Jim Hightower : ‘Too Big to Fail’ Is Too Big, Period.

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Too big to fail. Photo by Jennifer Szymaszek / AP / Noise Between Stations.

The ‘too big’ claim forms the rationale for the diversion of regular people’s money into rich people’s pockets.

By Jim Hightower / April 4, 2009.

As skiers and backcountry hikers know, a whiteout is a blizzard that’s so intense that those caught in it can’t even see the blizzard.

That’s how I think of the Wall Street bailout now swirling around us. So many trillions of our tax dollars are being blown at the financial giants that we’re blinded by the density of it, unable to see where we are or know what direction we’re headed.

However, one way to get your bearings in this bailout blizzard is to focus on the central point that both the bailors (Washington) and the bailees (Wall Street) keep pounding as an irrefutable truth that everyone simply has to accept — namely, the institutions being rescued are too big to fail.

Even sheep know to flee when coyotes howl in unison — and we commoners need to confront the absurdity of this “too big” claim, which forms the rationale for the entire diversion of regular people’s money into rich people’s pockets.

Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG — omigosh, cried the Powers That Be, these behemoths are linked to every other behemoth, so if we don’t stuff them with tax dollars … well, we have no choice, because they’re just too big for the government to let fail.

Point No. 1: They have failed. They are kaput. It costs more to buy a snickerdoodle than to buy a share of Citigroup stock. AIG is 80 percent owned by you and me, the taxpayers. These once-haughty outfits are insolvent — wards of the state.

Point No. 2: If they’re too big, why should we sustain them? Let’s be clear about something the establishment doesn’t want you and me to understand — these giants did not get so big and interconnected because of natural market forces and free-enterprise efficiencies. They amassed power the old-fashioned way: They got the government to give it to them. In the past 20 years or so, they lobbied furiously to get Washington to rig the rules so they could latterly bloat … and float out of control.

A new report by Wallstreetwatch.org reveals that from 1998 to 2008, the finance industry made $1.7 billion in contributions to Washington politicians (55 percent to Repubs, 45 percent to Dems), spent $3.4 billion on lobbyists (3,000 of them on the industry payroll in 2007 alone) and won a dozen key deregulatory victories that led directly to today’s financial meltdown.

Inherent in the industry’s push for unbridled expansion was the unstated goal of guaranteeing that they would get taxpayer bailouts if things went badly. So many investors, businesses, employees and others would be hooked into these multitentacled blobs that government would be compelled to rescue the banks from their own excesses.

Knowing that they could privatize all of the profits from quick-buck schemes and socialize the losses, bankers were unleashed to do their damnedest. Which they did.

What to do now? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is calling on Congress to create a “super regulator” to control the irrational risks that the too-big boys take. Immodestly, Bernanke suggests that the Fed be this overseer. He is backed up by Timothy Geithner, President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary and point man on rescuing the giants. He has just outlined a new regulatory regime that he suggests we entrust to the Fed.

Bad idea all around. First, the Fed already has far-reaching watchdog authority that it refused to use as today’s crisis built up. We heard no bark and got no bite because, while the Fed has enormous public authority to regulate America’s money supply, interest rates and banks, it is governed by — guess who? — bankers, and it operates essentially as a private banking cartel.

Second, and most important, too big to fail is too big to regulate. And too big to regulate means they are too big to tolerate. Period.

The answer is to split their investment, banking and insurance functions into separate companies and reinvigorate America’s antitrust laws to restore competition in each of the three sectors of finance.

As Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsh put it in an online column in February, “We can’t have a free-market economy dominated by institutions so huge that they don’t have to play by free-market rules.”

Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.

[Texan Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow (Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown, co-edited by Phillip Frazer.]

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

A Cuban Revolutionary and a Cuban Exile Reunite

Posted on April 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Coqui Salazar. Photo by Michael D. Nolan / The Rag Blog.

Dos Hermanos – Reunifying Two Cuban Brothers
By Michael D. Nolan / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2009

Toward the end of our week in Havana, Coqui took us on a tour of the mansions of Miramar where wealthy Cubans and North Americans once resided in the opulent days before Castro’s Revolution. Now the stark Russian Embassy tower dominated the main thoroughfare. We stopped for lunch at a small outdoor café.

Coqui brought up the case of “Pedrito,” his half-brother who left the island with his parents in the early 60s shortly after Fidel assumed power. Their father was a prominent doctor in Guantanamo and part of the exodus of middle-class professionals who left their homeland for the United States.

“I must tell you,” Coqui related, “that I always knew that I had a brother over there. I knew he lived at Chicago but he had moved to another city and I moved from Guantanamo to Havana, so we had lost our trails because in those moments it could be very difficult even sending a letter. About twenty years ago someone told me that my dad, Pedro, and stepmother were living at San Francisco.”

Many of Coqui’s touring customers were Californians. Some had offered to look for his missing brother but without success. Challenged by the dramatic nature of the task, I offered to look myself. I felt commissioned by the older brother whose life-long quest had too frequently ended with disappointment. Had he waited until this final encounter of our visit to share this precious information about a 40-year fraternal separation?

It was the spring of 2000. My 21-year-old daughter Rosy and I set out from the San Francisco Airport shortly after midnight. The ease with which we slipped into Fidel’s forbidden paradise amazed us. We switched planes in Mexico City and arrived in Havana in the afternoon. We came loaded with enthusiasm, preparation and gifts – an obscure Nissan car part, a “CARE package” for a Cuban boyfriend, a variety of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals.

Carlos Iglesias, a journalist friend, picked us up at the Havana airport and brought us to our rooftop apartment in the Vedado section of the capital city.

We packed our week with explorations of colonial architecture, strolls along the coastal Malecon, stopping for impromptu displays of music and singing. Already an accomplished drummer, Rosy took a private percussion class. We attended a folkloric dance performance at UNEAC, the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists located in an old mansion just a block from our residence. After returning to the apartment, we could still hear the music wafting across the tropical air as we looked out across the cityscape, past the downtown hotels to the Caribbean.

We were introduced to Coqui Salazar when looking for a way to get to the beach on the eastern outskirts of the city. He lived just two floors below us with his wife and two children. He owned a car, not a common occurrence in Havana, spoke English quite well and chauffeured tourists around the city for a living. Nicknamed Coqui as an infant for his fuzzy coconut-looking head, his full name was Pedro Enrique Salazar. Now 65, Coqui had a full mane of wavy black hair. As a young man, he fought with Castro in the mountains outside his native Guantanamo.

On a second trip to Playa Santa Maria, the sandy shore just east of Havana, Coqui brought his 10-year-old daughter Salome along. Rosy frolicked in the clear turquoise surf, exclaiming she’d never seen water this color before. Later she and Salome delighted in burying me in the sand as Coqui grinned.

One night, Coqui drove us to his favorite “paladar,” one of the many government-approved 12-seat-limit private restaurants that families have established in their garages or extra rooms. We were escorted past a living room to a tented annex. Rosy and I were the only guests. They lavished us with a variety of savory red and white lobster, more than we could consume at one sitting.

With each new experience, Coqui and I developed a trust and affection for one another that no doubt led him to share the information about his missing brother.

The day after our farewell lunch, I went to Carlos’ office in the Havana Libre Hotel to use his computer. His offices were in the Havana Libre Hotel (the Havana Hilton in pre-revolutionary times.) This time I sent a message to Jon Frappier, a detective friend in California, asking if he would search for a Pedro Salazar, or Pedro Eusebio Salazar, or Peter E. Salazar, living in northern California and born in the late 1950s.

Rosy and I returned to our apartment and packed our bags. Carlos picked us up for a farewell dinner with his family in the Lawton section of Havana and then the trip to the airport.

Several days after our return to San Francisco, Jon came to my house. I cleared the paper clutter on the yellow Formica kitchen table so he could spread out lists generated by his online investigation. Among them was a Pedro E. Salazar, born in 1957, living on 21st Street in San Francisco with a phone number. We both agreed it was good bet.

Jon departed and shortly after, I made the phone call. An older woman answered in Spanish. The mention of “Coqui” brought instant recognition. It was Elvira, Pedro’s 82-year-old mother and Coqui’s stepmother. She told me that Pedro no longer lived in her apartment. He had married and moved across the Bay to Alameda.

