That Would Be the New World Order COINTELPRO

Posted on October 12, 2008 by RagBlog

“None of us are fringe people,” said David Zirin, referring to a characterization made by Maryland’s former state police superintendent. Photo: Kevin Clark / The Washington Post.

Spying on Activists Discussed at Forum: Group Questions Why Some, Not Others
By Lisa Rein / October 12, 2008

The 53 men and women wrongly classified by the Maryland State Police as terrorists include two Catholic nuns, a Democratic candidate for Congress, a man who campaigns against military recruiting at high schools and one person who has never set foot in the state.

They share a passion for peaceful political protest. But as the activists were invited last week to review their files before they are purged from state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, their identities indicate that the 14-month surveillance operation in 2005 and 2006 targeted not just local opponents of the death penalty and Iraq war, as police claim, but a broader group.

Frederick lawyer Barry Kissin, his wife and two other members of the Frederick Progressive Action Coalition received letters from the police last week notifying them that they were on the list. Since the anthrax attacks in 2001, the group has been devoted to marching peacefully to fight the government’s expansion of biodefense research at Fort Detrick, arguing that the research will pose a health threat.

“That’s what ties the four of us together,” said Kissin, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in 2006.

Kissin was one of 70 activists who gathered at Takoma Park Presbyterian Church yesterday for a forum sponsored by the Washington Peace Center to discuss a strategy to ensure that their names are erased from any anti-terrorism databases. Among their questions are why some of them were targeted and others spared. Some people named in surveillance logs released in July by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland — which sued for the documents under public records laws — have not been contacted by police.

Some who made the list said they were not in Maryland when the spying took place, prompting them to wonder if the operation went on for longer or if their names were culled from other databases. The activists were furious that they will not be allowed to keep paper copies of their files or review them with attorneys for the ACLU, which is representing many of them.

“I am not a fringe person, and none of us are fringe people,” said David Zirin, a sportswriter and death penalty opponent from Silver Spring, referring to a characterization by former state police superintendent Thomas E. Hutchins at a legislative hearing last week.

State police spokesman Greg Shipley said Friday that he did not know how commanders in the Division of Homeland Security and Intelligence decided which names to enter in the databases. “What [State Police Superintendent Col. Terrence B. Sheridan] has said is the action taken wasn’t appropriate and that’s why the individuals’ names are being purged.”

State Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery) told the group that he plans to co-sponsor a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would prohibit covert monitoring by police of any political group unless they have an “articulated” suspicion of criminal activity.

Their antiwar protests landed Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Ardeth Platte, both of Baltimore, in federal prison in Colorado after they trespassed on a military base and poured blood into a nuclear missile silo to protest the war in Afghanistan. When they received their letters from the state police, they were offended that they would be able to review only “relevant” information the police have gathered on them. “Anything you have on me is relevant as far as I’m concerned,” Gilbert said.

Nancy Kricorian, a New York writer who coordinates that state’s chapter of Code Pink, a national nonviolent women’s antiwar group, said she received an e-mail from the state police Monday asking for her address. She thought it was a prank. “Honestly, I’ve never been to Maryland,” she said, although she might have driven down Interstate 95 to the District to march in a Mother’s Day peace vigil in Lafayette Square. When Code Pink plans a protest in New York, she’s the one who calls police to let them know. “To me that’s a big irony here, that I’m the police liaison,” she said.

Although most activists on the list appear to represent progressive causes, a neo-Nazi who says he is the leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party said police contacted him last week, too. William A. White said that he moved from Derwood to Roanoke, Va., in 2003, and wondered why he was under surveillance. White said he espouses nonviolence, although he has faced several criminal charges.

Pat Elder of Bethesda said he believed he was targeted for his leadership of a national network that opposes military recruitment in high schools. When he called the police to arrange to review his file, he said he was told he would have only a half-hour. After he requested more time, the commander on the phone told him he could have it because his file was “quite extensive.”

Source / The Washington Post

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Ethnic Cleansing of Iraq Is Not Yet Finished

Posted on October 12, 2008 by RagBlog

A car bomb damaged this Chaldean church in west Mosul on January 17, 2008. Photo: Elizabeth Valgiusti.

3,000 Christians flee Mosul raids
October 12, 2008

MOSUL — Militants blew up three empty Christian homes yesterday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where more than 3,000 Christian families have fled in the past two days.

The governor of northern Ninevah province, Duraid Mohammed Kashmoula, said more than 3,000 Christians have fled Mosul over the past week alone in what he called a “major displacement.”

This is despite months of US and Iraqi military operations to secure the city.

He said most have left for churches, monasteries and the homes of relatives in nearby Christian villages and towns.

“The families were already displaced in two of the houses that were attacked. The militants evacuated the third and then blew it up,” parliamentarian Unadim Kanna said.

“Of course Al Qaeda elements are behind this campaign against Christians,” he said.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s parliament suspended proceedings for one day yesterday in mourning for a Shi’ite MP who was killed in a bomb attack.

Parliamentarians from across rival parties condemned the killing of Saleh Al Ugaili, a member of the parliamentary bloc loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.

In fresh violence, Turkish warplanes and artillery attacked 31 Kurdish rebel bases as part of a week-long operation in northern Iraq after an attack that killed 17 Turkish soldiers, the military said.

Ahmed Danees, spokesman for the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraq, said that new shelling had taken place in mountainous areas inside Iraq for about an hour.

The Turkish president said for the first time publicly that Ankara was talking to the Iraqi government about acting against the PKK.

In other violence, a US soldier was killed in a roadside bomb blast in southern Iraq.

