

“I’d had my own preconceived ideas what the military was — I mean straight-up, strict discipline,” Jones says on the video, made a year ago. “The drugs, the gang mentality — it was all right there in the military. It was a big letdown.”

In a June interview with the AP, Jones said he doesn’t blame the military for his mistakes but has found in prison the sort of discipline he had expected from the Navy. Behind bars, he and 58-year-old John E. Barba, who is serving a life sentence for robbing and murdering a methamphetamine maker, have become co-chairmen of the prison’s veterans history committee.

Guided by materials from the Library of Congress, they have become such skilled interviewers since last fall that they and prison librarian Mary Stevanus, who spearheaded the history project, hope to produce a how-to booklet or video for other veterans groups, in or out of prison.

“What you’re looking for is the meat of the stuff,” said Barba, who served domestically in the Navy from 1970 to 1974. Working together, he and Jones conduct informal “pre-interviews” with their subjects, making notes of compelling material “so when they’re giving their interview, we can dive in,” Barba said.

They extracted a harrowing account from Ronald L. McClary, 62, of his experience under fire as a fresh-faced Marine in Vietnam. On his video, the burly inmate, seated before a large U.S. flag, recalls his daily “search-and-destroy” missions.

“Every day, you would look at one of your buddies and wonder who wasn’t going home today or who was going to get killed today. Everybody knew it was going to be somebody,” said McClary, who is serving 12 years for the second-degree murder of his wife in Baltimore 2005.

He recounted a firefight in which two buddies were killed.

“Three rounds went off. The first round hit Amos in the head. Amos fell. When Amos fell, Cope looked around and looked down at Amos. The second round hit Cope in the head. And I seen it. I told you, three rounds went off. Cope was to my left. Amos was to my left, and then there was me. You cannot tell me today the third round wasn’t meant for me. But I was down. I was eating dirt.”

Ordered by his lieutenant to get up and charge the enemy, McClary fired two shots before his gun jammed. “I had to get back down,” he says on the video. “I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”

Jones said he feels privileged hearing such stories.

“These guys have kept this stuff to themselves for 40 years,” he said. “You’ll see one guy that actually breaks down and cries. I mean, these are hardened criminals and he breaks down and cries on his video.”

About 226,000 of the national’s 25.1 million veterans were in prison or jail in 1998, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most recent report on the subject.

Matt Davison, chairman of an incarcerated veterans project for New York-based VietNow National, a veterans advocacy group, said most inmate vets he’s met are proud of having served — and many feel remorse for having done something dishonorable.

Barba said most of the inmates he has interviewed for the history project express gratitude that they were able to serve.

In one video, white-haired World War II vet Lee D. Gerhold, doing 50 years for arranging an ex-wife’s murder, grips his cane and says, “I’m thankful to the country for accepting me.”

On the Net:

• Veterans History Project: http://www.loc.gov/vets
• VietNow National: http://www.vietnow.com

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More Prison Statistics

Can’t vote because you’re in jail? Yes you can!

by Jennifer Rae Taylor

On a cloudy Saturday morning in August, the sidewalk outside Glenn E. Dyer Jail in Oakland seems an odd site for a voter registration drive – but organizers are targeting an atypical audience: inmates and those visiting them.

“You’ve got the right and reason to register to vote in this election and so do the people you’re coming to visit,” says Linda Evans as two women approach the jail entrance. Evans is co-director of the San Francisco-based non-profit All of Us or None, which organized the Aug. 16 Day of Action to raise awareness of voting eligibility and counter what they call “widespread confusion about inmates’ legal voting rights.” Chapters throughout the state held drives in Alameda, Sacramento, Orange, San Mateo, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

“Laws that directly affect inmates will be decided this November, so please share this information and encourage them to vote,” Evans continues.

“Wait,” one woman says, slowing her pace. “You mean they can vote while they’re in jail?”

“Yes they can,” says Evans. “It’s the law.”

A law that is hardly clear. After years of disagreement and legal wrangling, authorities at every level still disagree about the voting rights of California’s more than 82,000 jail inmates – most of whom are Black or Latino, and have not been convicted of any crime. Less than three months before one of the most historic elections in national history, California is still without a clearly established policy on jail inmate voting – and “the law” seems to vary with who you ask.

Ten California counties hold about 70 percent of the state’s jail inmates, but calls to the registrars of voters in each of these counties yielded a variety of opinions on whether or not those inmates can vote. Representatives from four counties, including San Diego and Alameda, stated that inmates cannot vote under any circumstances; four other counties, including Fresno and Sacramento, said inmates with felony convictions were disenfranchised; Orange County’s registrar’s office said that jail inmates are eligible to vote as long as they are citizens; and in Los Angeles County – which holds the nation’s largest jail population of 19,000 – a registrar employee admitted to not knowing what voting rights jail inmates held and suggested calling Secretary of State Deborah Bowen.

“The law is the same in all of California. Registrars are supposed to be the authority and people are going to trust what they tell them. Their answers shouldn’t vary by where they are or who picks up the phone,” said Dorsey Nunn, co-director of All of Us or None and its parent organization, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. However, uncertainty has surrounded this issue for years.

In June 2004, San Francisco non-profit Legal Services for Prisoners with Children asked then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to clarify the voting rights of those in jail and on probation and learned that both groups were eligible to vote. In November 2005, new Attorney General Bill Lockyer officially denounced Shelley’s interpretation, declaring those on probation and in jail for a felony to be legally disenfranchised.

All of Us or None, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several other organizations took the debate to court. In December 2006 the California Court of Appeal sided with the activists, ordering the secretary of state to inform election officials that “the only persons disqualified from voting are those who have been imprisoned in state prison, or who are on parole as a result of the conviction of a felony.”

Following the 2006 decision, the secretary of state’s office complied by informing county registrars that only those “in prison or on parole for a felony” were ineligible to vote – but did not fully explain what that meant for those held in jail, creating a network of state elections officials who disagree amongst themselves.

According to the secretary of state’s lawyers, individuals serving a jail sentence following a felony conviction cannot vote, while those in jail for a misdemeanor or awaiting trial can. Organizations like the ACLU, All of Us or None and Berkeley-based Voting Rights for All and even the county of San Francisco take a different stance, arguing that the 2006 Appeals Court decision enfranchises even those jail inmates who have a felony conviction.

The confusion may ultimately boil down to the precise meaning of “a felony sentence.” According to Peter Sheehan, an attorney with the Social Justice Law Project who served as co-counsel in the 2006 case, the decision holds that someone sentenced to jail for a felony is incarcerated as a condition of felony probation, and not technically serving “a felony sentence.” That makes the actual number of disenfranchised jail inmates very small. Or it would, if the average citizen – or public official – understood that distinction. “If the Secretary of State is simply saying people in jail for a felony cannot vote, that’s a misrepresentation unless they follow up with a detailed explanation of the distinction between felony probation and a felony sentence,” Sheehan said.

Ultimately, most jail inmates’ rights do not hinge on the outcome of that particular disagreement. According to state data, more than two out of three California jail inmates have not yet been convicted of any crime and would qualify as potential voters even under the secretary of state’s own reading of the law – though four of the 10 county registrars polled believed all jail inmates were ineligible to vote.

“If most people in jail haven’t been convicted, the state already agrees that most people in jail can vote,” said Evans. “So why isn’t there some kind of institutionalized procedure to make that easier and to make that known?”

According to a legal representative from the secretary of state’s office, the state is only required to inform counties of the law, while each county registrar is responsible for ensuring that employees correctly follow it. Sheehan believes the state has a duty to do more.

“Let’s say we were talking about women or Catholics or Blacks, instead of people in jail,” he said. “We all know these groups can vote under the law. If some counties wouldn’t let them, we’d expect the state to take action, whether it involved making phone calls or holding a training. This should be no different.”

But it is different. “The misinformation is widespread and goes all the way to the top,” said Judy Gerther, a co-chair of Voting Rights for All, who coordinated volunteers to register voters outside of Oakland’s county courthouse in 2004. “There were judges we ran into then who read our materials on eligibility and said, ‘We don’t believe you.’ This has been the law since 1973, but it’s never been publicized or clarified in layperson’s language. Lawyers don’t know; judges don’t know.”

Along with this month’s Day of Action, grassroots efforts to raise awareness have included a Northern California ACLU billboard campaign and All of Us or None lobbying state officials for better education and enforcement. As in 2004, Voting Rights for All plans to conduct outreach outside several Bay Area courthouses in mid-September. All of Us or None and the ACLU have sought a meeting with Secretary of State Deborah Bowen for several months, peaking in April when All of Us or None led a protest on the state capitol. That meeting hasn’t happened.

When it comes to inmate voting, jail facilities are no more regulated than county registrars. Don Allen of California’s Correctional Standards Authority, the agency responsible for designing state jail and prison policies, admits there are no mandated procedures for providing inmates access to voting information. “We have a broad rule that jails need to have some kind of policy to accommodate inmates’ right to vote,” said Allen. “The onus is on the county to design procedures that fulfill that obligation. Some may do the minimum and some may do more.”

For some, that minimum is far too low. “Many individuals in jail have no reason to think they can vote and little chance of receiving accurate information if they ask,” said Kathy Kahn, a retired defense attorney and Voting Rights for All co-chair. “Until we can assure accurate information is available, we don’t know how many inmates don’t want to vote and how many are being incorrectly told they can’t.”

“Even if the law says inmates can vote, they’re in jail. They’ve got bigger problems and priorities,” said Michael Robinson, an Alameda resident perplexed by the campaign to secure inmates’ rights he’s not sure they want. “My nephew talks to me about all kinds of stuff when I go see him in jail, but he’s never asked me to help him sign up to vote.”

Activists argue that this is not a question of whether or not inmates want to vote or who they will vote for. “I don’t think most people in jail understand the power of their voting. They often think voting won’t change anything,” said All of Us or None member Elder Freeman. A former Black Panther and state prisoner, Freeman fears many in jail today don’t know what voting can accomplish.

“Getting them the vote is just the first step,” he said. “We need to teach them it’s not all about federal elections. State and local elections determine policies in the communities where they live.”

Though All of Us or None has sought support for this issue from the state Democratic Party with little success, Nunn emphasizes that defending the voting rights of those in jail is about civil rights, not partisanship.

“Nobody I try to register ever says, ‘Oh, I can’t vote because I’m Black,’” said Nunn, also a former prisoner. “But I get plenty of Black and Brown people who falsely believe they can’t vote because they’re on probation or have a felony conviction. I know there are plenty of Black and Brown people who are told and believe they can’t vote because they’re in jail. So the effect is the same.”