Pedro later recalled, “My mom called me that afternoon and said this guy called, just came back from Cuba where he met Coqui and had his phone number. My knees were shaking as I told my wife. I was beside myself.”

If I had the slightest reluctance in making the phone call, it was a concern that the two brothers, for reasons of political differences, were not interested in hearing from one another. My hesitation was momentary, easily overcome by a passion for the pursuit and the commission I had embraced.

Pedro Eusebio Salazar called me later that afternoon. It turned out he had been looking for his older brother for years. Now in his early 40s, Pedro worked as a chef in the University Club on San Francisco’s Nob Hill and lived across the Bay in Alameda. He suggested we meet at his mother’s apartment on Saturday.

Pedro recollected, “I have this memory of my brother standing in the door of my grandmother’s house in Guantanamo, as I sat on the couch. Coqui was dressed in his guerrilla fatigues, silhouetted by the sun, wearing his strap of bullets across his chest. He had been a member of the student movement in Havana working to overthrow the Batista regime.”

It was a bright morning, the day before Easter. I left my home on Bernal Heights, boarded the Mission 14 bus at the bottom of the hill, just nine blocks from my destination. Elvira lived in an apartment house on 21st Street between Mission and Valencia Streets. I had walked by the place many times and attended receptions in the storefront art gallery on the ground floor.

Elvira greeted me at the door of her apartment and ushered me into the living room where a table was set for lunch. The walls of the room were filled with family photographs set in Cuba and the U.S. Pedro, a dark handsome man with a bright smile, emerged from the kitchen where he was preparing our meal. He presented me with a bottle of wine.

Elvira went into her bedroom and came out with a photo of Coqui in Guantanamo in January, 1959 smiling as he stood in front of a jeep with a bandolier across his chest. I showed them my recent photo of Coqui taken during our Miramar lunch.

I gave them Coqui’s phone number at his Vedado apartment and said goodbye. It was the day before Easter. The morning news reported that Attorney-General Janet Reno had just raided the Miami home where Elian Gonzalez lived and rescued him for ultimate delivery to his father in Cuba. I boarded the bus home feeling I had been on a Cuban rescue mission myself.

Pedro called his older brother in Havana that afternoon, so filled with emotion, he couldn’t say very much. Elvira easily fell into reminiscing about her stepson’s youthful exploits. “Coqui, remember when you used to chase after that negrita in Guantanamo?”

Seven months later Pedro was finally able to take time off from work and fly to Cuba to see Coqui. Jon and I met Pedro at the University Club for a “Buen Viaje” toast.

He appeared dizzy with delight at what was about to happen the next day. To calm himself, he asked questions to suggest this was just another plane ride to a tropical resort. “Tell me, is there a place to go jogging there in Havana? I’ll probably need to get out and stretch after the long flight.”

Elvira moved in with Pedro’s wife and daughter for the week so they could all be close to the phone and receive news of the trip. I waited a few days before I called. “He says he’s come home again,” his wife told me. The brothers developed a daily ritual of standing on the balcony of the apartment toasting their reunion with their morning cups of coffee.

“I thought Coqui had stayed in the military,” Pedro discussed his trip to Cuba. “I thought I’d like to meet him once before I die. I remember circling Havana and seeing the lights of the city. Then there was the long wait at customs and big crowds in the airport lobby. I walked out front and then Coqui approached me with his two children. They began calling me ‘Tio’ right away. We hugged.

Coqui wrote to me after the reunion. “Thanks God, I meet you and Rosy, and you know the rest of this story. Meeting him at the airport was really one of the happiest moments I ever had. I kept on saying to myself: I just can’t believe it. You can imagine that the last time I saw Pedro, he was four years old, and at that moment I had in front of me a handsome tall man smiling at me and two of my kids kept on asking: Papa. That’s our uncle? We all gave him a big and close hug and believe me, there was more than one tear that moment. Bye for now and a big hug to you, Coqui.”

[Michael D. Nolan also posted this on his website mikeyno on March 26, 2009.]

Muchas gracias a Alice Embree / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

ART / ‘Man at Work’ Exhibition Has Lessons for Today

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

At the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee: Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The Seaweed Gatherers, 1912 / MSOE.

Workers Built the Modern World

[The Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection ‘Man at Work,’ continuing installation of 700 paintings and sculptures spanning 400 years of history. Also, touring exhibition, ‘Cradle of Industry: Works from the Rhineland Industrial Museum,’ January 16 – April 5, 2009. Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee.]

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2009

The Grohmann Museum, a modern building with a cylindrical entrance way reaching up to the fourth floor, is nestled among a variety of interesting and renovated older buildings in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The museum is a block from an old Blatz Brewery building that looks like it has been converted into high income condominiums.

Inside the Museum is an extraordinary collection of paintings, over 700, covering 400 years of artistry, all about work and workers. An additional visiting exhibit, “Cradle of Industry,” added paintings of German industrialization from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s and some recent documentary photos.

The paintings together illustrated the evolution of work, from agriculture, to crafts people (cobblers, blacksmiths, cork makers, glass blowers, and taxidermists), to miners and forgers, bridge builders, and steel makers. Additional paintings presented women picking hops for beer making, a seventeenth century accountant pouring over his books, and a surgeon opening up a patient’s head. Some of the paintings portrayed twentieth century factory work and a few documentary photos showed workers amassing in strikes against their bosses.

The paintings were collected by Dr. Eckhart Grohmann, a local entrepreneur who acquired and expanded a local aluminum casting and engineering company in Milwaukee. Grohmann reported that as a child he visited his grandfather’s marble processing company in Poland where he watched stonecutters and sculptors engaging in their craft. It was there, he reported, that he grew to appreciate hard work not as “an idealized concept but a principle of life.” Grohmann’s goal was to present in these paintings “a clear image of the honor of work.”

Viewing these many images of work, the viewer develops a profound appreciation of the centrality of human labor to the evolution of civilization. The paintings suggested how classical economists like Karl Marx could develop theories based on the idea that the value of all commodities came from the amount of work time that went into their production. In short, labor was the basis of all value.

Unfortunately, while the paintings powerfully underscore the basic Marxian idea about the value of work, contemporary politicians see work and workers as disposable. If they are organized in their work places they are impediments to human progress.

So goes the recent hint by the Obama administration that it will force General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy court. The New York Times wrote on April 1 what the consequences of this might be for workers: “In bankruptcy, companies can seek to persuade a judge to set aside labor contracts and terminate pension plans, by making a case that they are too expensive, forcing workers to rely on smaller government-provided retirement checks.”

In addition, Republicans, so-called moderate Democrats, Bank of America, Starbucks, Costco, the Chamber of Commerce and other representatives of big capital are marshaling resources to forestall the Employee Free Choice Act from becoming law. EFCA would make it easier, in the face of company pressures, for workers to form unions. If workers have a realistic chance of voting in unions they will do so. If they do have unions, wages and benefits will rise and workers’ basic quality of life and sense of security will rise. Finally, increasing numbers of workers with jobs at livable wages could stimulate economic growth.

Visiting the Grohmann Museum suggests the profound gap between the history of human civilization, built on the skills and energies of workers, and the way in which the contemporary political economy denigrates, marginalizes, and humiliates workers. Empowering and rewarding the working class must be central to progressive change in the days, weeks, and years ahead.

Harry Targ, who posts to Progressives for Obama, teaches political science. This article also appears on his website, Diary of a Heartland Radical.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Dems Are Complicit If They Don’t Prosecute

Posted on April 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Read the Nuremburg Principles !! The Democrats and anyone who is unwilling to condemn and prosecute those responsible for what has happened at US hands are complicit in the crime. Give us justice, you immoral cretins politicians !!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Democrats Duck Bush Torture Probe
By Jason Leopold / April 3, 2009

Despite now overwhelming evidence that ex-President George W. Bush and many top aides engaged in a systematic policy of illegal torture, national Democrats appear to be shying away from their recommendation last year for a special prosecutor to investigate these apparent war crimes.