In another development, Turkish authorities claimed to have foiled a probable suicide attack by a suspected Kurdish militant in Istanbul yesterday.

Police arrested a woman in her 30s in the heart of Turkey’s largest city who they said had been faking pregnancy and was carrying 8.8kg of explosives, 15 detonators and a manual button in her bag.

The amount of material the suspect was carrying suggested she was preparing an attack on a scale as “murderous” as the twin bombings in Istanbul in July that killed 17 people, sources said.

Source / Gulf Daily News

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Animals Seek Higher Elevations Fleeing the Heat

Posted on October 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Scientist went to sites, including Mono Lake (pictured here), examined decades ago by Joseph Grinnell, to look at effects of climate change. Photo: Michael Macor/The Chronicle.

Climate change forcing animals to move up
David Perlman / October 10, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — From the mountains of Yosemite to the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, global warming is forcing animals and plants to move to higher and higher elevations, searching for climates that have allowed them to evolve and thrive for millions of years.

The exodus from less tolerable habitats to cooler and more benign environments has been taking place for nearly a century, according to scientists who scrambled over rocks and ridges, through steamy rain forests and up steep volcanic slopes to complete their painstaking surveys.

And in a few cases, the moves are taking a toll: Some mountain animals, left with smaller ranges to forage for food, may face extinction, while others are up against Darwinian competition as their new habitats intrude on already-established animal populations.

“These kinds of changes have been going on forever,” said James L. Patton, a biologist at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “The only difference is that this has probably happened in our lifetime. It’s the speed with which these changes are taking place that gives one pause.”

As the pace of global warming quickens, change is everywhere: from glaciers melting in Greenland, to ice shelves crumbling in Antarctica, to coral reefs dying in tropic seas – and now to animal and plant life in many parts of the world.

In a report appearing today in the journal Science, Craig Moritz, also of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Patton and their colleagues describe how they surveyed 28 species of mammals studied by the late UC ornithologist Joseph Grinnell beginning in 1914. They covered many of Grinnell’s sites from the San Joaquin Valley across all of Yosemite, over the crest, and down to Mono Lake and then compared the results.

Their report is appearing with another one on the effects of climate change in Costa Rica by an international group headed by Robert K. Colwell, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was formerly also a UC Berkeley scientist.

The impacts of warming

Moritz and Patton note that since Grinnell completed his work, the central Sierra has seen continuous warming, with nighttime low temperatures averaging 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were 90 years ago. During the same period, more than half of the species he studied have shifted their ranges upward by as much as 1,600 feet, the researchers said.

Many of the others, Moritz and Patton said, stayed put in ranges that shrank over time, largely the result of human development rather than climate change.

The California vole, the California pocket mouse and the western harvest mouse, for example, have all increased their ranges by moving up-slope, while the bushy-tailed wood rat and Allen’s chipmunk remained at lower levels but their ranges have diminished, the Berkeley scientists found.

Another chipmunk, the alpine species, saw its range shrink before it moved upward more than 2,000 feet seeking a friendly climate, Patton said. Ninety years ago, that same species of alpine chipmunk was common in lodgepole forests below 7,800 feet, but Patton said he found none living lower than 9,600 feet. As a result, he said, it may now face the risk of extinction because of its diminished range.

Similar changes are also endangering plant and insect species in some of the warmest places on Earth, according to the international survey team headed by Colwell, an evolutionary biologist.

In the tropics the climate has warmed by nearly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1975, Colwell’s report in Science notes, and climate models for the tropics indicate it could get hotter by nearly an additional 6 degrees before the end of the century.

Working their way up the forested slopes of Volcan Barba in Costa Rica – from sea level to the volcano’s summit at nearly 10,000 feet – Colwell and his team of scientists surveyed the ranges of 1,902 different species of insects and plants, including moths and ants, orchids, mosses, ferns, fungi and the shrubs and bushes that live beneath forest canopies.

Trouble ahead for insects

Based on their observations, the scientists foresee trouble ahead: As the climate warms, even in the wet tropics, Colwell said, the ranges of many insect species will become more isolated in their higher habitats.

Some species now living part way up the volcano will have to move their ranges as much as 2,000 feet higher if the climate heats up by as much as 6 degrees, and that will put them into wholly new environments facing competition that evolution hasn’t equipped them to face, the scientists said.

At the same time, species already living near the volcano’s summit will find themselves with nowhere higher to move. In Colwell’s words, they’ll face “mountaintop extinction” as the climate warms even more.

In the tropical lowlands, little opportunity exists for plants or animals to escape future increases in temperature by migrating either north or south – it’s all hot everywhere. So as temperatures increase, according to Colwell’s report, about half the species the Costa Rica team studied will disappear – unless they retained the genetic tolerance for greater heat that their ancestors possessed some 55 million years ago when the world was far hotter than it is now.

The others may seek new habitats in wetter regions that are at least somewhat cooler than where they live now, but even then the warming trend will increase the dangers from drought and forest fire.

So the future looks tough all over.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

Source / San Francisco Chronicle

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Paul Craig Roberts Proposes an Economic Fix

Posted on October 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Source, and for additional information about the market free-fall.

A Solution?
By Paul Craig Roberts / October 10, 2008

Readers have been pressing for a solution to the financial crisis. But first it is necessary to understand the problem. Here is the problem as I see it. If my diagnosis is correct, the solution below might be appropriate.

Let’s begin with the fact that the financial crisis is more or less worldwide. The mechanism that spread the American-made financial crisis abroad was the massive US trade deficit. Every year the countries with which the US has trade deficits end up in the aggregate with hundreds of billions of dollars.