Whether the question of inmate voting rights will be settled with a conference or require further legal action, organizers and advocates are determined to not see another election pass without a statewide policy protecting incarcerated voters’ rights under the law.

“Even with the law on our side, we are being disenfranchised by misinformation,” said Nunn. “That is a blow to our communities and to our democracy.”

Jennifer Rae Taylor can be reached at jraetay@gmail.com.

Let my people vote!

by Pastor Kenneth Glasgow

One of the most important rights people lose by going to prison is the right to vote, so voter re-enfranchisement is key to successful reentry back into the community. People who have been in prison are determined to build political power in order to win back our rights, and one expression of political power is exercising our right to vote.

Voting rights laws differ widely from state to state, and 48 out of 50 states have laws that disenfranchise or limit voting rights for people with felony convictions. A national research organization estimates that at least 5.3 million Americans will be denied the right to vote in the 2008 election because of a felony conviction.

A total of 13 percent of Black men are ineligible to vote because of past convictions. Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of All of Us or None, noted: “The voting rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and people with past convictions have been violated over the course of decades, at a minimum through benign neglect and at worst deliberate disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people. The lessons coming out of Florida in 2000 were not only a question of hanging chads but the open suppression of Black votes through the manipulation of felony conviction status.”

Formerly incarcerated people throughout the U.S. are determined to unite to make our voices heard: As our forefather Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will.” Join us in a National Day of Action for Jail and Prison Voting Rights.

We’ve gone from the back of the bus to the front of the prison. The struggle continues.

We’re not second class citizens, but second chance citizens, SO LET MY PEOPLE VOTE!

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National Century Ex-Chief Poulsen Convicted of Fraud

(Update2)

By Denise Trowbridge and David Voreacos

October 30 2008

Lance Poulsen, former chief executive officer of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., was convicted of defrauding investors of $2.9 billion before his health-care financing company collapsed in 2002.

A federal jury in Columbus, Ohio, today found Poulsen guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. Poulsen, 65, cheated investors who bought National Century bonds to back the purchase of unpaid insurance bills from medical providers that needed cash, prosecutors said. The company advanced $2.2 billion to six companies in which Poulsen owned a stake, they said.

After the verdict, Poulsen looked at his wife, Barbara, and said, “I’m so sorry.” Barbara Poulsen, who testified in his defense, began to cry.

National Century’s collapse hastened the bankruptcies of 275 hospitals, clinics and other health-care providers, authorities say. Victims included Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s largest bond fund. Pimco lost $283 million and Credit Suisse Group AG lost $257 million, prosecutors said.

“This is one of the largest frauds the FBI has ever investigated,” Leo Wise, a Justice Department trial attorney, told jurors yesterday in closing arguments. “Investors were told their money would be used to buy accounts receivable. They got a worthless IOU in many cases from a health-care provider teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.”

Witness Tampering

Poulsen, who founded the Dublin, Ohio-based company, faces from 30 years to life in prison. He already is serving 10 years after his conviction in March for trying to bribe the main witness against him. Prosecutors have now won convictions of six National Century executives at trial, as well as four who pleaded guilty.

Jurors deliberated four hours before convicting Poulsen of all 12 counts, including six of securities fraud, three of money laundering, two of conspiracy, and one of wire fraud. The panel of seven women and five men began hearing the case on Oct. 2.

“We’re obviously extremely disappointed with the verdict,” said Poulsen’s attorney, Peter Anderson. He said Poulsen plans to appeal.

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley didn’t set a sentencing date for Poulsen, who has been detained at the Ross County Jail. Another former National Century executive, James Happ, is set for trial for Dec. 1.

Poulsen testified in his own defense at the trial, denying the existence of a fraud and seeking to counter testimony by Sherry Gibson, a former subordinate who he tried to bribe. He also said he relied on legal documents and advisers who led him to believe that the advances and other actions were permitted.

`Nobody’s Fault’

“When something this big goes wrong, it’s kind of everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault,” Poulsen said.

“No one woke up one morning and said, `Let’s torpedo this $3 billion funding company, lose all of this investor money, and ruin these people’s lives,”’ he said. “A lot of little things went wrong. When they all went wrong at one time, it was the perfect storm of the financial world and the company collapsed.”

Gibson was one of four former National Century employees who testified against Poulsen. Gibson, who pleaded guilty to a role in the fraud, testified that Poulsen told her to create phony monthly reports for investors about cash flow and receivables. She also said National Century kept two sets of company books.

FBI Tapes

After Gibson served 30 months in prison, a friend of Poulsen’s approached her about changing her testimony. She went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and secretly taped the friend. Jurors at this trial heard those tapes, as well as FBI recordings made of Poulsen and the friend.

Prosecutors said Poulsen lied to investors about the quality of accounts receivable that were supposed to secure payments on the bonds that kept the company going.

“They were told there was high-quality collateral, there were monthly investor reports and random audits, and there was over-collateralization to protect investors,” Justice Department attorney Kathleen McGovern told jurors.

Poulsen robbed investors of protections through money advances without receivables backing them and by manipulating reserve accounts, McGovern said in closing arguments. He also didn’t rely on third parties, as he claimed, she said.

“He needed the trustees to move the money at his direction, he needed the rating agencies to give the bonds an AAA rating, he needed the underwriters to market the bonds, and he needed investors to put money into NCFE,” McGovern said. “He lied to all of them to get their OK.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by market value, agreed to pay $425 million in 2006 to settle claims by Arizona noteholders. The noteholders said JPMorgan and other banks underwrote or were trustees of the notes used to defraud investors.

The case is U.S. v. Poulsen, 06-129, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).

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AIG Already Running Through Government Loans

October 30 2008

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

“You don’t just suddenly lose $120 billion overnight,” said Donn Vickrey of Gradient Analytics, an independent securities research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mr. Vickrey says he believes AIG must have already accumulated tens of billions of dollars worth of losses by mid-September, when it came close to collapse and received an $85 billion emergency line of credit by the Fed. That loan was later supplemented by a $38 billion lending facility.

But losses on that scale do not show up in the company’s financial filings. Instead, AIG replenished its capital by issuing $20 billion in stock and debt in May and reassured investors that it had an ample cushion. It also said that it was making its accounting more precise.

Mr. Vickery and other analysts are examining the company’s disclosures for clues that the cushion was threadbare and that company officials knew they had major losses months before the bailout.

Tantalizing support for this argument comes from what appears to have been a behind-the-scenes clash at the company over how to value some of its derivatives contracts. An accountant brought in by the company because of an earlier scandal was pushed to the sidelines on this issue, and the company’s outside auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, warned of a material weakness months before the government bailout.

The internal auditor resigned and is now in seclusion, according to a former colleague. His account, from a prepared text, was read by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in a hearing this month.

These accounting questions are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at AIG but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.

Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure AIG, has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.

Continuing Risk

Fear that the losses are bigger and that more surprises are in store is one of the factors beneath the turmoil in the credit markets, market participants say.

“When investors don’t have full and honest information, they tend to sell everything, both the good and bad assets,” said Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a consulting firm in Chicago. “It’s really bad for the markets. Things don’t heal until you take care of that.”

AIG has declined to provide a detailed account of how it has used the Fed’s money. The company said it could not provide more information ahead of its quarterly report, expected next week, the first under new management. The Fed releases a weekly figure, most recently showing that $90 billion of the $123 billion available has been drawn down.

AIG has outlined only broad categories: some is being used to shore up its securities-lending program, some to make good on its guaranteed investment contracts, some to pay for day-to-day operations and — of perhaps greatest interest to watchdogs — tens of billions of dollars to post collateral with other financial institutions, as required by AIG’s many derivatives contracts.

No information has been supplied yet about who these counterparties are, how much collateral they have received or what additional tripwires may require even more collateral if the housing market continues to slide.

Ms. Tavakoli said she thought that instead of pouring in more and more money, the Fed should bring AIG together with all its derivatives counterparties and put a moratorium on the collateral calls. “We did that with ACA,” she said, referring to ACA Capital Holdings, a bond insurance company that filed for bankruptcy in 2007.

Of the two big Fed loans, the smaller one, the $38 billion supplementary lending facility, was extended solely to prevent further losses in the securities-lending business. So far, $18 billion has been drawn down for that purpose.

For securities lending, an institution with a long time horizon makes extra money by lending out securities to shorter-term borrowers. The borrowers are often hedge funds setting up short trades, betting a stock’s price will fall. They typically give AIG cash or cashlike instruments in return. Then, while AIG waits for the borrowers to bring back the securities, it invests the money.

In the last few months, borrowers came back for their money, and AIG did not have enough to repay them because of market losses on its investments. Through the secondary lending facility, the insurer is now sending those investments to the Fed, and getting cash in turn to repay customers.

A spokesman for the insurer, Nicholas J. Ashooh, said AIG did not anticipate having to use the entire $38 billion facility. At midyear, AIG had a shortfall of $15.6 billion in that program, which

it says has grown to $18 billion. Another spokesman, Joe Norton, said the company was getting out of this business. Of the government’s original $85 billion line of credit, the company has drawn down about $72 billion. It must pay 8.5 percent interest on those funds.

An estimated $13 billion of the money was needed to make good on investment accounts that AIG typically offered to municipalities, called guaranteed investment contracts, or GICs.

When a local government issues a construction bond, for example, it places the proceeds in a guaranteed investment contract, from which it can draw the funds to pay contractors.

After the insurer’s credit rating was downgraded in September, its GIC customers had the right to pull out their proceeds immediately. Regulators say that AIG had to come up with $13 billion, more than half of its total GIC business. Rather than liquidate some investments at losses, it used that much of the Fed loan.

For $59 billion of the $72 billion AIG has used, the company has provided no breakdown. A block of it has been used for day-to-day operations, a broad category that raises eyebrows since the company has been tarnished by reports of expensive trips and bonuses for executives.

The biggest portion of the Fed loan is apparently being used as collateral for AIG’s derivatives contracts, including credit-default swaps.

The swap contracts are of great interest because they are at the heart of the insurer’s near collapse and even AIG does not know how much could be needed to support them. They are essentially a type of insurance that protects investors against default of fixed-income securities. AIG wrote this insurance on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of debt, much of it linked to mortgages.

Through last year, senior executives said that there was nothing to fear, that its swaps were rock solid. The portfolio “is well structured” and is subjected to “monitoring, modeling and analysis,” Martin J. Sullivan, AIG’s chief executive at the time, told securities analysts in the summer of 2007.