Last June, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 55 other congressional Democrats signed a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey demanding a special prosecutor to investigate the growing body of evidence that Bush administration officials had sanctioned torture, which had been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Not unexpectedly, Mukasey — a staunch defender of Bush’s theories about expansive presidential powers — ignored the letter. Now, however, despite even more evidence of torture and a Democratic administration in place, the calls for a special prosecutor have grown muted.

Aides to several Democratic lawmakers who signed the June 2008 letter told me that the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush administration’s past actions could become a distraction to that focus.

They added that the most that now can be expected is either a “blue ribbon” investigative panel such as Conyers proposed earlier this year or a similar “truth and reconciliation commission” as advocated by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. Not a single signer of last year’s letter has stepped forward to renew the demand for a special prosecutor to the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder.

The loss of Democratic interest in a special prosecutor suggests that the signers made the recommendation last year knowing that Mukasey would ignore it but thinking that the letter would appease the Democratic “base,” which was calling for accountability on Bush’s war crimes.

This readiness of Democrats to put the pursuit of bipartisanship over the pursuit of justice — after a victorious election – parallels their actions 16 years ago when President Bill Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress swept under the rug investigations of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, such as the Iran-Contra scandal and Iraqgate support for Saddam Hussein. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

However, this time, Bush-43’s apparent violations of international laws prohibiting torture are forcing global demands for action, if the United States fails to live up to its obligations to enforce its own commitment to anti-torture laws and treaties.

Torture is a war crime that carries universal enforcement, which means that prosecutors of other nations can bring charges if the nation directly implicated doesn’t act. In that regard, Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon took the initial steps last week to investigate whether six high-level Bush officials, including key lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, violated laws against torture.

Torture Results

Also, over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the waterboarding — or simulated drowning — of “war on terror” suspect Abu Zabaida induced him to provide a host of new leads about al-Qaeda plots, but that his torture-induced claims turned out to be time-consuming dead-ends.

“Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations,” the Post reported.

“Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.” [Washington Post, March 29, 2009]

Two weeks ago, other evidence about Bush’s torture policy surfaced when journalist Mark Danner published chilling details from a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that concluded that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees at CIA secret prisons “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings have legal consequence.

The June 2008 letter from Conyers apparently was prompted by the same or similar ICRC findings, citing “several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

Conyers and the other Democrats told Mukasey then that the ICRC findings alone warranted action but were buttressed by other information that senior Bush administration officials met in the White House to approve the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” and that “President Bush was aware of, and approved of the meetings taking place.”

The letter added: “This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law.

“We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.

“Despite the seriousness of the evidence, the Justice Department has brought prosecution against only one civilian for an interrogation-related crime. Given that record, we believe it is necessary to appoint a special counsel in order to ensure that a thorough and impartial investigation occurs.”

Still Waiting

Nearly nine months have passed since Conyers and the other Democratic lawmakers sent the letter to Mukasey. Since then, more evidence has piled up implicating at least a dozen senior Bush administration officials in sanctioning a policy of torture.

For instance, in January, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who heads military commissions at Guantanamo, became the highest ranking U.S. official who said the interrogation of at least one detainee at Guantanamo met the legal definition of torture and as a result she would not allow a war crimes tribunal against him to proceed.

Last week, Vijay Padmanabhan, the State Department’s chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, told the Associated Press that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a policy of torture at the facility.

“I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration,” Padmanabhan told the AP. He criticized other “overreactions” such as extraordinary renditions, waterboarding at secret CIA prisons and “other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture.”

Meanwhile, other Bush administration veterans, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have spoken openly about their support for and approval of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods, although they continued to insist that the tactics did not constitute torture.

During a speech at the University of Texas at Austin recently, former Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “there are things that you can call waterboarding that I am thoroughly convinced are not torture. There are things that you can call waterboarding that might be torture. …

“The point that ought to be understood is that throwing a term around recklessly for its emotional content doesn’t really get you anywhere.”

In waterboarding, a person is strapped to a board with his head tilted downward and a cloth covering his face. Water is then poured over the cloth forcing the panicked gag reflex associated with drowning. It has been condemned as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition and its use has resulted in past criminal prosecutions under U.S. law.

Before leaving office, Vice President Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three “high value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.

Admissions of Crimes

Civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney’s comments amounted to an admission of war crimes. The ACLU called on Attorney General Holder two weeks ago to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a probe into the Bush administration’s torture practices.

“The fact that such crimes have been committed can no longer be doubted or debated, nor can the need for an independent prosecutor be ignored by a new Justice Department committed to restoring the rule of law,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.

“Given the increasing evidence of deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse, and that such conduct was the predictable result of policy changes made at the highest levels of government, an independent prosecutor is clearly in the public interest,” Romero said.

Holder has not responded to the ACLU’s request. Over the next several weeks, however, the evidence of torture should continue to mount.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to release a voluminous report on the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees held in U.S. custody and the brutal interrogation techniques they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources.

The declassified version of the report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes, and will reveal a wealth of new information about the genesis of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, according to these sources. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete.

The Justice Department also is expected to release a declassified version of a critical report prepared by its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigated legal work by former attorneys at the Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on the limits of presidential authority.

The report concluded that three key attorneys — John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury — blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals, which included a legal justification for torture, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the report are still classified.

On April 2, the Justice Department also is expected to release three still-classified legal opinions that Bradbury wrote in May 2005, reaffirming Bush’s claimed authority to subject “war on terror” prisoners to harsh interrogations.

[Jason Leopold is an investigative reporter and a two-time winner of the Project Censored award. He is the author of the National Bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir, and he has launched a new online investigative news magazine, The Public Record.]

Source / Dissident Voice

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Blowing It in Afghanistan, Just the Same As in Iraq

Posted on April 4, 2009 by RagBlog


Top Ten Ways the US is Turning Afghanistan into Iraq
By Juan Cole / April 3, 2009

1. Exaggerating the threat. An Afghan army foot patrol was attacked by guerrillas in Helmand Province on Wednesday, according to AP. US and Afghan soldiers responded, engaging in a firefight. Then the US military called in an air strike on the Taliban, killing 20 of them. On Tuesday, a similar airstrike had taken out 30 guerrillas.

It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder why the Taliban (or whoever these guys in Helmand were) are considered such a big threat that the full might of NATO is needed to deal with them. They have no air force, no artillery, no tanks. They are just small bands, apparently operating in platoons, who, whenever they mass in large enough numbers to stand and fight, can just be turned into red mist from the air.

2. The US has actually only managed to install a fundamentalist government in Afghanistan, which is rolling back rights of women and prosecuting blasphemy cases. In a play for the Shiite vote (22% or so of the population), President Hamid Karzai put through civilly legislated Shiite personal status law, which affects Shiite women in that country. The wife will need the husband’s permission to go out of the house, and can’t refuse a demand for sex. (Since the 1990s there has been a movement in 50 or more countries to abandon the idea that spouses cannot rape one another, though admittedly this idea is new and was rejected in US law until recently).

No one seems to have noted that the Shiite regime in Baghdad is more or less doing the same thing. In Iraq, the US switched out the secular Baath Party for Shiite fundamentalist parties. Everyone keeps saying the US improved the status of women in both countries. Actually, in Iraq the US invasion set women back about 30 years. In Afghanistan, the socialist government of the 1980s, for all its brutality in other spheres, did implement policies substantially improving women’s rights, including aiming at universal education, making a place for them in the professions, and so forth. There were socialist Afghan women soldiers fighting the Muslim fundamentalist guerrillas that Reagan called “freedom fighters” and to whom he gave billions to turn the country into a conservative theocracy. I can never get American audiences to concede that Afghan women had it way better in the 1980s, and that it has been downhill ever since, mainly because of US favoritism toward patriarchal and anti-progressive forces.

3. The US is building a mass of hardened bases costing over $1 bn. in Afghanistan. That’s about the annual budget of the Afghanistan government.

4. It begins. The US is creating local militias in Wardak called the Afghan Public Protection Force. You wonder how long it will be before the Karzai government is engaged in firefights with them (cf. Fadl in Baghdad earlier this week).