Countries don’t put these dollars in a mattress. They invest them. They buy up US companies, real estate, and toll roads. They also purchase US financial assets. They finance the US government budget deficit by purchasing Treasury bonds and bills. They help to finance the US mortgage market by purchasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. They buy financial instruments, such as mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives, from US investment banks, and that is how the US financial crisis was spread abroad. If the US current account was close to balance, the contagion would have lacked a mechanism by which to spread.

One reason the US trade deficit is so large is the practice of US corporations offshoring their production of goods and services for US markets. When these products are brought into the US to be sold, they count as imports.

Thus, economists were wrong to see the trade deficit as a non-problem and to regard offshoring as a plus for the US economy.

The fact that much of the financial world is polluted with US toxic financial instruments could affect the ability of the US Treasury to borrow the money to finance the bailout of the financial institutions. Foreign central banks might need their reserves to bail out their own financial systems. As the US savings rate is approximately zero, the only alternative to foreign borrowing is the printing of money.

Financial deregulation was an important factor in the development of the crisis. The most reckless deregulation occurred in 1999, 2000, and 2004. See Roberts, “The End of American Hegemony.”

Lax mortgage lending policies grew out of pressures placed on mortgage lenders during the 1990s by the US Department of Justice and federal regulatory agencies to race-norm their mortgage lending and to provide below-market loans to preferred minorities. Subprime mortgages became a potential systemic threat when issuers ceased to bear any risk by selling the mortgages, which were then amalgamated with other mortgages and became collateral for mortgage-backed securities.

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s inexplicable low interest rate policy allowed the systemic threat to develop. Low interest rates push up housing prices by lowering monthly mortgage payments, thus increasing housing demand. Rising home prices created equity to justify 100 percent mortgages. Buyers leveraged themselves to the hilt and lacked the ability to make payments when they lost their jobs or when adjustable rates and interest escalator clauses pushed up monthly payments.

Wall Street analysts pushed financial institutions to increase their earnings, which they did by leveraging their assets and by insuring debt instruments instead of maintaining appropriate reserves. This spread the crisis from banks to insurance companies.

Finance chiefs around the world are dealing with the crisis by bailing out banks and by lowering interest rates. This suggests that the authorities see the problem as a solvency problem for the financial institutions and as a liquidity problem. US Treasury Secretary Paulson’s solution, for example, leaves unattended the continuing mortgage defaults and foreclosures. The fall in the US stock market predicts a serious recession, which means rising unemployment and more defaults and foreclosures.

In place of a liquidity problem, I see an over-abundance of debt instruments relative to wealth. A fractional reserve banking system based on fiat money appears to be capable of creating debt instruments faster than an economy can create real wealth. Add in credit card debt, stocks purchased on margin, and leveraged derivatives, and debt is pyramided relative to real assets.

Add in the mark-to-market rule, which forces troubled assets to be under-valued, thus threatening the solvency of institutions, and short-selling, which drives down the shares of troubled institutions, thereby depriving them of credit lines, and you have an outline of the many causes of the current crisis.

If the diagnosis is correct, the solution is multifaceted.

Instead of wasting $700 billion on a bailout of the guilty that does not address the problem, the money should be used to refinance the troubled mortgages, as was done during the Great Depression. If the mortgages were not defaulting, the income flows from the mortgage interest through to the holders of the mortgage-backed securities would be restored. Thus, the solvency problem faced by the holders of these securities would be at an end.

The financial markets must be carefully re-regulated, not over-regulated or wrongly regulated.

To shore up the credibility of the US Treasury’s own credit rating and the US dollar as world reserve currency, the US budget and trade deficits must be addressed. The US budget deficit can be eliminated by halting the Bush Regime’s gratuitous wars and by cutting the extravagant US military budget. The US spends more on military than the rest of the world combined. This is insane and unaffordable. A balanced budget is a signal to the world that the US government is serious and is taking measures to reduce its demand on the supply of world savings.

The trade deficit is more difficult to reduce as the US has stupidly permitted itself to become dependent not merely on imports of foreign energy, but also on imports of foreign manufactured goods including advanced technology products. Steps can be taken to bring home the offshored production of US goods for US markets. This would substantially reduce the trade deficit and, thus, restore credibility to the US dollar as world reserve currency. Follow-up measures would be required to insure that US imports do not greatly exceed exports.

The US will have to set aside the racial privileges that federal bureaucrats pulled out of the Civil Rights Act and restore sound lending practices. It the US government itself wishes to subsidize at taxpayer expense home purchases by non-qualified buyers, that is a political decision subject to electoral ratification. But the US government must cease to force private lenders to breech the standards of prudence.

The issuance of credit cards must be brought back to prudent standards, with checks on credit history, employment, and income. Balances that grow over time must be seen as a problem against which reserves must be provided, instead of a source of rising interest income to the credit card companies.

Fractional reserve banking must be reined in by higher reserve requirements, rising over time perhaps to 100 percent. If banks were true financial intermediaries, they would not have money creating power, and the proliferation of debt relative to wealth would be reduced.

Does the US have the leadership to realize the problem and to deal with it?

Not if Bush, Cheney, Paulson, Bernanke, McCain and Obama are the best leadership that America can produce.

The Great Depression lasted a decade because the authorities were unable to comprehend that the Federal Reserve had allowed the supply of money to shrink. The shrunken money supply could not employ the same number of workers at the same wages, and it could not purchase the same amount of goods and service at the same prices. Thus, prices and employment fell.