Gathering Storm

By fall, as the mortgage crisis began roiling financial institutions, internal and external auditors were questioning how AIG was measuring its swaps. They suggested the portfolio was incurring losses. It was as if the company had insured beachfront property in a hurricane zone without charging high enough premiums.

But AIG executives, especially those in the swaps business, argued that any decline was theoretical because the hurricane had not hit. The underlying mortgage-related securities were still paying, they said, and there was no reason to think they would stop doing so.

AIG had come under fire for accounting irregularities some years back and had brought in a former accounting expert from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He began to focus on the company’s accounting for its credit-default swaps and collided with Joseph Cassano, the head of the company’s financial products division, according to a letter read by Mr. Waxman at the recent Congressional hearing.

When the expert tried to revise AIG’s method for measuring its swaps, he said that Mr. Cassano told him, “I have deliberately excluded you from the valuation because I was concerned that you would pollute the process.”

Mr. Cassano did not attend the hearing and was unavailable for comment. The company’s independent auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was the next to raise an alarm. It briefed Mr. Sullivan late in November, warning that it had found a “material weakness” because the unit that valued the swaps lacked sufficient oversight.

About a week after the auditor’s briefing, Mr. Sullivan and other executives said nothing about the warning in a presentation to securities analysts, according to a transcript. They said that while disruptions in the markets were making it difficult to value its swaps, the company had made a “best estimate” and concluded that its swaps had lost about $1.6 billion in value by the end of November.

Still, PricewaterhouseCoopers appears to have pressed for more. In February, AIG said in a regulatory filing that it needed to “clarify and expand” its disclosures about its credit-default

swaps. They had declined not by $1.6 billion, as previously reported, but by $5.9 billion at the end of November, AIG said. PricewaterhouseCoopers subsequently signed off on the company’s accounting while making reference to the material weakness.

Investors shuddered over the revision, driving AIG’s stock down 12 percent. Mr. Vickrey, whose firm grades companies on the credibility of their reported earnings, gave the company an F. Mr. Sullivan, his credibility waning, was forced out months later.

The Losses Grow

Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.

“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought AIG’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.

Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through AIG to counterparties.

“We may be better off in the long run letting the losses be realized and letting the people who took the risk bear the loss,” said Bill Bergman, senior equity analyst at the market research company Morningstar.

Source

Seems the Bailout money was wasted on AIG. They obviously don’t know how to run a business. I guess they will be begging for more money in the near future. The Welfare bums strike again.

I guess they need another big party the last one wasn’t large enough to satisfy them.

Coming Soon: Congress Is Back With ‘Stimulus-2’

October 31 2008

Washington, taking a page out of Hollywood, looks set to release Stimulus 2, the sequel.

And unhappy, tapped-out taxpayers—aka voters—may get a sneak preview of the second fiscal package as soon as next week if lawmakers return to Washington for a lame-duck session under the eye of a newly elected President.

CNBC.com

Critics and supporters alike, however, should hope that the next fiscal stimulus package is more of a commercial success than its predecessor, lest another big-budget flop be tacked on to the ever-growing federal debt.

“It has to be done in a way where you get a good rate of return,” says Tom Schatz, president of Taxpayers Against Government Waste. “What can we do that will work, not how much can we spend and where can we spend it?”

The hastily conceived $168-billion stimulus package quickly signed into law last February was built around tax breaks for business and tax rebates for consumers, whose impact on the economy was fleeting, at best.

This time around—with recession a reality not a perception and consumer confidence at a record low—the package may be bigger and broader. But that doesn’t mean it will be any wiser or more likely to leave a lasting impression on the nation’s economy or psyche of consumers.

If anything, it may be the mother of all stimulus packages.

“There’s a political element, Wall Street got its bailout now everyone needs to get something,” says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which advocates fiscal responsibility.

In its recent nine-point prescription for sound fiscal policy, the coalition joined a growing chorus of groups calling for a balancing of short-term stimulus and long-term discipline, noting that spending patterns are already unsustainable and new revenue will needed.

Thus far, Congress seems to be heeding another call: reaction, not action.

“It’s a pretty dangerous process the way its been approached so far,” says Brandon Arnold, who follows public policy for the Cato Institute. Members of Congress, he adds, seem to “setting a figure before considering what is needed.”

The original price tag was about $60 billion package, but it wasn’t long before it was $150 billion, then $300 billion was thrown around.

Given the current state of the economy, $300 billion would be equal to about 2 percent of GDP. Though that’s a relatively small sum compared to the federal government’s extraordinarily expensive efforts to  shore up the financial sector, its larger than most recent stimulus packages.

In 2001, the tax rebate portion of Bush Administraion’s long-term tax-cut legislation totaled just $38 billion.

President Clinton’s unsuccessful $30 billion plan in 1993—proposed, it later turns out, after the recession had ended but while joblessness continued to rise—was rejected by Congress.

Economist Steve Hanke, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at Cato, says that—in the context of the federal government’s “serial spending spree” of bailouts and stimulus packages—“$300 billion sounds like chicken feed.”

The high likelihood of more money this time also increases the possibility of a bigger shopping list.

“There doesn’t seem to be as much consensus about its makeup as there as there was for the one they did in January,” says Bixby.

That makes it even more vulnerable to political horse-trading and lobbyists.

“There is such a populist mentality out there,” says Arnold “The need to give something back to the people. It’s much easier to cobble something together by adding more things.”

Arnold says lobbyists are already lining up with their suggestions.

“They need to see what’s worked in the past and not turn it into pork-laden legislation,” agrees Schatz.

What works and what doesn’t, of course, is a matter of some debate and could very likely slow down the legislative process.

One-time tax cuts, or rebates—the cornerstone of the previous package—will probably not have a role in the second stimulus plan.

An extension of unemployment benefits, a boost in food stamp funding, aid to states and municipalities—absent in the first package—are widely considered to be among the must haves, according to budget watchers and legislators.

“They make sense economically and politically,” says Bixby.

AP

Another somewhat conventional measure is spending on infrastructure—buildings, roads and bridges—but its inclusion is less certain. Skeptics say it is likely to be end up in the package because of strong lobbying efforts, even if such spending measures tend to have a flash-in-the-pan impact.

Congressional leaders are said to support Infrastructure spending if it is for existing projects, such as ones that have been delayed, rather than new ones. Nevertheless, some are talking about ambitious new spending in the form of energy investment or a public-works program.

Among the more unusual and untested measures are tax credits for business to hire workers and a one-time allowance for the withdrawal of money from a 401(k) retirement account without the normal stringent tax penalties.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama happens to support versions of both ideas.

Critics say undoing policies to encourage savings, particularly in a country that has a problem saving, is unsound and could set a bad precedent. But its inclusion in the policy debate underscores the something-for everyone approach that is seeping into the process.

“I hear people saying, ‘Where’s my bailout?’ ” says Schatz.

Former Federal Reserve governor and White House chief economist Lawrence Lindsey told CNBC that a lot of the ideas are of the “‘lets help out our friends back home’ variety.”

Arnold of Cato calls them the “innocent bystanders who have taken a pretty hard hit to their savings,” because of the stock market sell-off and economic downturn.

So at this point, if Halloween is the holiday that most resembles the economy and the financial system, then it is Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one for government fiscal policy.

Observers say there’s a chance a lame-duck Congress will pass a small package in the weeks ahead, leaving a bigger package to a new congress and president in January.

By that time, however, the recession—by one general measure—will be a year old and certainly deeper than today with the unemployment headed to 7 percent, leaving Congress vulnerable to criticism it delayed staving off some of the pain.

Either way, the level of spending is worrisome to many and dangerous to some. Hanke says governemnt has lost “any sense of proportion.

“It’s just spend and pass the burden on the future,” adds Schatz.

Source

George Bush Will Soon Be Free To Do Just What He Wants

The raid on Syria is a dark portent. The current president has three long, unaccountable months to cement his legacy

By Jonathan Freedland

October 31, 2008

We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won’t even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer.

How Bush might use it is a question that gained new force at the weekend, when US forces crossed the Iraqi border into Syria to kill Abu Ghadiya, a man they said had been funnelling “foreign fighters” allied to al-Qaida into Iraq. That American move has touched off a round of intense head-scratching around the world, as foreign ministers and analysts ask each other the time-honoured diplomatic query: what did they mean by that? To which they add the post-Nov 4 question: and what does it tell us about how Bush plans to use his final days in the White House?

You can choose from two versions. Call the first the “no big deal” theory. It holds that the Sunday raid was no more than standard operational procedure in the war on terror. Sure, it meant violating the sovereignty of an independent nation state, but that’s not so new: there was a similar incursion into Pakistan in September. Indeed, there may be more relevant precedents. A former official in the Bush administration confirmed to me yesterday that the US has lunged into Syrian territory several times before: it’s just that Damascus chose to keep quiet. In which case, the interesting question is why the Syrians went public this time.

In this “no big deal” version, Abu Ghadiya was simply too irresistible a high-value target to let slip away. “They saw something they wanted to hit and they hit it,” says one European diplomat resignedly. The most extreme version of this shoulder-shrugging account holds that the decision may not even have been taken at the political level, but in the field, by General David Petraeus. Not so implausible, since Bush in effect ceded command of the Iraq war to Petraeus a long while ago.

Nonsense, says the other school of thought. It is a massive deal to strike at a sovereign state in this way: in an earlier era, before 2001, we would have called it an act of war. Pakistan is no precedent, because in that case there was a degree of cooperation. Not now.

This was a deliberate act, calculated to send a series of messages. First, to the Syrians, reminding them who’s boss in the region and strong-arming them to do more to crack down on al-Qaida.

Second, to the Europeans who have been moving towards a rapprochement with Damascus. Nicolas Sarkozy may have invited President Assad to Paris and David Miliband may have been hosting the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, in London this very Monday, 24 hours after the raid – but no matter. Bush gets to remind both these uppity Europeans who’s in charge.

Third, the president could have been sending a message to his own administration. Perhaps this was a memo to his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who had dared meet Muallem at the UN just last month in a meeting that apparently she requested. If so, it would fit with the pattern of wildly mixed signals that has emanated from the administration in recent months. Two days before Rice sat down with Muallem, for instance, Bush had used his UN address to denounce Syria as a state sponsor of terror. Might Sunday’s raid have been the president’s attempt to reassert himself against a senior staff all but denuded of its hawks? Rumsfeld, Bolton and Wolfowitz are long gone; the more emollient Robert Gates is at defence, widely tipped to continue under a President Obama. In these last days, Dick Cheney has only himself for company.