5. Now thousands of private security contractors (i.e. mercenaries) will be hired in Afghanistan. But they won’t be Americans for the most part. Children, can you say “Hessians”?

I don’t understand the concept of paying someone $200,000 a year to guard armed GIs being paid a fraction of that. Wouldn’t it be better to expand the size of the army if you need more troops? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have one line of command? Aren’t these essentially high-priced MPs?

6. The secretary of defense is predicting that the US military will be in Afghanistan indefinitely and will only achieve limited goals there. (!)

I ask myself, “why?”

7. An attempt by officials in the Obama administration to replace Guantanamo with Bagram in Afghanistan has been shot down by a Federal judge. The government actually argued that the three men (2 Yemenis and a Tunisian) did not have habaeus corpus rights because they are in a war zone.

Why are they in a war zone? Because the US government transported them there!

8. The president is corralling a coalition of the reluctant for troop contributions in Afghanistan.

9. While militaries spend tens of billions on fighting disgruntled Pashtun tribesmen, a fifth of pregnant women or women with newborns are malnourished in Afghanistan. In Iraq, as well, public health crises took a back seat while hundreds of billions were spent on weapons and warfare.

10. A new Friedman unit. It was always the “next six months” that would be “crucial” for Iraq. It is now “this year” that is crucial for Afghanistan. By the math of Friedman units, does this mean the Afghanistan occupation will last twice as long as the Iraq one?

Source / Informed Comment

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

They’re Not Sticking !!!

Posted on April 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Texas Prisons : Forced Labor Creates Unfair Competition

Posted on April 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Lufkin rig: forced out by forced labor.

Prison labor contract forces Lufkin Trailers out of business; Another manufacturer fights back.

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2009

All those big rigs pulling trailers with “Lufkin” branded on the rear will be disappearing from the highways because the company cannot compete with forced prison labor. In a turn of events reminiscent of the Nazi slave labor camps Lufkin Industries, founded in 1902, announced the closing of one of it’s major product lines – Lufkin Trailers.

A Nacogdoches businessman, Charles Bright, is fighting back to save his Viking Trailer business before it too succumbs to $1.00 a year facilities rental and .80 cent an hour labor. Please file under Prison Reform.

Nacogdoches manufacturer instrumental in saving Texas jobs
By Donna McCollum / April 1, 2009

NACOGDOCHES, TX — Bright Coop owner Charles Bright began making wooden chicken coops over 60 years ago. Today the company manufactures metal coops, forklifts and trailers. What’s consistent is he knows every step taken. “This is a low boy trailer and will probably end up in oil field,” said Bright during a tour of the plant. He also knows each employee, over 100 during peak production. “Hi Paul,” said Bright to a welder. “Some of my employees have worked for me for 30, 40 years. I know most of them by their first name,” Bright said.

The legacy nearly cratered. Less than 90 miles away at the Michael Unit at Tennessee Colony imported pre finished trailers were assembled by state prison labor. “It’s stiff competition,” notes Bright. Specifically, a $2,000 undercut in price. Enough to put trailer manufacturer, Lufkin Industries out of business. “Lufkin, you might say, just bit the dust,” said Bright. Bright didn’t want that to happen to his newly established Viking Trailers.

Bright and Lufkin industries got the support of Senator Robert Nichols. The Jacksonville Republican requested Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to review the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE program). An official Attorney General informal opinion found that PIE is not operating within federal and state law. Nichols went to work. He asked Bright to testify, something he did as many as five times before legislative committees.

Bright noted his multi million dollar investments, while the state rented to facilities to an out of state company for, “One dollar. I said one dollar,” stated the employer. The pay scale is significantly different too. Bright’s employees make competitive wages. Prisoners are paid less than 80 cents an hour. “I’m for the program if it will help train the prisoners, give them something to do when they get out, but let’s all get on the same playing ground,” said Bright.

The man who shuns at the idea of retiring, probably wouldn’t have pursued his trailer division had he known of the prison industry contracts. He’s no longer ignorant of the state competition. Now he’s wanting to save other Texas manufacturers.

Legislation under development includes safeguards for existing Texas industries and more transparency in prison labor contracts. The bill could be kicked out of committee as early as this week.

Source / KTRE.com

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Type rest of the post here

Source /

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment

I Only Read the First 140 Characters. I’m Posting This on My Facebook Wall. Snob.

Posted on April 3, 2009 by RagBlog


Nit-twits!! If You Twitter, You May Be a Twit
By Dorian Snow / April 1, 2009

I have an aversion to blogging about my personal life on public websites. I just don’t think I’m that interesting. And it gives me the willies to think someone I don’t like, or wouldn’t like, can spy on me. It also makes me shudder to think I may type something I’ll regret, and I won’t be able to delete it. I prefer to blog anonymously. I don’t need credit for my posts. If I were an entertainer, a performer, a celebrity, a politician, or a creator of absolutely anything that should be in the public forum, I could see the interest in having a MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter account. However, as best as I can tell, there are more “regular” people with these free blog pages than public figures, and it amazes me how many of these people appear unaware of the fact that the entire world can watch them in this fishbowl technology. I had to wonder: How many people who post using their real names wonder if anyone is spying on them? Do they wonder if they may be sounding unprofessional? Do they wonder if judgments are forming about them—and I don’t mean the good ones?

So as not to be judgmental, I researched the pros and cons of these sites. There are advantages and disadvantages, and if you have a fan club (even if it consists of a nephew and a niece, or one friend) Facebook and MySpace are a convenient and free way to keep them up-to-date on your thoughts and whereabouts. But be mindful: e-mail is much more private. On Facebook, you can allow or block readers. But on Twitter, the whole world can “follow” you. If you are a voyeur, that is the best feature of Twitter. (More on that later.)

I had never had an interest in posting to any of these public sites. This past October, I was invited to join Facebook. It was against my sensibilities, but in order to see photos from a thirtieth high school reunion I had attended, I had to open a Facebook account. It took thirty seconds to do. This was the forum used by the former classmates so they could stay in touch with each other. Facebook has a tool to create alumni groups, social groups and activist groups. It’s wonderful for networking. But mostly, it’s used by friends and families to post in-the-moment thoughts and photos. Facebook also encourages its users to play gimmicky social games that are, for me, sophomoric.

When I joined, I had no idea how popular this site was. I had heard about FB for the first time a couple of years ago. A high-school student mentioned it to me as a way she was staying in contact with her friends and acquaintances. It seemed like a fun thing for kids, and she seemed to think that high school and college kids were using it as an alternative to MySpace. Now, a couple of years later, it seems people of every age group are using it.

Within a day of joining, people from recessive corners of my life began to find me, inviting me to be their FB “friends.” Oh no! I wondered, do I have time for this? When you have a FB, MySpace, or Twitter account, if anyone googles you, they will find you quickly. If people were looking for a way to contact you, consider yourself found. Since you have to apply by using an e-mail account, all your email contacts who are also using these other blog platforms will quickly find out you too are using the same platforms. And voila—if you are popular, or if former friends had been looking for you, your e-mail inbox will be filled to the gills with messages from people from your past. If you are looking to expand your social or professional network, this can we a wonderful tool.

However, if you are trying to hide from the world, do not open a Facebook account!

There are many uses for these sites. But be forewarned: Many of the people with Twitter and Facebook accounts think that the minutia of their lives is interesting. They are basically tone-deaf to their own vapidity.

With Facebook, www.facebook.com, you have to be invited to be a “friend” in order to enter someone’s blog page and read all the posts on their page. I have accepted the invitations of everyone who has asked me to link to them, and so far, only people I know have requested this. Suddenly, with access to their homepages, I was now peering into their cyber worlds, reading their posts, and viewing their photos. I thought this could be a lot of fun. Dorian the Spy.

So I began to read posts. What surprised me the most was that for the most part, their personal comments painted a picture of rather mundane worlds, although I doubt these individuals think of their lives as mundane. I also don’t think that in reality, their lives are as mundane as they sound. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be making them public…one would think. What I learned is that when given a public forum, most people aren’t very creative. What caused me to form this opinion was that I observed that those who religiously post on Facebook answer truthfully the ever-present Facebook question: What are you doing right now?