The explanation of the Great Depression was not known until the 1960s when Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published their Monetary History of the United States. Given the stupidity of our leadership and the stupidity of so many of our economists, we may learn what happened to us this year in 2038, three decades from now.

Source / Information Clearing House

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AIG Proves Corporate America Has No Shame

Posted on October 11, 2008 by RagBlog


AIG execs planned SECOND resort trip after bailout
By Helen Kennedy, Daily News Staff Writer / October 8, 2008

Even as the White House on Wednesday branding it “despicable” for bailed-out AIG to spend $443,000 on a swank company junket, honchos were preparing another lavish retreat.

About 50 American International Group managers are set to attend next week’s retreat at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton spa resort in California’s Half Moon Bay.

The insurance giant said the meeting is to educate 150 independent agents who sell AIG coverage to high-end clients.

“They are top business producers, and they are vital to the company,” AIG spokesman Joe Norton said. “If a company is not selling, it’s not profitable.”

The cost of the planned retreat was unknown. Rooms at the Ritz run from $300 to $1,200 a night – extra for a dip in the “Roman-style” mineral baths.

Last month, just days after the government saved AIG from bankruptcy with $85 billion in loans, the company paid for a week-long corporate junket at another California resort. The tab included $10,000 in bar bills and $23,000 in spa treatments.

“It’s pretty despicable,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. “The President did not want to move forward on this rescue package … to help executives go to a spa.”

AIG CEO Edward Liddy said the junket was for independent life insurance brokers, not execs.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Liddy said AIG is “reevaluating the costs of all aspects of our operations.”

Update: The second trip was cancelled.

Source / New York Daily News

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GOP Rallies : Conservatives Go Ballistic

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

A McCain supporter yells at Obama supporters before McCain and Palin arrive at a rally, Oct. 8, 2008, in Strongsville, Ohio. Photo by AP.

McCain campaign riling up base by ‘ratcheting up fears and frustrations.’
By Jonathan Martin / October 10, 2008

The unmistakable momentum behind Barack Obama’s campaign, combined with worry that John McCain is not doing enough to stop it, is ratcheting up fears and frustrations among conservatives.

And nowhere is this emotion on plainer display than at Republican rallies, where voters this week have shouted out insults at the mention of Obama, pleaded with McCain to get more aggressive with the Democrat and generally demonstrated the sort of visceral anger and unease that reflects a party on the precipice of panic.

The calendar is closing and the polls, at least right now, are not.

With McCain passing up the opportunity to level any tough personal shots in his first two debates and the very real prospect of an Obama presidency setting in, the sort of hard-core partisan activists who turn out for campaign events are venting in unusually personal terms.

“Terrorist!” one man screamed Monday at a New Mexico rally after McCain voiced the campaign’s new rhetorical staple aimed at raising doubts about the Illinois senator: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

“He’s a damn liar!” yelled a woman Wednesday in Pennsylvania. “Get him. He’s bad for our country.”

At both stops, there were cries of, “Nobama,” picking up on a phrase that has appeared on yard signs, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

And Thursday, at a campaign town hall in Wisconsin, one Republican brought the crowd to its feet when he used his turn at the microphone to offer a soliloquy so impassioned it made the network news and earned extended play on Rush Limbaugh’s program.

“I’m mad; I’m really mad!” the voter bellowed. “And what’s going to surprise ya, is it’s not the economy — it’s the socialists taking over our country.”

After the crowd settled down he was back at it. “When you have an Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there gonna run this country, we gotta have our head examined!”

Such contempt for Democrats is, of course, nothing new from conservative activists. But in 2000 and 2004, the Republican rank and file was more apt to ridicule Gore as a stiff fabulist or Kerry as an effete weather vane of a politician.

“Flip-flop, flip-flop,” went the cry at Republican rallies four years ago, often with footwear to match the chant.

Now, though, the emotion on display is unadulterated anger rather than mocking.

Activists outside rallies openly talk about Obama as a terrorist, citing his name and purported ties to Islam in the fashion of the viral e-mails that have rocketed around the Internet for over a year now.

Some of this activity is finding its way into the events, too.

On Thursday, as one man in the audience asked a question about Obama’s associations, the crowd erupted in name-calling.

“Obama Osama!” one woman called out.

And twice this week, local officials have warmed up the crowd by railing against “Barack Hussein Obama.”

Both times, McCain’s campaign has issued statements disavowing the use of the Democrat’s full name.
A McCain aide said they tell individuals speaking before every event not to do so. “Sometimes people just do what they want,” explained the aide.

The raw emotions worry some in the party who believe the broader swath of swing voters are far more focused on their dwindling retirement accounts than on Obama’s background and associations and will be turned off by footage of the McCain events.

John Weaver, McCain’s former top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this behavior.

“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

But, if it were up to them, such hard-edged tactics are clearly what many in the party base would like to use against Obama.

That McCain has so far seemed reluctant to do so has frustrated Republicans.

“It’s time that you two are representing us, and we are mad,” reiterated the boisterous Republican at McCain’s town hall in Wisconsin Thursday. “So go get ’em!”

“I am begging you, sir, I am begging you — take it to him,” pleaded James T. Harris, a local talk radio host at the same event, earning an extended standing ovation.

“Yosemite Sam is having the law laid down to him today in Waukesha, Wis.,” quipped Limbaugh on his show Thursday, referring to the GOP nominee. “This guy, this audience member, is exactly right,” the conservative talk show host said of the first individual.