However we are meant to read it, the attack on Syria looks a lot like a parting shot from Bush, an end-of-the-movie reminder of what this long and bloody saga has been about. A small operation, causing eight deaths, it nevertheless captures much of the Bush ethos that has ruled the globe these past eight years. It was unilateral; it trampled on state sovereignty; and it relied on force as a first, not last, resort. As a souvenir of the Bush era, it would be hard to top.

But it may not be the final act. For we have not yet entered the twilight zone proper. That will come only when polls close next Tuesday. When the transition begins, all kinds of surprises are possible.

Spool back 20 years, to the dying days of the Reagan administration. In January 1989, the president officially recognised the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people. It was a farewell gift to Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush: the old man took the flak so that the new president would not have to.

In December 1992, Bush himself proved rather less helpful to his replacement, saddling Bill Clinton with the deployment of US forces in Somalia, an episode whose humiliating conclusion badly hobbled Clinton thereafter.

Eight years ago, it was Clinton’s turn. He sweated until his final hours in office trying to close a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, who seemed then to be just inches apart. The legacy was the Clinton parameters, still regarded as marking the basic contours of any future agreement for Israel-Palestine.

So what will emerge from the twilight of George W Bush? Most diplomats are bracing themselves. “They’re not going to sleep,” says one senior British official. The optimists hope for a repeat of Reagan and Clinton, something that helps Middle East peace. It’s true that Rice and Bush have been eager for a breakthrough, if only to have a presidential legacy untainted by Iraq. Perhaps Israel and the Palestinians might initial a provisional document, proof that their labours since Bush’s Annapolis summit of 2007 have not been entirely fruitless.

But the bad timing that has cursed the Middle East so often has struck once again. Israel is entering an interregnum of its own, following Tzipi Livni’s failure to form a coalition. It’s hard to believe an interim, caretaker administration could forge a peace deal.

That leaves other options. Bush could ape Reagan and decide to speak to Hamas. More likely would be a shift in policy that helps future peacemaking efforts: he might, for instance, declare that any changes to the 1967 borders must be equal, with Palestinians compensated inch for inch for any West Bank land conceded to Israel. Or he could look further afield in the region, contradicting himself and Sunday’s raid, by reaching out to Syria. Or, as some hawks fear, he could step up the tentative dialogue with Iran. A symbolic gesture would be to open a US visa section in Tehran.

Of course, Bush may be thinking of a parting gift more in keeping with the record of the last eight years. He and Cheney might decide, what the hell, we have one last chance to whack Iran – and let the new guy clear up the mess. Not likely, but possible. For in the twilight zone, anything can happen.

Source

Broken Securities Industry Still Has $20 Billion to Pay Bonuses

By Christine Harper and Serena Saitto

October 27 2008

Five straight quarters of losses and a 70 percent slide in its stock this year haven’t stopped Merrill Lynch & Co. from allocating about $6.7 billion to pay bonuses.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, both still on track for profitable years, have set aside about $13 billion for bonuses after three quarters, down 28 percent from a year ago. Even some employees at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which declared the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history last month, will get the same bonus they received a year ago.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a $700 billion taxpayer bailout, public outcry over excessive pay and the demise of three of the biggest securities firms won’t deter Wall Street from offering year-end rewards to employees on top of their salaries, compensation experts say.

“Critical producers and critical managers will be retained with the same bonus they had last year,” said Robert Sloan, head of U.S. financial-services recruiting at Egon Zehnder International, a New York-based executive-search firm. “The others will see sharp cuts.”

Goldman, the biggest and most profitable Wall Street firm until it opted to become a bank holding company last month, has set aside about $6.85 billion for bonuses, or an average of $210,300 for each employee, down 32 percent from $339,400 a year ago. Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest securities firm until it also converted to a bank, has $6.44 billion for bonuses, or $138,700 per person, down 20 percent from last year. Both firms accrue a fixed percentage of their revenue for compensation, so the decline in bonus pools matches the drop in revenue.

Merrill’s Compensation

The money Merrill has set aside for bonuses equates to an average $110,000 for each of its 60,900 people, up from $108,000 a year ago because more than 3,000 jobs have been cut.

The bonus figures are based on estimates that about 60 percent of the compensation and benefits expenses reported by the companies will be paid in year-end bonuses, as occurred in past years. Average bonuses aren’t an indication of how much any employee will receive, since payments range widely from assistants to top traders. Bonuses aren’t paid until the end of the fiscal year, so firms could choose to reallocate the funds.

“We are in the process of determining appropriate levels of year-end compensation, and no decisions have been made,” said Mark Lake, a spokesman at Morgan Stanley. Ed Canaday, a spokesman for Goldman in New York, declined to comment.

Merrill spokeswoman Jessica Oppenheim said the firm’s accrued bonuses aren’t down as much as those at Goldman and Morgan Stanley because the firm reduced expenses last year, when it also had a loss. Compensation costs are down 18 percent this year, compared with the first nine months of 2006, Merrill’s last profitable year.

`Moratorium on Bonuses’

A worldwide economic slowdown, caused in part by the financial industry’s losses, and a U.S. Treasury plan to spend $250 billion of taxpayer money buying stakes in banks, have made pay a political issue this year.

“There should be a moratorium on bonuses,” Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told reporters last week. “If nobody gave them, there wouldn’t be a competitive aspect.”

In Zurich, protesters blocked UBS AG‘s private-banking branch on Paradeplatz last week to seek curbs on executive pay after Switzerland’s largest bank was forced to ask for government aid.

$145 Billion

“I’m just flabbergasted that the financial community has failed to show any sense of leadership on this issue and doesn’t seem to understand how angry people are at them,” said Nell Minow, editor of Corporate Library, a Portland, Maine-based corporate-governance research firm. “They are just a bonus away from having the villagers come after them with torches.”

New York-based Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lehman and Bear Stearns Cos. awarded their employees a cumulative $145 billion in bonuses from 2003 through 2007, according to estimates based on company reports. That’s more than the annual gross domestic product of the Philippines. Last year the firms paid out a record $39 billion.

At the end of this year, companies may decide against paying the money accrued for bonuses and instead use part of it to cover severance costs, said Rose Marie Orens, a New York-based partner at Mercer, the human resources consulting unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos., who specializes in executive compensation for financial- service companies. Goldman and Morgan Stanley end their fiscal year in November, and Merrill‘s ends in December.

Lehman Bankruptcy

“Whether what you see is what they’re going to pay, you can’t tell yet,” she said. “It’s highly unlikely they’ll add to those numbers and more likely they’ll bring them down.”

Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were rescued in emergency sales to Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Goldman and Morgan Stanley are each receiving $10 billion of capital from the government.

Bank of America is offering Merrill’s U.S. brokers bonuses of as much as 100 percent of the revenue they generate to keep them after the deal is complete, people briefed on the plan said last week. Scott Silvestri, a spokesman for Bank of America, declined to comment.

Employees at Lehman Brothers in Europe have been promised by their new owner, Nomura Holdings Inc., that they will receive the same bonus as last year, according to two people familiar with the situation. A Nomura spokesman declined to comment.

Earnings Slump

Share prices and profits have dropped more than bonuses so far. Goldman‘s profit has fallen 47 percent this year, and the stock is down 53 percent. Morgan Stanley‘s earnings have tumbled 41 percent, and the shares have shed 69 percent of their value.

“Performances have certainly not been what investors would expect,” said Daniel Moynihan, a principal at Compensation Resources Inc., a 25-year-old company in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey that advises companies on pay practices. Still, “smart companies are going to reward those people who performed well,” he said.

Even without bonuses, Wall Street’s traders and bankers typically receive salaries that range from $80,000 to $600,000 a year. That compares with the mean annual wage for the average U.S. employee of about $40,690 and a mean for CEOs of $151,370, according to a May 2007 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

For many on Wall Street, those salaries aren’t enough. Top employees expect to receive bonuses that can be in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. Lloyd Blankfein, 54, Goldman’s chief executive officer, was awarded a $67.9 million bonus last year on top of his $600,000 salary.

`Obscene’ Mindset

At Merrill Lynch, CEO John Thain, 53, received a $15 million bonus when he was hired in December. Peter Kraus, 56, who is leaving after joining Merrill last month as strategy head, may be eligible to collect on a pay package originally valued at $95 million, including stock and options that replaced a Goldman stake he had to forfeit, people familiar with the matter have said.

While some of the most senior executives may choose to forgo their bonuses, like Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, 63, did last year, others whose compensation isn’t disclosed can still take home millions, said Mercer’s Orens.

At investment banks, “the largest compensation doesn’t necessarily get paid to the top five executives,” she said. “They could be zeros, but there still will be people making $28 million.”

“When you work on Wall Street and you get no bonus, that is a huge shock to the system,” said Bill Coleman, chief compensation officer at Salary.com, a software provider based in Waltham, Massachusetts. “Wall Street has created this mindset that most people find obscene, which is that it’s hard to live on just half a million dollars a year.”

`No Wall Street’

A Morgan Stanley investment banker in Europe, speaking on the condition that he wouldn’t be identified, said his bonus last year was five times his salary and that he would quit if he didn’t get a bonus this year, unless his salary was doubled.

“There is no Wall Street without bonuses,” said Andy Kessler, a former analyst and hedge-fund manager turned author. “The guys who know how to make money are the ones who are in demand. If you want to keep them, you have to pay them something.”

More than 148,000 financial jobs have been eliminated worldwide since the middle of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Securities industry jobs in New York fell by 9,000, or 5 percent, through August 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in an Oct. 23 report. The mean annual salary of securities-industry employees in 2007 was “slightly less than $400,000,” according to the Fed report.

Goldman Cuts

Goldman Sachs plans to cut about 3,200 people, or 10 percent of its employees, a person familiar with the matter said last week. That’s a reversal from Sept. 16, when Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said he expected the number of employees to grow this year. Viniar told analysts in March that compensation costs make up two-thirds of the firm’s expenses and that year-end bonuses are roughly two-thirds of compensation.

More job reductions are likely, especially at Merrill and Lehman. About 10,000 Merrill employees may lose their jobs, estimates Richard Bove, an analyst at Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Options Group, a financial services recruitment and consulting firm in New York, estimates that global banking job cuts could reach 200,000, with as many as 50,000 in New York.

“The vast majority of the guys who are being let go are not going to find another job in this environment on the Street,” said Fred Joseph, the former CEO of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. who’s now co-head of Morgan Joseph & Co. in New York. “Middle- market firms like us are growing, but all of us won’t hire enough people to dent the 10 percent of people that Goldman’s going to let go.”