The answer to that question is what is known as your “status” update. As an example, I noticed that my acquaintance “friends” were regularly answering that question with brutally truthful answers that seemed to me so dull, perhaps only one or two people on the planet might care, and that’s being generous:

“Dreading having to go food-shopping in the freezing cold.”
“Sitting on the sofa with my feet up, watching TV, but nothing good is on.”
“Bored silly on a Saturday night.”

Coming up with an answer more scintillating than that probably requires more thought than most people are willing to entertain.

The schticks and gimmicks attached to FB are endless: delivering cyber glasses of wine to your online “friends,” throwing “snowballs,” and “poking” them. Please don’t ask me to explain this. It’s not worth your time. But the one gimmick that gave me pause was the request to post “25 Random Thoughts About Myself.” A “friend” invited me to participate. It’s a way for them to get to know you better. I declined. I can’t even think of one person who would be interested in reading 25 thoughts about myself, or 25 people who would want to read even one random thought about myself! I decided I could not bear to inflict my personal and random thoughts on cyberspace.

To be clear, I think these sites are great. Merging freedom of speech with interesting communication technology gives everyone an interesting product. However, by posting the question “What are you doing now?” these popular sites are enticing people to write the first thing that comes to mind. And from what I can tell, these knee-jerk, thoughtless comments are creating an inordinate amount of mindless cyber-clutter.

This led me to my next observation: If you are trying to impress someone—for instance, if you are looking for love, or looking for a job—if the most interesting answers to the question “what are you doing right now” are more often than not in the realm of the tedious, work-a-day drivel that clutters your mind—and you are at the same time hoping to convince someone out there in the real world that you are the best thing since sliced bread—you might want to put a bit more thought into your posts.

Additionally, it is wise to keep in mind that all of your “friends” and fans can post to your page. And if they are FB or Twitter addicts, they may post some inane things from time to time. If they sound like ninnies, don’t blame the rest of the world if they judge you by the cyber-company you keep. Trust me: There are people out there who are not willing to ignore the portrait your blog pages are painting you to be.

If I were looking for love, you can be sure I’d refrain from telling the truth about my boring Saturday night. Your other bored friends might enjoy your misery-loves-company attitude. But remember that the world is watching you in that cyber fishbowl. My status update would surely be something much more enticing to the reader I was hoping to attract: “Cooking yummy gourmet meal. Listening to Beethoven’s Waldstein. Taking dog for walk on beach. Wish I had special guy 2 share it with.”

That post was 131 characters long. Why mention it? This is important to know if you want to use Twitter. www.twitter.com. Each post on Twitter has to be no more than 140 characters in length. Can you sound interesting in fewer than 140 characters? From my observations, most people can’t. But the point of Twitter is not to sound fascinating. The point is to communicate is short sentences.

I recently read that six million people are using Twitter, which grew by 900 percent last year. The average age of a Twitterer is 31. A few news anchors I watch have been mentioning their Twitter blogs, such as Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper. I’ve chosen to ignore that until now. Most of the time, a TV anchor might ask the viewer to “go on Twitter and tell us what you think.” By the sound of it, it seemed to be something I needed to “ignore.” There is way too much stuff I don’t have time to read which I wish I did have time to read, and I decided I definitely do not have enough time to wade through Twitter babble.

However, after my recent foray into Facebook, and my refusal to participate with others very often, I decided I should take a look at Twitter to see what all the hoopla is about. As I mentioned, if you are a voyeur, it can provide hours and hours of fun. While you can find links to topics of interest, and short, personal updates written by people you may find interesting, it is also a site where you may find you are spending hours and hours poring through mini-thoughts—most of which are no more interesting than an observation of the weather at the corner of Sixth and Nowhere. For many, it is a useful tool. I certainly do not begrudge anyone a useful tool. However, one needs to be aware that if you are reading someone’s Twitter page, you might wonder why a public figure might have just posted they are stuck in rush-hour traffic. My first reaction to this was: BORING!! WHO CARES!!! Turns out, because Twitter links to Blackberry and I-Phone applications, it keeps friends, family, and colleagues up-to-date on your whereabouts. Famous people and others with important, relevant issues to discuss use their Twitter blogs for advertising, PR, sales, and comments. Yet, periodically, they post they are just getting on the red-eye, or they are stuck in traffic. Someone out there actually cares. I’m guessing the significant other cares…the rest of us are just innocent bystanders, or witless voyeurs into their fishbowl.

twitter1.jpgSome people report that Twitter is faster than email and doesn’t require an Internet connection. Therefore, millions are using it so their inner circle and network are updated when necessary. From what I can ascertain, the most beneficial use of “tweeting” is to communicate short ideas, directions, or bulletins to inform your circle what you are doing in that moment, what information they need to know, or where they need to be. Many Twitterers post a link to an article, a website, or a video that they think the reader will find interesting. A Twitter page is a running log of comments, and tweets are often non-linear conversations. Posts intended for fans or colleagues are interspersed with posts responding to specific people’s comments to you, or personal updates to family members and friends. If you are reading their page, you’ll find you may want to “ignore” a lot of it. Expect that you’ll have to wade through a lot of posts that sound so meaningless and banal, you might wonder why the Twitterer took the time to type them. If this gets too tedious, you may find you don’t enjoy Twitter. If you don’t, you are not alone. Many people hate it.

Getting onto Twitter takes a few seconds. I had no goals. I quickly set up an account and started looking around. The setup lets you know which of your e-mail contacts have Twitter accounts. These are people you can instantly put in your Twitter network, if you choose. You can also delete their names in an instant. Anyone you find on Twitter is someone you can “follow.” You don’t need permission from them. Through my small instant network of friends who were immediately linked through my e-mail contacts, I clicked on one of their names, and looked at the people they were following on Twitter. You can literally follow thousands, if not millions, of people on Twitter. Within a minute, I was reading David Gregory’s, Rachel Maddow’s, and Chris Hayes’s Twitter pages. A blog entry is called a “tweet.” (That term is a bit saccharine for my taste, but it follows the birdbrain, micro-attention-span format of the site.) Chris Hayes writes for “The Nation.” He appears on MSNBC frequently as an astute political commentator. And yet, Chris’ tweets can be rather banal blurbs about D.C. rush hour traffic on a Friday afternoon. When he’s not following the ins and outs of the political scene, he’s blogging about stuff that definitely needs to be ignored. I learned quickly that Chris must have people who care about his traffic woes. I was disappointed. Chris’ Twitter page wasn’t giving me anything worth reading. David Gregory was posting the names of upcoming guests on “Meet the Press,” using his page as an advertising vehicle. Rachel Maddow was posting the names of her upcoming guests that evening, listing stories she was working on, and making some snarky comments, too.

tweeter4bird.jpgNot surprising, for many people, these sites are a place for the egocentric who wish they were famous. Some people have in fact successfully become “famous for being famous” by using these sites. All of these sites are getting more and more popular. But they have one thing in common: they allow everyone in their network to know how interesting, or ordinary, their life is.

Supporters say, “Just ignore the things you aren’t interested in.” However, you can’t know you want to ignore something until you have read it for content. In the search for interesting posts, ignoring can be very time-consuming. There is a lot of drivel out there. On Twitter, you might find yourself wading through an endless list of 140-character posts of nonsense.

On Day One of my entrée onto the Twitter site, I got a cute little pop-up message with a picture of their cute bird icon: The message read: “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

Their site went down. Too popular. And clearly their servers are beyond capacity.

The following was a comment on a blog responding to an article about Twittering. This supporter of Twitter wrote this:

“Sure, there are people whose ego overrides their good sense…Like any tool, Twitter has good uses, and LOTS of worthless ones. I follow about a hundred accounts…most of them automated news feeds. Much quicker to read through a few pages of headlines and links than to scan a hundred or so RSS feeds or hit a hundred bookmarks. I do fieldwork with a group of colleagues, and we’re all set to phone-follow each other. One twitter can broadcast a quick update to several people at once, and it’s much easier than conference calls or mass emails…and can be done from places where we don’t have any Net connection. ‘15 mins – NW corner Smith & Jones’ and we all know where and when to join up…And then there was this recent weather emergency when phone lines (and cell freqs) were overloaded…one quick tweet every hour or so, taking almost negligible bandwidth, could let a couple of dozen friends, family, and editors know that I wasn’t dead. Oddly enough, they seemed to care about that. Twitter’s just another way to keep in touch.”