“You are running for president. You have a right to defend this country. You have a responsibility to defend this country and not just fulfill some dream you had eight years ago running for president against Bush. It’s time to start naming names and explain what’s actually going on, because, Sen. McCain, the people of this country are dead scared about what we face if you lose.”

John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at California’s Claremont McKenna College and former Republican operative, suggested core Republicans were acting out their longstanding frustrations with their self-proclaimed maverick nominee.

“McCain has always frustrated the Republican base,” Pitney said. “In this campaign, he has alternated between partisan attacks and calls for bipartisan cooperation. It’s nice that he thinks he can round up congressional votes the way a border collie rounds up sheep. But you can’t be a border collie and a pit bull at the same time. The crowds want a pit bull.”

There is also the belief that taking out Obama is the only way to win.

“They know that when McCain has taken off the Senate mantle and put the stick to Obama (celebrity ad, as a case in point), we get movement in the polls,” said Rick Wilson, a GOP consultant not working on the presidential race. “They want McCain to call out Obama — on the Fannie/Freddie mess, on Wright, on Ayers, on guns, on [the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] — because they know that if McCain says it, it penetrates the MSM filter. … Only McCain and Palin can really drive that message.”

The two have begun to get more aggressive on many of these topics, with both discussing Ayers in multiple venues Thursday. The RNC is also going up for the first time with an ad featuring the former domestic terrorist.

It was enough to stir hope that McCain may stay on the offensive, even in Limbaugh, who has often criticized the Arizona senator for working with Democrats more than attacking them. The radio host praised his sometimes-nemesis for singling out Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) as partly responsible for the credit crisis.

“McCain/Palin fired back today in Waukesha, and 15 years of frustration is coming out joyously in the voices of GOP supporters at these rallies,” Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail, arguing that Republicans were fed up with having been portrayed as the bogeyman for myriad issues since the Clinton years.

But to the exasperation of many in the party, Obama’s pastor, the most damning of all his associations, remains off-limits, at the express desire of McCain. Palin ignored Wright and focused on Ayers when she was asked about the two in an interview Thursday with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham. And McCain focused on Ayers only when he was asked an open-ended question at the town hall about Obama’s “associations.”

“It is a shame McCain took Wright off the table,” lamented one prominent Republican operative not working on the race. “He is a legitimate issue, and we may look back and realize he was the issue that could have changed the race.”

For now, though, party members don’t seem to be looking back with regret as much as fearing what lies ahead.

“McCain is behind in the polls, and the Republicans have no chance of regaining control of Congress,” Pitney noted. “Republicans are facing the prospect of unified Democratic control of the government for the first time since the first two Clinton years. And even then, Clinton’s agenda had moderate elements (e.g., [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and deficit reduction). With Obama, [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi in power, Republicans worry about a hard push for a hard-left agenda.”

Source / Politico

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Chomsky: "Progressive Legislation and Social Welfare Have Been Won by Popular Struggles, Not Gifts from Above"

Posted on October 10, 2008 by RagBlog


Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism is Being Exposed
By Noam Chomsky / October 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis, writes Noam Chomsky.

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

© 2008 The Irish Times

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press.

Source / Irish Times

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Sarah the Scoundrel : The High Art of Lying

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Sarah Palin: Drive-by liar?

‘When a candidate repeatedly lies about herself and her accomplishments, the lies reflect profound character disorders.’
By Sherman De Brosse / The Rag Blog / October 10, 2008

See video of Sarah Palin defending the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ during 2006 campaign for governor, Below.

Sarah Palin has set a new standard of mendaciousness in politics. Americans are usually only slightly annoyed when one candidate tells a flat-out lie about an opponent. Palin and McCain have taken this to a new level, repeating the same lies even after numerous fact checkers disprove their claims. But these are only lies about an opponent, so people think they do not reflect on the liar’s character. Maybe they are only white, excusable lies.

But when a candidate repeatedly lies about herself and her accomplishments, the lies reflect profound character disorders. Her claim to having initiated action to act on behalf of Darfur demonstrates a shocking opportunism and that she has no respect for truth.

It is no surprise that Governor Sarah Palin lied about the State of Alaska ending its investment in Sudan. She claimed that as soon as she learned of the Darfur situation she took the lead in the divestment cause. In fact, she ignored a 2007 postcard campaign aimed at getting her to act. Save Darfur people also met with her staff in 2007. She did nothing. The fact is that the Palin Administration openly stated its opposition to divestment in 2008 and prevented it from coming to a vote! This is what her deputy revenue commissioner said in a hearing:

The legislation is well-intended, and the desire to make a difference is noble, but mixing moral and political agendas at the expense of our citizens’ financial security is not a good combination

The hearing minutes are on line as of this date. State Representative Les Gara said that killed the bill. He said, “I walked out of that hearing livid.” The committee would not vote on divestiture. The Alaska Permanent Fund still had the $22 million invested in Sudan as of a few weeks ago.

Some say she has the power as chief executive to change the investment. In the debate, she said action will be taken when the legislature reconvenes.

She lied about when she knew about the problem and about taking leadership at the outset. Perhaps she came to see Darfur as a winning political issue a little belatedly and decided she could still claim this as a political feather.

She retained two clear lies in her standard stump speech long after they were disproven.

1.) She boasted that she told Congress “thanks but no thanks” on the Bridge to Nowhere. The fact is Congress pulled the plug on the bridge and she then reversed her position. She had supported it.

2.) She said she opposed earmarks. The fact is she zealously pursued them as mayor and is seeking them as governor.

There are other important questions to be raised.

3.) She said she did not use religion in her first campaign for mayor. In fact she criticized the incumbent for not going to church enough.