Hedge Funds

Barclays Plc, which is acquiring Lehman’s North American investment banking and capital markets businesses, will cut about 3,000 jobs, Barclays President Robert Diamond said in an Oct. 10 Fortune magazine article. While London-based Barclays has a $2.5 billion pool of money to pay severance and other compensation, it hasn’t promised former Lehman employees any bonuses. Seth Martin, a spokesman at Barclays, declined to comment.

Competition for top employees, a standard explanation for paying large bonuses, is less fierce this year. Hedge funds, which have poached top traders from securities firms in the past, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs this year after their biggest losses in more than 20 years, estimates Options Group.

“People don’t have a whole lot of alternative places to go to, and it’s pretty clear to everybody that they’re lucky to have a job,” said Roy Smith, a former Goldman partner who’s now a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “It has never been easy to find industries away from finance where you can make millions of dollars a year.”

Who Are Keepers?

Fewer employees means more bonus money will be available for those who remain, said Mercer’s Orens.

“You determine these are keepers, and you’ve got to keep them, so they’ll receive a disproportionate amount of the money that remains,” she said. “You want to make sure they’re not there and angry.”

Joseph, the former Drexel CEO, recalled the time at Shearson Hammill & Co. in 1973 when he had to deliver some good news and some bad news to a young employee.

“The good news is we’re firing half your class, but we love you and we want you to stay; the bad news is you’re not going to get a bonus, and we’re cutting salaries 10 percent,” he said. “He stayed and he built a whole career, and he’s been a successful investment banker ever since.”

The following table compares compensation and estimated bonuses for the first nine months of 2008 with the first nine months of last year. Bonus estimates are 60 percent of total compensation. Bonus awards are typically determined at the end of the year, with payments made in December or January.

                    Goldman        Morgan Stanley      Merrill

Nine Months 2007
Total Compensation  $16.92         $13.37              $11.56
(in billions)

Estimated Bonus     $10.15         $8.02               $6.94
(in billions)

Employees*          29,905         47,713              64,200

Bonus Per Employee  $339,408       $168,067            $108,075

Nine Months 2008
Total Compensation  $11.42         $10.73              $11.17
(in billions)

Estimated Bonus     $6.85          $6.44               $6.70
(in billions)

Employees*          32,569         46,383              60,900

Bonus Per Employee  $210,322       $138,749            $110,049

*Employee numbers are figures in third-quarter earnings reports
and don't reflect any cuts or additions since then.

Source

Transcript of prank call between Palin and Masked Avengers

Well on the lighter side of things. This was just to cute to pass up.  Some things are just irresistible. Bless the Avengers.

November 1, 2008

A transcript of a prank phone call between Quebec comedy duo “The Masked Avengers” and Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, released Saturday.

Sarah Palin: This is Sarah.

Masked Avengers: Ah, yeah, Gov. Palin.

Palin: Hello.

Avengers: Just hold on for President Sarkozy, one moment.

P: Oh, it’s not him yet, they’re saying. I always do that.

A: Yes, hello, Gov. Palin.

P: Hello, this is Sarah, how are you?

A: Fine, and you? This is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?

P: Oh, it’s so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.

A: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

P: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I. We love you and thank you for taking a few minutes to talk to me.

A: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday, you know?

P: Yes, good.

A: Excellent. Are you confident?

P: Very confident and we’re thankful that polls are showing that the race is tightening and…

A: Well I know very well that the campaign can be exhausting. How do you feel right now, my dear?

P: I feel so good. I feel like we’re in a marathon and at the very end of the marathon you get your second wind and you plow to the finish.

A: You see, I got elected in France because I’m real and you seem to be someone who’s real, as well.

P: Yes, yeah. Nico, we so appreciate this opportunity.

A: You know I see you as a president one day, too.

P: Maybe in eight years.

A: Well, I hope for you. You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favourite activities is to hunt, too.

P: Oh, very good. We should go hunting together.

A: Exactly, we could try go hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in French, on pourrait tuer des bebe phoque s, aussi.

P: Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together while we’re getting work done. We can kill two birds with one stone that way.

A: I just love killing those animals. Mmm, mmm, take away life, that is so fun. I’d really love to go, so long as we don’t bring along Vice-President Cheney.

P: No, I’ll be a careful shot, yes.

A: Yes, you know we have a lot in common also, because except from my house I can see Belgium. That’s kind of less interesting than you.

P: Well, see, we’re right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes.

A: Some people said in the last days and I thought that was mean that you weren’t experienced enough in foreign relations and you know that’s completely false. That’s the thing that I said to my great friend, the prime minister of Canada Stef Carse.

P: Well, he’s doing fine, too, and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder.

A: I was wondering because you are so next to him, one of my good friends, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr. Richard Z. Sirois, have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?

P: I haven’t seen him at one of the rallies but it’s been great working with the Canadian officials. I know as governor we have a great co-operative effort there as we work on all of our resource-development projects. You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife. Oh my goodness, you’ve added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours.

A: Thank you very much. You know my wife Carla would love to meet you, even though you know she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today.

P: Well, give her a big hug for me.

A: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she’s so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.

P: Oh my goodness, I didn’t know that.

A: Yes, in French it’s called de rouge a levre sur un cochon, or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber…it’s his life, Joe the Plumber.

P: Maybe she understands some of the unfair criticism but I bet you she is such a hard worker, too, and she realizes you just plow through that criticism.

A: I just want to be sure. That phenomenon Joe the Plumber. That’s not your husband, right?

P: That’s not my husband but he’s a normal American who just works hard and doesn’t want government to take his money.

A: Yes, yes, I understand we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It’s called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit.

P: Right, that’s what it’s all about, the middle class and government needing to work for them. You’re a very good example for us here.

A: I see a bit about NBC, even Fox News wasn’t an ally as much as usual.

P: Yeah, that’s what we’re up against.

A: Gov. Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life. You know Hustler‘s Nailin’ Paylin?

P: Ohh, good, thank you, yes.

A: That was really edgy.

P: Well, good.

A: I really loved you and I must say something also, governor, you’ve been pranked by the Masked Avengers. We are two comedians from Montreal.

P: Ohhh, have we been pranked? And what radio station is this?

A: CKOI in Montreal.

P: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters.

A: CK…hello?

Source

The Masked Avengers, notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state, notched its latest victory Saturday when it released a recording of a six-minute call with Palin, who thought she was talking with Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Under Bush Administration were you Better Off?

Probably Not

Since Bush took office, workers’ paychecks have stagnated and the cost of energy and food has gone way up—as have corporate profits.

November 1 2008

By Ellen Gibson
“Are you better off?” It’s a question the candidate of the challenging party asks during each Presidential campaign. The economy, of course, is the No. 1 issue this election, and that question has been raised in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the country. With the recent stock market meltdown and the collateral damage to 401(k) plans, many voters are indeed poorer. But in terms of real wages and the cost of consumer goods, are we truly worse off? For most Americans, the answer is, sadly, yes.

On Jan. 22, 2001, when President George W. Bush took over the White House, the Nasdaq was in the midst of a post-dot-com freefall. Bush had the bad luck of taking office just before the economy went into a recession that March. But after a mini downturn, the American economy experienced a period of recovery and expansion, with the gross domestic product growing at a steady clip and productivity surging 22%. That measure of prosperity, however, hasn’t translated into gains for most families.

In 2000 the median U.S. household income was $50,557 (adjusted for inflation), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Seven years later, the median income fell to $50,233. “That might not sound too bad,” says Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, “but normally, median income increases. That’s not good news for the middle class.” Consider that the median household income would be almost $64,000 had paychecks kept pace with the GDP.
Overblown Claims?
While workers’ paychecks have stagnated, corporate profits jumped an average of 10.8% per year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. “The fact that middle-income households ended up below where they were in 2000 despite strong productivity growth—that’s the heart of the problem,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “It’s one thing if you’re looking at a period like now, when the macroeconomy is dysfunctional, but for most of this decade the economy has been pumping along.” However, economists at the conservative American Enterprise Institute counter that claims of income stagnation are overblown, pointing out, for example, that household income data does not take into account total compensation, including companies’ burgeoning contributions to employee health insurance.

Even though inflation has not been severe for most of the decade, the cost of living has outpaced wages. The consumer price index has risen by 25% since January 2001, while core inflation jumped 18%. But the core consumer price index can be deceptive because it excludes food and energy. Once, after reporting that core inflation had been relatively tame that quarter, Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein came back to the office to find an irate e-mail: “Hey, dummy, what the hell do you think we spend our money on?” The point was taken: When energy and food skyrocket, families feel it.

And skyrocket they have. In early 2001 you could fill your car with regular gas for $1.47 a gallon. But on Oct. 24, three months after regular unleaded peaked at $4.11 a gallon, the average cost was leveling off around $2.78, according to the AAA online Daily Fuel Gauge Report. Grocery store sticker shock has been almost as acute. Take, for example, the price of a dozen eggs, which has risen 97% since 2001, from a nationwide average of $1.01 to $1.99. “You could look at inflation and think it hasn’t been that much of a problem, but in fact, if you look at the components of the middle-income consumption basket—tuition, housing, childcare, gas, food—all of those have been rising a lot more quickly,” says Bernstein.
Retirees Are Really Feeling It
There are consumer goods that have come down in price. And some economists don’t buy the argument that families are being hit where it hurts most. “People are more attuned to price increases than declines, so their perceptions are biased,” says Wolff. He points out that the price of goods such as toys and clothing have remained fairly stable because we have benefited from inexpensive imports. Electronics have come down, too, especially when adjusted for advances in technology. In 2001 the base model of Apple’s iBook, with its paltry 500MHz chip and 10GB hard drive, sold for $1,499. Today, the basic white 13-inch MacBook laptop will run you $999 for a 2.1 GHz chip and 120GB drive. That’s $500 less for nearly four times the speed and 12 times the storage capacity.

For consumers, there’s no argument over the impact of the current economic crisis. They’re feeling it, especially retirees. Take Patricia Wehrs, a Washington State resident who retired from her federal government job in 2000. She and her husband were all set for a comfortable, though modest, retirement. Then their retirement fund started losing money every month, while the cost of living crept up. “Our basic bills—electric, telephone, water, and cable—went up, in some cases 90%, over the past two years. I’ve kept the food bills under control with a budget and a diet,” jokes Wehrs. “However, fuel costs have drained any extra money, so no more theater, no dinners out, and smaller gifts to the grandchildren for special occasions.”
Source

THE BUSH LEGACY
Bad policies and a lack thereof
November 1, 2008

Long before the credit crisis that almost buried Wall Street and forced the U.S. government to effectively nationalize a chunk of the American financial system, President George W. Bush had shown himself to be a dismal caretaker of his country’s economic and fiscal well-being.