Another downside to all of these sites is that like Instant Messaging, both Facebook and Twitter can be addictive, if you are prone to that. For some people, they can be so consuming, their relationships and jobs can suffer.

On the same blog on Alternet was this comment, which summed up my concerns perfectly:

twitter3.jpg“Does anybody enjoy being alone in their own space anymore? Seriously: a quiet walk in the park, a quiet book with some soft music, a dinner made for a loved one, a morning doing art, canoeing or gardening…anything that doesn’t have a constant e-portage of the minutia of other people’s moment-to-moment commentaries?

“…When is the last time people just spent time alone and enjoyed it? If you’re not enjoying being alone in your headspace for any significant period of time…are you ever doing your own thinking & personal development? Are you ever in the moment?

“Who are you if you can’t spend any time without a constant chatter from talk radio?…tv?…Twitter?…Facebook?…TXTMSG? Hell, some people can’t even walk down a hallway without jabbering on a cell phone…don’t even get me started about ‘quality time’ with a BlackBerry or iPhone junkie…

“Is our technology stealing our opportunities for experiencing the goal of Zen practitioners: being in the moments of our existence?”

Very good questions, if you ask me.

Not only is there a social issue, but there is a safety issue. Did you hear that New York City may make it illegal to type text messages and cross a street at the same time? At least one casualty per day shows up in the emergency room because someone fell off a curb or hit a lamp post while using their Blackberry because they were not watching where they were walking.

Would you read a magazine while walking through a crowded city street?

Would you read a magazine in front of your companions at a fancy dinner party?

Would you read a magazine while driving a car?

These are all activities where texting simultaneously is not obviously rude, or worse, dangerous, to a lot of folks.

Jerry Seinfeld recently did a bit on Blackberries. He won’t use one. He rightly observed that people have become exceptionally rude while using them during social gatherings. He explained that there were perhaps more interesting buttons on the Blackberry than there were on the face of the person sitting next to them. From my own experience, I have noticed some of my in-laws playing video games on their iPhones during dinner parties. How has this become socially acceptable?

For years, I have suggested that adolescent addictions to instant-messaging and texting has turned young people into people with fewer interpersonal skills. And yet supporters of these technologies insist these technologies will never replace the need for face-to-face communication. That may be true, but I have my doubts. I have observed that social groups, while face-to-face with friends and family, find whatever is happening on their Blackberries and I-Phones exceedingly more interesting than what is being said by the person in the chair next to them. How many of us have been out to dinner with someone who has constantly answered their cell phone and has spent more time on the phone than in conversation with us? Have you been with people whose gaze is constantly drifting down to their idle cell phone to see who may have sent them a text or e-mail? I surmise they fear that they are missing out on something if they aren’t checking their cell phones constantly.

With the increase in cyber networks and platforms, the number of digital communications has become so tremendous that it can be a full-time job reading them, let alone responding to them. It has become very easy to tune out from real life in favor of tuning into the world of digital communication.

If they are not waiting for an emergency call, should we not inform our friends that this behavior is rude? Or should we just “ignore” them and move on? If a dinner companion who is jilted in favor of their friend’s tweet and texts on a cell phone doesn’t find this insulting, they should. It worries me that so many are turning into Pavlov’s dogs, jumping at every ringtone, every vibrating alert, every text message.

On The Daily Show, Feb. 26, Brian Williams responded to Jon Stewart’s question on this topic. Jon asked Brian what he thought of Twitter, observing that many correspondents now use it.

Jon: “Have the news organizations now become so enamored of the technology that they really are not using it for its proper things? Congressmen are Twittering. Newscasters are Twittering. Is this a distraction? Is it worthwhile? What’s your opinion?”

Brian: “You know what? I don’t Twitter. When you Twitter, the subject line is automatically, “”What are you doing right now?”” And the answer I have to that question at any moment of the day isn’t interesting enough. It’s not interesting enough to my family and friends…my dog doesn’t wake up when I come home. So until I can answer that with a more compelling thing…it just isn’t my game.”

Jon expressed consternation that members of Congress were Twittering during Obama’s address to Congress on the evening of February 24. Brian replied, “A 200-pound chimp in an inappropriate relationship has caused them to jump on monkey legislation, and you’re expressing surprise??”


And so, if you Twitter, you may be a twit. Not necessarily…but you get my drift.

As my parents used to say, “There is a time and a place for everything.” Unfortunately, I believe our society may have lost its sights on the appropriate time and place for respectful behavior.

When I have more time to waste, or an addiction to take up, I will surf through Twitter to look for the hidden gems…the blogs of artists, musicians, scientists, writers, thinkers…the people who are compelled to share more interesting thoughts than wishing they didn’t have to go out in the cold for a quart of milk, or wishing they could find something good to watch on TV.

In case you are interested in organizing your cyber platforms, there is software that allows your various blogs to link to each other, so one status update will update all the other platforms. It’s an organization tool that can be a valuable time-saver. A friend linked me to this page, in case you need to link your blogs. mashable.com/2007/07/17/social-network-aggregators/

Source / CommonSense2

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Death at Three Mile Island : The Corporate Media’s Iron Curtain

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, 1979.

Thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has formed between the corporate media and the alternatives, with nuclear power at its center.

By Harvey Wasserman / April 1, 2009

Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people.

But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has formed between the corporate media and the alternatives, with nuclear power at its center.

The Soviets denied for days that the Chernobyl accident had happened at all. America’s parallel corporate media says “no one died at TMI.”

Take National Public Radio’s Scott Simon. On March 28, Simon smirked on air that “no one was killed or injured” at Three Mile Island, “not so much as a sprained ankle.”

Except when people are fleeing them, as they did 30 years ago, radiation releases have never been linked directly to joint sprains.

But cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, malformations, spontaneous abortions, skin lesions, hair loss, respiratory problems, sterility, nausea, cataracts, a metallic taste, premature aging, general loss of bodily function and more can be caused by radioactive emissions of the type that poured out of TMI. And all such ailments have been documented there OUTside the corporate media.

Simon and everyone else INside the corporate media missed the well-organized, well-executed press event in the statehouse at Harrisburg on March 26. Despite solid publicity from Eric Epstein and the long-standing Three Mile Island Alert, not a single corporate reporter covered presentations by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and University of North Carolina epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Wing.

Once a top industry executive, Gundersen has shown that the containment at Three Mile Island Unit 2 did not completely hold, and that far more radiation was released than previously believed.

Dr. Wing reports that levels of radiation-related disease significantly rose in the downwind area. Wing and three co-authors looked at statistics used in a major study by Columbia University and other sources. They concluded that—despite official denials—the numbers clearly indicate serious potential health effects.

Gundersen and Wing were neither hiding nor alone. University of Pittsburgh radiology Professor Emeritus Dr. Ernest Sternglass and health researchers Joe Mangano and Jay Gould have long since documented that public health catastrophe. House-to-house surveys from local residents Jane Lee and Mary Osborne confirm the damage. Massive anecdotal evidence collected in a book and radio show by Robbie Leppzer appears at turningtide.com. Published in 1982 by DellDelta, KILLING OUR OWN correlated the death toll at TMI with that from other mis-uses of radiation. Other books have followed with similar conclusions.

This tidal wave of proof about the TMI death toll spread through the “alternative” media prior to the accident’s anniversary. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales talked with me about it on March 27. Announced by the Institute for Public Accuracy, the story appeared on the Pacifica and Counterspin/Fair radio networks , and with Peter B. Collins on the Thomm Hartmann Show. It was also heard on stations such as WORT (Madison), KBOO (Oregon), KDKA (Pittsburgh), radioornot.com, and more. Websites like Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet, FreePress.org, NukeFree, CounterPunch, BuzzFlash, Smirking Chimp, Daily Kos, and dozens more got the story out, as did environmental groups like Greenpeace, NIRS and Beyond Nuclear. (If your website, radio show or organization also carried it, please contact me).