4.) She told Wasilla employees their jobs were safe, and then she set about firing six department heads.

5.) She told the police chief she was firing him because the NRA disliked him. Then she changed her story and said the man intimidated her.

6.) The evidence is clear that she wanted to censor books in the library and that she tried to fire the chief librarian for not going along with censorship. Then she said the discussion was only hypothetical.

How can we believe anything this woman says. Can we believe her denials about Troopergate when she did so much to block the investigation?

For whatever reason, she believes it is right for her to lie whenever it accomplishes her political purpose. Her distorted claim that Obama’s limited ties to William Ayers constitute proof of lack of patriotism remind us of the axiom that patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel. Her own words prove that she is, indeed, a scoundrel.

Sherman De Brosse is the peudonym for a retired history professor who was once chased off the Ohio University campus for protesting the John Birch Society. He is a contributor to The Rag Blog and also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.

Sarah Palin defending the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ during the 2006 election:

Also see Sarah Palin and Dominionism : Kingdom Now by Sherman DeBRosse / The Rag Blog / October 8, 2008

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The NSA DOES Spy on Innocent Americans

Posted on October 10, 2008 by RagBlog


NSA Snooped on Innocent Americans’ Private Calls from Iraq, Former Operators Charge
By Ryan Singel / October 09, 2008

The National Security Agency routinely listened in on the intimate and innocent phone calls of Americans in Iraq, including government personnel, journalists and aid workers, as they called back into the United States, according to two former NSA operators who spoke to ABC News.

The accusations that the NSA routinely listened in on Americans’ phone calls contradicts the Administration’s repeated claims that its secret spying did not listen to any Americans other than suspected terrorists.

The conduct also appears to violate the rules that govern when the NSA can listen in to Americans’ making calls overseas — which then required high-level approval for each target.

The two operators, who ABC News say do not know one other, came forward after speaking with the foremost chronicler of the NSA, James Bamford, whose new book the Shadow Factory comes out on Tuesday.

ABC News reports:

“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

It’s not clear whether the allegations refer to the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program that the Administration admitted to running after the New York Times revealed its existence in December 2005. The government describes that program as listening into phone calls where one end is outside the United States and where one party is suspected of being a terrorist. That program likely intercepted phone calls with help from American telecom companies.

The program described by the operators in the ABC News story likely collected the intelligence outside the United States.

Kinne’s allegations are not new — she’s been making them public for sometime as part of her involvement in the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Adrienne Kinne IVAW – US spied on Americans “just in case”

If the allegations are true, they show that when the government secretly tossed aside the decades-old credo that the NSA doesn’t spy on Americans, it did not simply make one or two exceptions — it shredded the it.

ABC News says the head of the Senate Intelligence committee Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is disturbed by the news and pledges to look into it.

However, it fails to note that Rockefeller was the key lawmaker in this summer’s legislation that largely legalized the government’s formerly secret warrantless wiretap program and gave immunity to the companies that helped.

Source / Wired

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Ron Ridenour: Sounds of Venezuela, Part XI

Posted on October 10, 2008 by RagBlog

Ocumare de la Costa at Cata beach in Aragua state, one of hundreds of coastline beaches. Photo: Ron Ridenour.

Click here to view the entire series.

Sounds of Venezuela
Part XI: Ocumare de la Costa
By Ron Ridenour / The Rag Blog / October 10, 2008

Diego insisted that I take a relaxing trip to a resort area for ordinary Venezuelans called, Ocumare de la Costa, before I should leave. I must see and do something else than politics. He’d accompany me on the bus. Relaxing it wasn’t. The curves winding up a jungle mountain last for an hour as head and stomach sway. Some people can’t repress their breakfast from spewing over the bus floor. Although the distance from La Victoria is just 100 kilometers, it took three and one-half hours in two buses. But it was worth the dizzy ride.

Nothing fancy about the beaches or the small town of 10,000 inhabitants. The most talked about feature is the new therapeutic hospital with Cuban doctors. There are plenty of liquor stores, cafes serving beer, rum and fish, and lottery gambling stalls, which also sell bets on horse races. Profits go to government supported programs.

At one of the beachfront cafes, Diego asked around for a decent and inexpensive hotel for me. A local man guided us to Restaurant Los Nonnos, an Italian restaurant with a guest house. I was the only guest in this house spacious enough for eight persons. I had use of the kitchen and a good double bed.

Diego did not want to stay after our fish soup lunch. He did not care for swimming and he wanted to rejoin his lover for the weekend. So he returned and I went for a swim. The salt water felt good on my skin. I stayed inside the reef, which crossed parallel to the beach about four hundred meters out, stretching from large boulders spilled into the sea from the mountain range. Cata beach is thus enclosed. At peak times about 100 people were on the beach. Most are fearful of the small waves and do not bathe unless the water is calm. This is not a surfers’ beach nor is it an environmentalist haven. Trash lay everywhere despite several trash barrels placed about, which remain empty or nearly so.

I walked a kilometer down the beach, skirting trash, to La Boca. Here, at The Mouth, was fishermen’s turf. There were dozens of small two-man motor boats docked or returning from the day’s fishing. They didn’t bring in many fish but each boat had a share of some of the best tasting fish in the world: dorado, aguja, bonito, pargo. The golden dorado, which weigh from 10 to 20 kilos, and the smaller red snapper (pargo) are my favorite. There were no fancy restaurants but numerous beachfront cafes or even stands that served grilled fish and cold beer.