Then the housing bubble exploded, the value of complex, mortgage-related securities plummeted and credit markets froze solid. The ensuing collapse of some of the biggest and best-known names in banking, the controversial bailouts and the serious slowdown that has reached every corner of the globe will always colour the way economic historians evaluate Mr. Bush’s presidency.

Much like President Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression, Mr. Bush’s main contribution to the crisis was his failure to recognize its dimensions until irreparable damage had been inflicted.

His administration’s belated move to flood the financial system with credit and capital and to prop up ailing institutions may well prove the correct response. But it will inevitably worsen the dire fiscal situation that will face Barack Obama or John McCain, one that Mr. Bush’s misguided policies caused in the first place.

President Bush was spending like a Texas oilman on a Las Vegas gambling spree long before emergency rebates and massive bailouts became administration policy. In eight years, a supposedly conservative president made big government considerably bigger and more intrusive, and destroyed years of hard work by the Clinton administration to balance the books. His reckless combination of heavy tax cuts – even as the costs of the Iraq war climbed into the stratosphere – and significantly higher spending has left the government so awash in red ink that his successor has little hope of resurrecting even a modest surplus and still keeping the sputtering economy from crashing. The record budget deficit of $454.8-billion (U.S.) in the latest fiscal year pales in comparison to cautious forecasts of about $750-billion for this year. A figure as high as $1.6-trillion has been kicked around.

Long-term deficits are not benign. They raise the cost of capital, restrict growth and, in normal times, undermine the currency. Panicky investors have recently flocked to the U.S. dollar as a rare safe harbour in a wide sea of uncertainty. But people will soon reassess the greenback’s long-term future, in light of the sky-high debt and severe structural problems left untouched or worsened by Mr. Bush’s policies or lack of them. The net result will be bad for the United States, and also for Canada and for the global economy, which still depend on a buoyant U.S. market. That, too, is part of the Bush legacy.

The Bush administration is not directly responsible for the current mess. Cheap credit, subprime mortgages, greedy investment bankers and opaque derivatives trading on a massive scale were already features of the landscape before Mr. Bush became president. But his strenuous efforts, along with those of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to play down the potentially devastating consequences of the bursting credit bubble inspired a dangerous level of complacency.

That brings us to the ignominious end of Mr. Bush’s economic management. But what about the beginning?

It is not hard to pinpoint where and how he went off the fiscal rails. He squeaked into office in 2000 on the promise of deep income-tax cuts, which seemed the right medicine when the Internet stock bubble was bursting and the U.S. economy was showing serious signs of stress after a long period of growth. But then came 9/11 and the enormous security and military expenditures that followed. The war in Iraq cost billions, and the peace has proved many times more expensive. The final tally will be in the trillions.

Yet, even as the U.S. economy pulled out of the doldrums, Mr. Bush stubbornly refused to abandon the low-tax, big-spend policies that were weakening public finances. What’s worse, after 9/11, he narrowed his focus dramatically, dropping ambitious plans to reform Social Security and allowing the United States to become even more dependent on foreign capital and foreign oil.

When government borrowing is rocketing skyward to pay for military adventures, that is not the time for unaffordable tax cuts, increased subsidies or a major expansion in Medicare for which there was no money.

Fortunately, Mr. Bush never proceeded with his idea to have Americans take responsibility for managing their own assets set aside for retirement. Had he succeeded in pushing through this privatization, the cost to the public purse could have been as high as $2-trillion. And the damage to Americans’ pension prospects after the credit meltdown and stock market plunge would have been incalculable.

But that does not mean the U.S. social safety net should have been left to slowly unravel. His successor is now saddled with that problem, as well as a raft of other costly domestic issues ignored or mismanaged by the current administration. Raising the necessary capital may well require scaling back the “temporary” Bush income-tax cuts, which are due to expire by 2010, imposing a national sales tax along the lines of the GST and even a gasoline tax. None would be popular. But there may be little choice.

Any Canadian leader who left people so vulnerable to future financial risk would have been run out of politics after a single term, regardless of the shape of the economy.

For three-quarters of Mr. Bush’s time in office, the U.S. economy was quite robust, which only underlines the poverty of his policies. Instead of taking advantage of the windfall revenues to cap the rising deficit, pay down debt, repair crumbling infrastructure and reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil, he earmarked large expenditures to cover the spiralling costs of his domestic security agenda and the disastrous war. He also proffered more tax breaks and higher subsidies to favoured industries, including oil and agriculture, which saw its trade-distorting federal handouts double between 2002 and 2005.

It was an opportunity squandered, and it will haunt U.S. policy-makers for years to come.

Today, the steady drumbeat of economic success is a distant memory. President Bush is not to blame for that. But the most profligate leader in U.S. history certainly bears a large share of responsibility for the dangerous holes in the leaky ship of state left for his successor to patch.

Source

Then there is the 11 trillion dollar debt he has run up.

Of course we also must remember the wars he has started as well.

Lest we forget

A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

January 29, 2004

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says Iraq probably did not have WMD before the war, a major blow to the Bush Administration which used the WMD argument as the rationale for war. Unfortunately, Kay and the Administration are now attempting to shift the blame for misleading America onto the intelligence community. But a review of the facts shows the intelligence community repeatedly warned the Bush Administration about the weakness of its case, but was circumvented, overruled, and ignored. The following is year-by-year timeline of those warnings.

In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay now admits that the previous policy of containment – including the 1998 bombing of Iraq – destroyed any remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: “As reported in detail in the progress report dated 8 October 1997�?and based on all credible information available to date, the IAEA’s verification activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of a technically coherent picture of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear programme. These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for t he production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.” [Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98]

FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS CONTAINED: “I think we ought to declare [the containment policy] a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.” He added Saddam “is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors” and that “he threatens not the United States.” [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and 2/24/01]

SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that “Saddam Hussein is bottled up” – a confirmation of the intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press, 9/16/2001]

SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans “in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States�?The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the c=I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community.” The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically “cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest” while officials deliberately “bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.” [Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04; New Yorker, 10/20/03]

Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.

JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR THREAT REPORT: “In CIA Director George Tenet’s January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea.” [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NOT PROVIDED WMD TO TERRORISTS: “The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials.” [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]

APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq’s declared nuclear power plants “fully within the parameters he could operate” when Blix was head of the international agency responsible for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report indicated that “Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program.” [Source: W. Post, 4/15/02]

SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: “In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies–noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA’s classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration’s claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes.” [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: “An unclassified excerpt of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq’s chemical warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has – or will – establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’” The report also said, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions.” [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE OF NUKE DOUBTS: “Doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence.” [Source: UPI, 9/20/02]

OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: “The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa.” [Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]

OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. “The activities we have detected do not … add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons.” INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source, Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]

OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: “The government organization most knowledgeable about the United States’ UAV program — the Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center — had sharply disputed the notion that Iraq’s UAVs were being designed as attack weapons” – a WMD claim President Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just three days before the congressional vote authorizing the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post, 9/26/03]

Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the intelligence community, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to conform their reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile, more evidence from international institutions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: “Vice President Dick Cheney’s repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration’s claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed.” Additionally, CIA officials “charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president’s office had ‘pressured’ agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam’s capabilities and intentions.” [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]

JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE WARNING TO POWELL: “The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department’s in-house analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation of his February speech that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium.” [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]

FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD HAVE BEEN FOUND: “In their third progress report since U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in November, inspectors told the council they had not found any weapons of mass destruction.” Weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN, 2/14/03]

FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in February that “We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq.” The IAEA examined “2,000 pages of documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist’s home — evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi regime was hiding government documents in private homes. The documents, including some marked classified, appear to be the scientist’s personal files.” However, “the documents, which contained information about the use of laser technology to enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to the IAEA and do not change the agency’s conclusions about Iraq’s laser enrichment program.” [Source: Wash. Post, 2/15/03]

FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: “A CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report on proliferation activities.” [NBC News, 2/24/03]

MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said nuclear experts have found “no indication” that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. For months, American officials had “cited Iraq’s importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein’s scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability.” ElBaradei also noted said “the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that documents which formed the basis for the [President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” When questioned about this on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said “Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong.” [Source: NY Times, 3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

MAY 30, 2003 – INTEL PROFESSIONALS ADMIT THEY WERE PRESSURED: “A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq . A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups. This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, ‘cherry-picked the intelligence stream’ in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA was “exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD,” or weapons of mass destruction, he said. Greg Thielmann, an intelligence official in the State Department, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped ‘from the top down.'” [Reuters, 5/30/03 ]

JUNE 6, 2003 – INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN SAYS INTEL WAS HYPED: “The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq , a leading national security historian concluded in a detailed study of the spy agency’s public pronouncements.” [Reuters, 6/6/03]

Source

Using bailout funds for bonuses, dividends and acquisitions illegal

Banking panel chairman say using bailout funds for bonuses against law

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October 31, 2008

Congressman Barney Frank is accusing financial institutions of “distorting” the government’s $700 billion bailout plan by using funds for bonuses, dividends and acquisitions.

The chairman of the House Financial Service Committee says such uses of the funds are a “violation of the terms of the act.” Frank says the money should used for “relending and no other purpose.”

The Massachusetts Democrat joins a growing chorus of lawmakers criticizing the Bush administration over management of the bailout plan.

Nine banks have received a $125 billion stock investment from the Treasury Department. While the law contains some limits on compensation, it does not prohibit recipients from paying dividends to investors, making acquisitions or awarding bonuses.

Source

Seems they need to tidy up a few things. Trust George Bush and his cronies folks he knows what he is doing.  They would never coerce or lie now would they? Honest as the day is long I hear.  Bush knowing what he is doing would be a shocker for anyone. Well unless your out for profit and George is quit good at helping his friends become very rich.

I would keep a very close watch on the outcome of all the Bailout money and who gets what.

Will anyone be prosecuted for these crimes that are now being perpetrated against the US tax payer?

We will see.  But folks don’t hold your breath.

Why was the cashing out of billions of dollars just before the 9/11 attacks never investigated?

November 1 2008

by Jim Hogue

It’s been over six years since 9/11, but U.S. regulatory entities have been slow to follow through with reports about the complex financial transactions that occurred just prior to and following the attacks. Such research could shed light on such questions as who was behind them—and who benefited—and could help lay to rest the rumors that have been festering.