But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the “mainstream” media and the “alternative.” Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents of birth-defected children, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report.

Nuclear opponents commemorated the day throughout the United States—most visibly at the gates of the plant itself—while Simon and others piously intoned that the opposition was dead and gone.

Simon concluded his 11-minute smarm by interviewing Dan Reicher from Google, whose “green” vision somehow includes new reactors. Not a peep was allowed from an epic grassroots No Nukes movement that has sustained itself nonstop (and nonviolently) since long before TMI melted, and is as strong as ever.

From the Associated Press and other corporate outlets, the parroted mantra that “nobody was killed” rang out as if a melt-down was no big deal, and turning a $900 million asset into a multi-billion-dollar liability was a “success story.”

Few assertions more clearly divide our parallel media universes than this one. Stolen elections and WMDs, corporate thievery and hemp/marijuana prohibition are all part of the Great Divide. But people (and animals) dying unreported in our most infamous industrial accident cut to the heart of our dis-informational dilemma.

Newspapers and TV networks are dying because they cannot attract advertisers because they are losing audience.

In some ways, we will miss them. But their self-interested omissions and deceptions have disemboweled their usefulness. Even the legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite bought into the line that there was no danger of an explosion at TMI that week.

But in fact there was. Was the omission due to haste in a murky nightmare? A fear of causing panic? A fear of retribution from major sponsors? Or merely an unhealthy willingness to take the authorities at their word?

Whatever the case, the bad news is that the dominant media cannot handle this story and too many others like it. Millions of Americans are thus dangerously misinformed.

The good news is, there is new media—including wherever you’re now reading this—that WILL report it. And that’s growing stronger because it reports the truth to power.

Izvestia and Pravda are still being televised. But people did die at Three Mile Island. And it’s the “alternative” media that now brings reality to the mainstream.

[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org and is senior editor of FreePress.org, where this article originally appeared. His books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, are available at harveywasserman.com.]

Source / The Free Press

Thanks to Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Lest We Forget That There Is Unfinished Business with a Few Stray War Criminals

Posted on April 3, 2009 by RagBlog


Fake Faith and Epic Crimes
By John Pilger / April 2, 2009

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves.”

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had “universal jurisdiction” statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against “ourselves,” or “our” allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. Home Secretary Jack Straw let him escape back to Chile.

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W. Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq — “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law” that had left the UN “in tatters.” He said, “There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay.”

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the West. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa — the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

Today, the unreported “good news” is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde R.L. Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter … I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete.”

Blair, too, is safe — but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing “an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges,” according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: “My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.”

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli “peace prize” worth a million dollars. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long revealed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister — a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his “project” and crimes is an embarrassment and preferably forgotten.

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried.” He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?” This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq’s “contribution to international terrorism” and Saddam Hussein’s “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction.” Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right.” He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.” In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour — in Australia, the original murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the “mystical” Blair in the Guardian of than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous groveling to the Nazis: “I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to sooth them.”

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as “a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion.” She asked him: “What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability …[sic]?” A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about “values.” Doogue said to him that “it was the bifurcation about right and wrong that what I thought the British found really hard” [sic], to which Blair replied that “in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was.” It was his classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bondish-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels.” She wrote, “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible.” No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair’s task to “prepare them for statehood.” The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man “has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated.” The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that “women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him.”

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a “prayer breakfast” with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. “We pray,” said Blair, “that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.” To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair’s “faith” represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profananation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part — or, like Alistair Campbell, his “communications director,” offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some — might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: “Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, 4 million refugees, countless maiming and traumas.”

These are indeed extraordinary times.

Source / Information Clearing House

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

FDR-Bashing and Right Wing Economics

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

How much can Obama learn from FDR? Graphic from Economic Policy Journal.

The right wing economic ideologues had their chance and got what they wanted in terms of deregulation, union busting, deficit spending and war. And the results are now pretty clear. It is time for them to just shut up.

By Chuck Spinney / The Rag Blog / April 2, 2009

See ‘Was the New Deal a Bust?’ by Jeff Madrick, Below.

The right wing in America has been bashing FDR for my entire life. Since 1981, the anti-Roosevelts have been in power for all but eight years, and that exception, the presidency of Bill Clinton, was more “conservative” than “liberal.” The centerpiece of Roosevelt’s legacy, Social Security, has been a particular target of the radical right, which harps on its long term problems. Their solution has been to “securitize” Social Security in the form of private 401K-type accounts.

Social Security has long term problems, to be sure. But in the short term, it has been a cash cow since the increases in social-security taxation were put into place during the 1980s, ironically while Reagan was preaching the virtues of privatization and running huge deficits. Since then, Social Security has been taking in much more money than it spends. The Social Security cash flow has been squandered through predilection for deficit spending by Democratic as well Republican administrations since LBJ unified the the budget in an effort to hide the cost of the Vietnam War, with much, if not most, of that diversion being directed toward the Pentagon, particularly during the Reagan and Bush II administrations.

One thing is now clear: Had the Republicans succeeded in securitizing Social Security, part or all of this cash surplus would have been pumped into Wall Street and inflated the financial bubble even further. It is also clear that the influx of money would have increased bankers’ bonuses and shifted even more money to the super rich. Perhaps, the huge influx of money would have delayed timing of the bubble’s bursting (into a democratic administration?), but it is now clear that the inevitable bursting would have been even more destructive to the welfare of average citizens than the current meltdown.

Nevertheless, even today, amid the carnage wrought by the supercapitalism of the radical right, we still hear them trashing Social Security as well as the social programs that are Roosevelt’s legacy. My friend Jeff Madrick, an old time liberal, is rightly offended by this attack and has written the attached defense of the New Deal, which I think is largely on the mark.

But while I think Jeff is dead on, I am still nervous over the question of whether or not a Keynesian approach will work well in today’s crisis. I think the total debt situation in our country (public and private) is very different than the 1930s and that it is being worsened by Obama’s giveaway to the big banks, which should be allowed to fail, be broken up, and re-regulated. Also, the U.S. was an industrial economy in the 1930s, with a very small military sector, and although production collapsed in the Great Depression, it remained an industrial economy, albeit one with horrendous excess capacity. So, there was a big pump that was ready to be primed.

Today, after years of deindustrialization, what remains of our industrial sector is much smaller and feebler relative to the size of our economy and its global competitors. Moreover, today’s industrial sector is infected by a proportionally much bigger permanent military sector made up of highly politicized inefficient mega-corporations that can not compete in free markets. Those who think increasing the defense budget today will stimulate the economy like it did in WWII are dead wrong, because a comparison of the stimulative effects of defense spending in WWII to today’s situation is completely bogus for at least two reasons:

(1) Rationing increased saving after we entered WWII, which built up pent up demand that was released after the war. On the other hand, our country has been over-consuming, dissaving, and deindustrializing since at least 1980.

(2) Most of the companies making defense products in WWII were commercial companies, like Ford, which returned to producing commercial products after WWII. Today, defense is a highly specialized sector with very little spin off to the civilian economy and no civilian market expertise. (Aircraft manufacturers were an exception, but the cold war and government subsidies bailed them out.)

So, my skepticism centers on the following question: Do the higher debt burden and the effects of deindustrialization and increased militarization in the industrial sector create a situation different enough from the 1930s and early 1940 to undermine the salutary effects on Keynesianism that Madrick discusses? I don’t think anyone knows the answers to this question.

On the other hand, some things are clear, at least to me:

(1) Squandering political capital to bail out a corrupt bloated financial sector that is so clearly obsessed with promoting its own welfare at the expense of the general welfare will only increase the power of the financial oligarchy that wreaked so much devastation.

(2) Propping up the defense industry by keeping cold war turkeys like the F-22 and missile defense systems alive in the name of protecting jobs also puts the interest of a faction before the general interest and retards the re-industrialization of the American economy.