As the sun sat glowing red, I watched the last boat return with an unusual shark. It was two meters in length. No one knew its name but one man called it “pure water”, because once cut open most of its 40 kilos proved to be nothing but water.

In the evening, I drank beer on Cata beach and watched the women. They were not bashful but were not after a quick sexual encounter either. Women in this country are definitely independent, strong, feminists without hatred of men from what I saw here and in three municipalities I explored and in three visits to Caracas. During the day, many walk on and near the beach in g-strings. Most women normally dress so that their breasts and thighs are high-lighted. But I got no sensation that their display of flesh is meant to entice men, but rather is an expression of liberty and for comfort in this sun-baked land.

The next day, the water was calm and came above the reef line. I knew it was risky but I dared myself to swim over it. Remember the dare devil boy-wants-to-be man syndrome in our youth? I haven’t quite gotten over that even when alone with no one to impress how manly I am. Maybe I do this because I don’t want to be encumbered. The open sea is most inviting, and I had my snorkel and mask so maybe I could see some large fish.

I floated cautiously over the sharp-pointed reef, about three to four meters wide and into freedom. The feeling that I can do it propels me more than common sense. After a fruitless search for fish yet having showed myself that “I can still do it at my age” I turned back toward the beach. Though the current was not strong I had neglected to take into account that ebb and flow directions make a difference. As I approached the reef the current pushed me forward. I could not control my body entirely. As I lay flat above the reef, the inward current forced my legs downward. I could only manage to resist with one, the other foot scraped upon a reef. I ignored whatever damage may have been caused and swam to the beach with decreasing lung capacity.

Once upon the sand, I saw blood running from the gash alongside my big toe. I collected my shirt and short pants and hobbled up the beach to a police station, which fortunately was no more than a couple hundred meters away. A policewoman gave me toilet paper to hold over my bleeding foot. She asked for identification but I had left it at the hotel. I only had a few Bolivars in my pocket. She and another policeman drove me the 10 kilometers to the Ocumare town emergency clinic. The hospital did not treat wounds.

I hobbled into the clinic as the police watched, ready to help if needed while respectful of do-it-yourself life approach whenever possible. There were a handful of patients but no waiting line. A nurse immediately guided me into a treatment room and the police departed. In the ensuing half-an-hour, three nurses and a doctor—all Venezuelan women—looked in on me. My foot was washed and I was given an anesthesia prior to being stitched. They all asked what had happened to my foot. Nurses, and the doctor, Dalia, about 55 years old, laughed as I explained my discovery that ocean waves and currents are stronger than my macho attitude.

Despite the anesthesia, it was still painful as Dalia sewed eight stitches through five centimeters of skin tightened over foot bone. They gave me another shot and asked me to sing. I am a terrible singer and know no songs but I managed to recall from my teenage years in Brazil a couple verses of a song about cachaza (a sugar cane pure brandy).

The medical workers appreciated my self-critique and humor. I appreciated their skill and affectionate care. After I was bandaged, the doctor had to fill out a brief form. It did not matter that I had no ID. Dalia just wrote down my name, age, the nature of injury and treatment. She wrote out a prescription against infection and swelling, and then told me:

“I love this revolution. I am a Colombian forced to flee 35 years ago. These past nine years have been most wonderful. Never before has a president cared for his people as does Chavez. He is almost too good,” she said, adding that his big heart causes some people to enshroud themselves in a sense of worthlessness.

There was no fee, not even for foreigners, and no papers for me to fill out. I later asked at a La Victoria private clinic what this would have cost: at least 100BF. I asked why people still came for private treatment when government health care was free.

“Oh, our services are better, and we are quicker. The government hospitals and clinics are not as good as private ones and they are all full,” the receptionist replied.

It was only two hundred meters from the Ocumare clinic to the pharmacy where I paid 6BF, less than $3, for the pills. Within a few minutes, I caught a taxi back to the beach town where I sat at a café table on the sand and ate the day’s catch — dorado — and drank my name. Ron in Spanish means rum.

As I watched the sun set, I felt content and wiser. Through this accident, one I unnecessarily caused, I had learned first hand how well the new health care system functions. The emergency service clinics, and the 2,700 community health centers constructed in five years, part of the Barrio Adentro Misión (Inside the Barrio Mission), has profoundly improved the health and welfare of more than half the nation not previously covered by medical care. Three thousand more health centers are under construction, according to the ministry’s August 2008 figures. True, many of the old hospitals are deteriorated and there is not uniformly accessible, excellent health care everywhere, but how can the right-wing make that an issue against the current government when they did nothing for the people’s health care when they ruled Venezuela.

Two days later, I splurged on a taxi to the airport, about a two-hour ride from La Victoria, depending on the traffic. The night before, I’d said my farewells to my new friends. Over the course of my time here they had all warned me about watching my back and my wallet. Maybe I was lucky, maybe careful enough but I was never attacked or robbed, and no one had short-changed me in the entire time.

The airport was packed, five long lines waited to pass through the first check-in. In all, our baggage was checked three times, and our persons once or twice. There were the civilian airline checkers, the customs, and the National Guard specializing in drug detection. When my flight was called and my ticket checked, I was asked to stand aside. Eventually, three young women from three countries were also standing aside. We were escorted outside near the aircraft where National Guardsmen opened our bags in our presence. We were politely told that the cameras and scanners can not always see everything in the bags so they make personal checks for drugs.

“We haven’t found anything today in this type of check. But yesterday, we confiscated 10 suitcases of cocaine destined for Mexico,” a young guardsman told me.

“You know,” he continued, “we confiscate and capture thousands of kilos every year and burn them—mostly cocaine, but also some heroin and marijuana. I wonder what President Bush would think if he knew how hard we work at stopping drug trafficking, almost all of which originates in Colombia not in our country.”

Drug free, we were boarding the plane but not before we were patted down at the entrance. Fortunately, I had put Diego’s advice into practice. I would not buy a commercial deodorant with which to swathe my armpits but I did apply a blend of lime juice and sodium carbonate, something Diego’s mother used long ago. So I did not offend the nostrils of the guards when I raised my left arm, clenched my fist and shouted the new sound of Venezuela: No volverán, the Empire and Oligarchy will not return.

The End

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Cleese Does Hannity. And Good…

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

John Cleese, shown with Sean Hannity. Madagascar photo by rodeime.

It’s a beautiful poem from the comedy icon of Monty Python fame that perfectly captures the essence of Sean Hannity.

Ode to Sean Hannity
by John Cleese

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

Source / Bademus / Talking Points Memo / October 8, 2008

Thanks to Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

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Cholera in Iraq: A Result of Government Corruption

Posted on October 10, 2008 by RagBlog

Children fill water containers in a former Baghdad army base, now a slum. Cholera has infected many supplies. Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Corruption blamed as cholera rips through Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn / October 10, 2008

BAGHDAD — A deadly outbreak of cholera in Iraq is being blamed on a scandal involving corrupt officials who failed to sterilise the local drinking water because they were bribed to buy chlorine from Iran that was long past its expiration date.

The centre of the epidemic is in Babil province, south of Baghdad, in the marshy lands east of the Euphrates river, not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon. In Baghdad, where half the six million population has no access to clean drinking water, people are now drinking only bottled or boiled water.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has appointed a commission of inquiry to find out why ineffective chlorine was being used. He is also refusing to release three officials under arrest despite demands from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) to which they are linked. In the town of al-Madhatiya, in southern Babil, a councillor involved in buying the chlorine was reportedly released after militiamen connected to ISCI intimidated police into freeing him.

The scandal over the contract is becoming a test case of the Maliki government’s willingness to tackle the pervasive corruption in Iraq where officials see their jobs primarily as a way of enriching themselves through bribes. It is also a test of his ability to exercise central control over ISCI and parties which have been hitherto dominant outside Baghdad.

Cholera is endemic in Iraq but last year there was an epidemic in northern Iraq which was far more serious than anything seen for years. Some 4,700 people, mostly in Sulaimaniyah province, were struck.

This year, the government hoped to stop another outbreak of the disease by repairing shattered water and sanitation stations and putting chlorine in the water supply. An Iraqi government official, who did not want his name published, said the Health Ministry bought $11m (£6.4m) worth of chlorine from Iran for use in the provinces of Babil, Diwaniyah and Kerbala, all on the Euphrates river south of Baghdad.

In the latter two provinces, officials noticed that the chlorine was old and the time during which it could be employed effectively had expired, and refused to use it. But in Babil the chlorine was put in the fresh water supply stations at al-Madhatiyah, al-Hashimiyah and al-Qasim, south-east of the provincial capital, al-Hillah. Soon 222 people were confirmed as having cholera in Babil, in a total of 420 cases of whom seven have died.

The scandal is a reflection of the the way Iraqi politics works. The ruling parties monopolise jobs and contracts. It is impossible to find work at any level in most ministries without a letter of commendation from one of the parties in the government. The enormous Iraqi government apparatus, employing some two million people, is a patronage machine. There are now more state officials than under Saddam, but it is unable to supply electricity, food rations and clean water, despite Iraq’s $80bn in accumulated oil revenues.

The power base of ISCI, the most powerful Shia religious party, is the Shia provinces of southern Iraq between Baghdad and Basra. Political parties are expected to protect their members from arrest. This explains what happened next. The officials arrested in Babil belonged to the Badr Organisation, the militia wing of ISCI. Leaders of the party demanded their release but Mr Maliki refused. Badr militants then turned up at a police station in al-Madhatiya and forced the police to release a councillor apparently involved in purchasing the chlorine.

But the grand Shia coalition which won more than half the seats in the Iraqi parliament in the last election in December 2005 has broken up. Mr Maliki is trying to build up his own Dawa party, using the resources of the state.

He has deepening differences with ISCI which won most of the southern Iraqi provinces. They accuse him of trying to create a power base in what was previously their territory by paying the tribes who belong to government-sponsored “support councils” in southern Iraq. His aim is to get his own candidates elected in the provincial and parliamentary elections next year. “These will be crucial in deciding who will hold power in Iraq in future,” said one senior Iraqi official.

Control of oil revenues gives Mr Maliki a crucial card. Iraq has 50 to 60 per cent unemployment and most jobs are with the state. Salaries of state employees have risen sharply. But the government remains largely dysfunctional aside from its growing military strength. Iraqi journalists are encouraged and paid to write “good news” stories. In Baghdad, people notice there is little mention of the cholera in the media. This provokes fear that the epidemic may be worse than the government admits.

After the invasion: Services in Iraq

* Before the war, Baghdad had electricity between 16 and 24 hours a day. This has dropped to just under 12.

* There was no national mobile phone network, now there are at least 12 million subscribers.

* In April 2007 there were 261,000 internet subscribers. Before the war this number was estimated as 4,500.

* Of the 34,000 doctors registered in pre-war Iraq, 20,000 fled, 2,000 have been killed and 250 kidnapped.

* Registered cars more than doubled, to 3.1 million by October 2005.

Source: The Brookings Institution

Source / The Independent

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