Warning bells about anomalies in the fiscal sector were sounded in the summer of 2001, but not heeded. Among those who has since raised questions was Bill Bergman. As a financial market analyst for the Federal Reserve, he was assigned in 2003 to review the record of July and August of 2001. He noticed an unusual surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply (cash circulating outside of banks) during that period. The surge totaled over $5 billion above the norm for a two-month increase. The increase in August alone was the third largest single monthly increase since 1947, even after a significantly above-average month in July.

Surges in the currency component of M1 are often the result of people withdrawing their cash to protect themselves lest some anticipated disaster (such as Y2K) befall the economy. In January of 1991 a surge was recorded (the then second-largest since ’47), which could be attributed to “war-time hoarding” before the Iraq I invasion, but could also be attributed to financial maneuverings and liquefying of assets relating to the BCCI enforcement proceedings. Bergman points out that the August 2001 withdrawals may have been, to a large extent, caused by the Argentinian banking crisis that was occurring at the time. However, he raises the point that no explanation has yet fully answered the important question: Why was the cashing out of billions of dollars just before the 9/11 attacks never investigated? It’s possible that the answer to this question is also the answer to the other follow-the-money questions surrounding 9/11; and despite an embarrassing heap of evidence, neither the press, nor Congress, nor any agency with investigative responsibility has done its job on our behalf. On the contrary, their inaction might reasonably be construed as a cover-up.Bergman “followed the money,” including developing a framework for working with money-laundering data and “suspicious activity” reports for monitoring and investigating terrorism. The questions he asked about what happened during the summer of 2001 should have led to investigations, which should have resulted in the prosecution of those with foreknowledge of the attacks.

Those who follow the history of the 9/11 fact-finding movement know that there is a laundry-list of unanswered questions that are just as compelling as those put forth by Bergman. And there is also a laundry-list of whistle-blowers who have been fired and subsequently ignored. So it is not at all surprising that Bergman was removed from his investigative duties, and that his concerns were not publicly addressed.

Bergman’s supervisor instructed him follow up on an unanswered question he had raised pertaining to an August 2, 2001 letter from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to the 12 Reserve Banks. This letter urged scrutiny of suspicious activity reports. Bergman learned of the pervasiveness of the warnings of the 9/11 attacks, and wondered how thoroughly these warnings had permeated the financial system.

In this capacity as Federal Reserve investigative point-man, and with his money-laundering portfolio being guided by his supervisor’s directive, he asked the Board why they had issued their August 2, 2001 directive, and whether this related to any heightened intelligence of a terrorist threat. His position was then eliminated, and a crucial investigation was terminated before it could even begin.

Another 9/11 Commission Misrepresentation

Footnote 28 of the Staff Monograph on Terrorist Financing from the official 9/11 Commission Report states that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 [PDF] “didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages.”

True? No. The NMLS Report mentions it 17 times. One gets the impression that the commission staff (under Philip Zelikow) was trying to paint the picture that there wasn’t a lot of co-operation between those involved in counterterrorism and the banking regulators in 2001. Why do they paint this picture, inasmuch as the contrary is the case? In fact, anti-terrorism was an important element of the National Money Strategy, and it was included and emphasized in its Report annually. It may have been part of the reason why the August 2, 2001 letter urging scrutiny of suspicious activity reports was issued in the first place.

In turn, the billions in currency shipments of July and August 2001 are completely omitted in the 9/11 Commission Report. I make bold to point out that the official story-line is that the attacks were accomplished by “the evil-doers” on a shoe-string budget with little money changing hands. Therefore, according to Zelikow et al., it is pointless to look at large flows of money in an investigation of the attacks. That makes perfect sense—unless you happen to have a brain.

To state the obvious, there are two reasons why Zelikow et al. made the false statement regarding there having been no references to terrorism in the National Money-laundering Strategy Report. One reason could be to justify and encourage more scrutiny (legal or otherwise) of small transactions generally, e.g. via USAPA, and the other could be to establish (read: invent) a reason for missing the evidence pertaining to the attacks. (’Transactions too small. No one could find.’) And since the real money trail points to foreknowledge within the financial community at large, and, possibly, the Federal Reserve specifically, the “low-budget terrorism” story-line that the 9/11 Commission had established needed to be protected.

If such a lack of attentiveness to a financial transaction of $5 billion goes unnoticed in August 2001, then a reason had to be established for this lack of attention. And Bergman’s attentiveness to the Board of Governor’s August 2 letter was the fly in the ointment, as this letter proves that the Board was indeed attentive to suspicious transactions, even very, very large ones. Bergman’s question of “Why” is therefore key to yet another avenue of inquiry.

All the News that’s Permissible to Print
Note that a few dollars sent to an Islamic charity could warrant arrests, investigations, front-page stories, and, sometimes, torture and many years in jail. That’s Propaganda 101: ‘Large amounts of money do not fund major acts of terrorism. Small amounts do. Small amounts covered the 9/11 tab, therefore large amounts didn’t.’ The news coverage, creating high-profile prosecutions for relatively small transactions, reinforces this scenario.

With this in mind, we suggest that the reader follow the story of Mark Siljander (major coverage) on the one hand, and also follow the Times UK reports from Sibel Edmonds (verboten in the US mainstream press) on the other hand. Edmonds told me recently of the major foreign media outlets that had offered to report her story. Not one major outlet did so in the US. R.T. Naylor suggests, in his wonderful book Satanic Purses, that any major terrorist event that involves a lot of money is ’state terrorism,’ and this is independently confirmed by Sibel Edmonds’ statements as to the enormous sums changing hands at the time of the 9/11 attacks. I suggest that her testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee (Leahy and Grassley) gave the lie to the official financial myth of 9/11. If Bergman had been allowed to continue his investigation, I suggest that he would have uncovered the same thing. Note that the drug money and other illicit transactions described by Edmonds occurred during the same time period, and the amounts in the billions are comparable.

The Law
To members of the constabulary: the operable statutes are 1) The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that imposed new financial reporting requirements to facilitate the tracing of questionable transactions and 2) the 1986 Money Laundering Control Act [PDF] that criminalized the act of money-laundering. Also operable, and of particular relevance in a historical context, is the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act [PDF] that was relied upon in October of 1942 to seize the assets of “Hitler’s Bankers in America,” Union Banking, (involving bank vice president Prescott Bush under his father-in-law and bank president, George Walker).

The law is not always followed, and the required “currency transaction reports” are sometimes not filed. The 9/11 Commission Report and the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 [PDF] identify those who are involved with large cash transactions. Had the paperwork been done in August of 2001, or an investigation done into the crime of failing to file the “currency transaction reports,” then we would know who made the cash withdrawals in $100 bills amounting to the $5 billion surge.

Information about what transpired took years to develop after the fact. For example, the Federal Reserve fined United Bank of Switzerland and Riggs Bank in 2004.

Mr. Bergman states that he doesn’t want to be a dog barking up the wrong tree, but the authorities, apparently under orders from our top officials, are preventing a standard investigation and the most obvious prosecutorial methodology from going forth.

Congress could step in; a prosecutor could step up. But don’t hold your breath.

Jim Hogue, a former teacher, is now an actor who tours his performance of Ethan Allen. He also operates a small farm in Calais, VT. His seminal articles about Sibel Edmonds and CIA Whistleblower “Miss Moneypenny” may be found in this newspaper’s archives. Bill Bergman currently works in Chicago as an equity analyst for a private sector firm. From 1998 to 2004 he was a senior financial market analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where his areas of expertise included Insolvency Issues in Derivatives Markets, Money Laundering, and Ethics and Payment System Policy. He holds an M.B.A. in Finance and an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago.
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/012908Hogue.shtml

Source

Rescued bank to pay millions in bonuses

By Simon Bowers

November 1 2008

Royal Bank of Scotland, which is being bailed out with £20bn of taxpayers’ money, has signalled it is preparing to pay bonuses to thousands of staff despite government pledges to crack down on City pay.

The bank has set aside £1.79bn to cover “staff costs” – including discretionary bonuses – at its investment banking division for the first six months of the year alone. The same division caused a £5.9bn writedown that wiped out the bank’s profits for the same period.

The government had demanded that boardroom directors at RBS should not receive bonuses this year and the chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, is walking away without a pay-off. But below boardroom level, RBS and other groups are preparing to pay bonuses to investment bankers who continue to generate profits.

The disclosure drew fierce criticism from Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman.

“The government said they would attach strict conditions on bonuses and it is very clear they are doing nothing of the kind.

“The banks are just making complete monkeys of them.”

He suggested the government would not have agreed to bail out any standalone investment bank. RBS and others had become “entangled with casino-style investment banking operations”, he said.

Despite the continuing financial turmoil and widespread criticism of the bonus culture in the City, the bank is understood to believe the payments are defensible.

A source said: “I think everybody would expect [that those responsible for writedowns] would not get a bonus. But there are people who still made fairly substantial money in other product areas – you cannot just not pay them bonuses, they will just go elsewhere.” Asked about the likely bonus culture after taxpayer-funded bail-out, the source said: “If the government does end up becoming a shareholder, RBS is still a listed entity. It remains the board’s responsibility to ensure it is run commercially.”

Several US politicians have seized on an investigation by the Guardian last month which showed six Wall Street banks – Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers – had set aside $70bn (£42.5bn) in pay and bonuses for the first nine months of the year.

Five are in line to benefit from a $700bn US taxpayer bail-out. The sixth, Lehman Brothers, has collapsed – though not without securing considerable bonus payouts for staff in the US.

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, wrote to chief executives of America’s nine largest banks this week asking them to hand over information about their pay and bonus plans.

In his letter Waxman cites the Guardian report and says: “Some experts have suggested that a significant percentage of [bankers’ pay] could come in year-end bonuses and that the size of the bonuses will be significantly enhanced as a result of the infusion of taxpayer funds.”

Staff costs at RBS’s investment banking division include salaries already paid in the first six months of the year, national insurance and profit-sharing contributions as well as funds earmarked for end-of-year bonuses. The sum set aside is 20% lower than the equivalent figure for the first six months of 2007.

Banking sources privately acknowledge that the sight of these bonus accruals may provoke anger. They concede the industry’s pay and bonus regime is under unprecedented strain as it fails to reflect profitability, asset writedowns or share price declines.

Source

Not really surprised to see some of  the bailout money is going to those who were in part, responsible for the down fall of the banks in the first place.

Governments should be protecting the taxpayer, not the bonues to those who messed up in the first place.

Why should we be surprised by this? Typical Government blunders are to be expected.  Either they don’t think or they don’t care about their citizens, as much as they pretend too.  This crisis was created in the US, flaunted around the world and now this  total insult to the taxpayers. As usual the rich get richer and the poor get ripped off. I am still waiting to see if and what has been investigated and what the findings are. This could be a very fraudulent set of events put into motion by a scrupulous few.

Create a Crisis, Fear and Solution. This method is as American as War or Apple Pie. This method has been used on the American people more times then one could ever imagine. Seems now they are using it around the world. Will we ever know the truth? Probably not.

This is a very informative Video, one of my Visitors gave me a while back. Very interesting indeed and an excellent Video. Be sure to take the time to watch it. You will be very enlightened by the end of it.  Could a Crisis be created? For sure.

The Money Masters – How International Bankers Gained Control of America

Congress Grew 13 Percent Richer In 2007

Times are tough, but don’t worry about most members of Congress making ends meet.

Their collective wealth grew by 13 percent last year, leaving them in better shape than most Americans to make it through an economic downturn, according to a new analysis of personal financial reports.

Overall, nearly two of every three senators are millionaires. That includes presidential candidates Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. In the House, 39 percent of all members belong to the exclusive club.

Only 1 percent of all Americans are considered millionaires.

“With a median net worth of $746,000, most members of Congress have a comfortable financial cushion to ride out any recession,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which conducted the study.

In the House of Representatives, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranks No. 1, with $397 million, followed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., with $343 million. Rep Robin Hayes, R-N.C., ranks third, with $173.4 million. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ranks sixth, with $62 million.

In the Senate, the two Democrats from Massachusetts claimed two of the top three spots.

Sen. John Kerry led the pack, with $336 million, while Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ranked third, with $104 million. Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., ranked second, with $241.5 million. Overall, senators had a median net worth estimated at $1.7 million.

The 535 members of Congress, who earn average annual salaries of $169,000 and receive cost-of-living pay increases, had a total net worth of $3.7 billion last year. Although some are likely to take a hit from Wall Street’s woes, their average net worth soared by 61 percent from 2004 to 2007.

However, not all members are wealthy and some appear to be bankrupt. The study found that 16 House members and three senators had an average net worth of less than zero.

Obama ranked as one of the biggest financial winners, with his net worth increasing from $800,000 in 2006 to $4.7 million last year, thanks mainly to royalties from his two best-selling books. McCain had a net worth estimated at $28.5 million, with most of the wealth attributed to his wife Cindy’s family fortune.

Authors of the study said it’s impossible to give a precise net worth for members of Congress because their individual assets and liabilities are disclosed in broad ranges. To conduct the study, the Center for Responsive Politics determined a member’s minimum net worth and maximum net worth and then calculated an average, which was used to rank the members.

Because the law does not require them to do so, members of Congress don’t disclose the value of their homes unless they produce income. As a result, a member’s true net worth is likely to be much higher than what gets reported.

“Members of Congress don’t make it easy for the public to keep tabs on their personal holdings and any conflicts of interest those holdings present,” said Dan Auble, who manages the center’s database of lawmakers’ financial information.

Who’s the wealthiest of them all?

A new study suggests that members of Congress are in much better shape than most Americans to make it through an economic slowdown.

Here’s a list of the members who had the highest average net worth last year:

Senate

1 John Kerry (D-Mass.)……..$336,224,883

2 Herb Kohl (D-Wis.)……..$241,545,513

3 Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)……..$103,560,020

4 Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)……..$93,715,011

5 Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)……..$89,509,099

6 Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)……..$84,171,162

7 Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)……..$46,127,014

8 Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)……..$33,308,537

9 Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)……..$32,428,089

10 Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.)……..$31,421,472

House of Representatives

1 Jane Harman (D-Calif.)……..$397,412,077

2 Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)……..$343,457,521

3 Robin Hayes (R-N.C.)……..$173,409,173

4 Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)……..$165,748,714

5 Michael McCaul (R-Texas)……..$64,073,077

6 Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)……..$62,468,047

7 Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)……..$50,297,547

8 Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.)……..$47,350,092

9 Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.)……..$43,716,445

10 Gary Miller (R-Calif.)……..$39,978,021

From Center for Responsive Politics

Source

This site is also rather interesting

Open Secrets

Iraq condemns US raid on Syrian village

The raid was carried out by the CIA

October 29 2008

By Patrick Cockburn

The Iraqi government has unexpectedly denounced a CIA raid on a compound in a Syrian border village that killed an al-Qa’ida commander who dispatched fighters into Iraq.

“The Iraqi government rejects US aircraft bombarding posts inside Syria,” said an Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, in a surprise rebuke to Washington. “The constitution does not allow Iraq to be used as a staging ground to attack neighbouring countries.”

The raid, the first on Syrian territory by the US since the invasion of Iraq five years ago, highlights the way the US carries out military operations without consulting the Iraqi government. This is humiliating for the Iraqi government and reinforces Iraqi doubts about signing a security pact with the US by the end of the year. The operation on Sunday, in which US helicopters landed 24 special forces troops in Sukkariyeh, five miles inside Syria near the border town of Abu Kamal, was carried out by the CIA according to US officials in Washington. The US soldiers reportedly killed Abu Ghadiyah, the nom de guerre of Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, who had been denounced by the US for facilitating the “flow of terrorists, weapons and money from Syria to al-Qa’ida in Iraq”. His body was flown back to Iraq, officials said.

Syria denied the presence of al-Qa’ida in Sukkariyeh and claimed the dead were local farmers. The Syrian government yesterday ordered the closure of an American school and a US cultural centre in Damascus in retaliation.

Abu Ghadiyah, aided by close family members, had his assets frozen by the US Treasury in February in a directive claiming he was the head of logistics in Syria for al-Qa’ida. The most surprising aspect of the US attack was its timing. Syria has been a conduit for anti-US insurgents since the Sunni Arab uprising against the US occupation started after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

But the Sunni rebellion has largely subsided since 2007 and Syria has become more co-operative in stopping the movement of fighters across the border. The US and Iraqi governments also claim to have succeeded in largely eliminating al-Qa’ida in Iraq in Anbar province, which has a long common border with Syria. Abu Ghadiyah’s smuggling activities would have been less significant than in the past. The CIA-led raid into Syrian territory will deepen suspicions in Syria and Jordan that, so long as the US has a military presence in Iraq, it will be used as a launching pad for operations against them. Iran has already made clear that it is against the Status of Forces Agreement (Sofa), negotiated by Iraq and the US over the past eight months. The decision on signing the agreement has divided the Iraqi government, and the cabinet is looking for amendments. In theory Sofa would increase Iraqi control but its critics claim it would formalise the occupation.

US officials are trying to get the pact signed before the UN mandate for the US occupation runs out at the end of the year. The decision on whether or not to sign Sofa has split the Iraqi politicians. The ministers of defence, interior, foreign affairs and finance are in favour; so too are the Kurdish parties. But the Shia religious parties are dubious or against it. The US raid into Syria is likely only to increase those doubts.

Source

US shows it is ready to take the war across boundaries

October 27 2008

The US commando attack inside Syrian territory appears to amplify an emerging message to countries giving safe passage to terrorists: Take action, or America will.

A Washington military official said special forces conducted the raid in Syria to target the network of al Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria to help fight in the war in Iraq.

Syria said troops in four helicopters attacked a building and killed eight people, including four children.

“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official said.

Although the flow of foreign fighters from Syria to Iraq has been declining, Americans have been unable to shut down the network in the area struck because Syria was out of the military’s reach.

The move appears to echo one taken recently in America’s other current war. President Bush in July secretly approved military raids inside anti-terror ally Pakistan, which has been unwilling or unable to stem the flow of militants hiding in Pakistan and waging cross-border raids into Afghanistan.

Helicopter-borne US special forces conducted a raid in September inside Pakistan – the only one known so far following Mr Bush’s order. Islamabad has complained bitterly about the move, which it says killed two dozen people, including civilians.

The US has become frustrated with the use of Pakistan’s north-western tribal areas as a haven for militants nearly seven years since the Taliban was rousted from Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden.

The weekend’s raid came just days after the commander of US forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an “uncontrolled” gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

Syria called the raid a “serious aggression,” and its foreign ministry summoned the charges d’affaires of the United States and Iraq in protest.

Government newspapers also published scathing criticisms of the raid today. Tishrin splashed its front pages with a headline denouncing it as a “US war crime,” while Al-Baath newspaper described the attack in an editorial as a “stunning, shocking and unprecedented adventure.”

Source

Syrian minister warns US after raid
October 27 2008

A US military raid inside Syria was an act of “criminal and terrorist aggression”, Syria’s foreign minister said today

Speaking at a news conference in London, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem warned of retaliation if Syria’s borders were violated again.

He said Syria “would defend our territories” if there were a repeat of the weekend raid.

The US military said it was targeting the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria to help fight in Iraq. Syria said troops in four helicopters attacked a building and killed eight people, including four children.

“They know full well that we stand against al-Qa’ida,” Mr al-Moallem said. “They know full well we are trying to tighten our border with Iraq.”

He was in London today for talks with the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The two were supposed to hold a joint press conference but this was cancelled at the last minute.

The Foreign Office said that it had been agreed with the Syrians that it would “not be appropriate” to hold a formal press conference following their talks in London. A spokeswoman said the press conference had been abandoned because both sides had been concerned that it would be dominated by questions about the US raid.

The Foreign Office confirmed that the meeting between Mr Miliband and Walid al-Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, was still going ahead as planned.

Mr al-Moallem called for a new US administration to “learn from the mistakes of this administration.”

“I hope the American people would elect a president who can bring a good reputation in the world, not like this reputation we are witnessing in this administration,” he said.

Source

Seems George Bush thinks he can do anything he wants to anyone he wants.

This will also backfire on the US as did the attacks on Pakistan. The US does not have the legal right to attack anyone they please. This is yet another illegal act of aggression ,  of the US Government.

Bush is in fact causing more war. He is also Trying to get him and his cohorts immunity from crimes against humanity and those under the Geneva Convention.

Bush Trying to Avoid War Crimes Charges

Violations under the Geneva Convention are a Felony.  So they want to pass a bit of legislation so they can’t be prosecuted. So in essence Bush thinks he can murder, maim, torture, commit acts of Genocide and get away with it.  I firmly believe Bush and those responsible should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and they should not be given any immunity for his crimes. Why should they be above the law when the rest of the people around the world are not?

Bush secret order to send special forces into Pakistan

Pakistani tribal chiefs threaten to join Taliban