(3) Our country definitely needs to devote more resources to repairing crumbling infrastructure, be it bridges, sewers, and roads, or education systems, or the medical system, in order to refurbish the base for economic growth.

So, with these caveats in mind, I think Jeff’s analysis is dead on and I urge you to read it. The right wing economic ideologues had their chance and got what they wanted in terms of deregulation, union busting, deficit spending and war. And the results are now pretty clear. It is time for them to just shut up.

Was the New Deal a Bust?
by Jeff Madrick / March 30, 2009

Today’s all-day conference taking a “second look” shows the power of the right in even getting such a question on the table. But claims that the New Deal failed are dead wrong.

Nothing better illustrates the tenacity of the political right in America than the attention it has won for its claims that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal made the Great Depression of the 1930s worse. Despite heavy political losses, the right soldiers on, maintaining if not building support for bigger battles it expects to come.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has provided the principal venue for the claims FDR’s programs failed. But today, the Council on Foreign Relations has put together an all-day conference in New York asking its audience to take a “second look” at the New Deal. It is another sign of the right’s influence that it is able to get the prestigious CFR to sponsor the occasion. I am participating and am very glad for the opportunity because claims that the New Deal failed are dead wrong.

What prompts the rightist outcry today, of course, is the government deficit spending proposed by President Obama.

What prompts the rightist outcry today of course is the government deficit spending proposed by President Obama. It is classic Keynesianism designed, along with the financial rescue and housing subsidies, to halt the current severe recession and ignite economic recovery. (The British economist John Maynard Keynes argued in his 1936 classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, that the government can stimulate the economy by spending more than it taxes, thus adding buying power and promoting business investment.)

The conservative critics of the New Deal today want nothing of Obama’s plan. Such Keynesian spending will do no good, make government still bigger, and encumber the U.S. with far more debt than it can manage for many years, they argue. But does a clear look at the 1930s Depression offer any serious evidence to support the contention that Keynesianism failed—and always will?

The claim is misleading from the very start. In fact, Keynesianism was not seriously applied in the 1930s. Economists and others in the 1930s supported government programs to increase consumption; an active right wing then opposed it. But no Keynesian or other serious economist for the last half-century has argued that the deficit spending applied by FDR had a chance to end the Depression. A paper by E. Cary Brown dismissed the notion as far back as 1955

As Price Fishback, a centrist mainstream economic historian from the University of Arizona, points out, budget deficits never rose to the level of Keynesian prescriptions because they were far too small compared to the sharp drop in the nation’s income and industrial production on the order of 30 percent or more. The budget deficits came to roughly 5 percent at their height. While federal spending to pay for relief, work projects, public works, and other matters was increased to as much as 8 percent of a much-shrunken gross domestic product, taxes were also repeatedly raised. Keynesianism is not about public spending per se, but the degree to which outlays exceed tax revenue—the size of the deficit. Compared to the sharp drop in demand, the deficits were just too small.

But even those deficits, coupled with less-stringent monetary policy, had a substantial impact. From 1933, when Roosevelt took office, to the end of his first term in early 1937, the nation’s GDP rose by 9 percent a year. In fact, as Alex Field, an economist at Santa Clara University, points out, when properly calculated on a “chain-weighted” basis, GDP exceeded its 1929 high by the end of Roosevelt’s first term. So did capital investment, rising from some $11 billion in 1933 (in 2000 dollars) to $91 billion in 1937.

This doesn’t stop some economists from claiming investment was poor in these years, evidence to the contrary. They blame the purported weakness on uncertainty over Roosevelt programs and on unions, which, with newfound organizing power due to Roosevelt legislation, artificially pushed up wages and reduced profitability. If anything, it was persistent excess capacity, not somewhat higher wages, that deterred investment. Industrial production remained below 1929 levels until roughly 1937.

For four years, then, the economy was improving robustly. Moreover, the rate of unemployment fell rapidly from roughly 25 percent at its worst level in 1933 to 14.3 percent in 1937. Good progress, but still much too high. No doubt, unemployment would have fallen significantly more, however, except that, under pressure from the predecessors to today’s anti-New Dealers, FDR stepped on the brakes. Taxes were increased, government spending cut back (federal salaries were reduced, for example), and the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy. The economy plunged into a new recession and the unemployment rate shot up four percentage points to about 19 percent. But the cause was not Keynesian stimulus, but its very opposite.

The anti-New Dealers apparently love to tell us that Keynesianism did not end the Great Depression, the war did. Exactly. Huge amounts of military spending provide the example that solidifies the Keynesian claim. Military spending is also government spending.

Christina Romer, the current head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has done academic research suggesting looser monetary policy in the late 1930s resulted in more rapid gains in the economy in 1938 and 1939. This is hardly inconsistent with Keynesianism. But it was the rapid rise in government spending in 1941, leaping from roughly $200 billion to $355 billion, that makes the Keynesian case. The economy took off at this point, and unemployment (before large-scale military conscription) fell by four percentage points. It is more than a little interesting that Romer also now supports deficit spending as a stimulus to the economy. So does Ben Bernanke, long a subscriber to the monetarist explanation of the Great Depression until his own place in history has been put on the line as Federal Reserve chairman.

If the New Deal was not about Keynesianism, then what good did it do? A great deal, and that’s understating it. It provided regulation for a modern financial economy, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission, passing the Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks, and creating deposit insurance. It established federal unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and of course Social Security. It enabled unions to organize. And I leave much out on the regulatory front. Eventually, it created the Bretton Woods framework for international trade and investment.

The New Deal also aggressively built the nation’s roads and bridges, again a fact often neglected. In the 1920s, the nation’s surface infrastructure did not keep up with the increase in auto ownership. But the capital stock of the nation’s roads, bridges, and new highways rose by a remarkable 70 percent between 1929 and 1941. The development of sewers and water systems was almost as robust. This enormous investment laid the groundwork for the suburban development and growing commercial economy after World War II.

The current right wing complains about all of these government programs, not least Social Security. They were supposedly dangerous interventions that reduced economic efficiency. Yet in the post-World War II era, the economy grew with remarkable speed despite its relative maturity after having become the world’s largest by the late 1800s, and wages doubled for all income groups. All the while, Social Security reduced elderly poverty rates from more than 30 percent to less than 10 percent. Those who complain about unions and their undermining of investment have a hard time explaining the economy’s success in the 1950s and 1960s, a time in which union power was at its height and capital investment was nevertheless robust. By contrast, after Ronald Reagan helped lead to declining unionization, capital investment was disappointing in the 1980s. In the 2000s, when unions seem almost nonexistent, median wages have fallen, and capital investment has been persistently weak.

Some on the right even deny the value of the new transportation infrastructure of the 1930s, claiming that public works spending did not produce an economic miracle. Of course it did not. It was never enough spending in the short run. Its benefits were longer term and critical to future prosperity, as public infrastructure has been since the beginning of the Republic.

One other neglected but remarkable fact should be mentioned, emphasized in particular in fine work by the economist Alex Field. Productivity rose rapidly in the 1930s. I don’t mean simple labor productivity—the output per hour of work. But total factor productivity, or TFP, rose at rates that exceeded growth in most other decades, including the 1920s. TFP is the true source of economic growth. It is, to simplify, the sum of new technologies, managerial innovations, learning on the job, scale economies due to growing demand, and other factors that cannot be attributed merely to increases in labor supply or capital investment. One reason, as Field persuasively computes, was the growth of surface transportation built by the government that made the productivity of private industry greater.

The New Deal, of course, was a hodgepodge of programs and as such, some of them failed and were damaging to the economy. Even Keynes decried provisions in the FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that resulted in allowing businesses to raise prices. No doubt, some public works programs were more worthwhile than others. But on balance, the New Deal left a stunning legacy that changed America incomparably for the better, made the growth of a true middle class possible, and reaffirmed faith in American democracy when it was perhaps most challenged under the dark cloud of the Depression. This is what many of us long believed, and despite efforts to revise this history, we still should.

The failure to adopt a powerful Keynesian stimulus delayed recovery far longer than necessary. The key lesson of the 1930s is that we cannot afford timidity.

[Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence and The Case for Big Government.]

Source / The Daily Beast

Thanks to Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment