McCain and Palin are Laughing at the Press

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘During the past week, virtually every major news outlet has produced welcomed, hard-edged fact-checking pieces about how the Republican ticket goes far beyond bending the truth,’ BUT…
By Eric Boehlert / September 16, 2008

Chris Matthews was steamed.

As John McCain’s manufactured “lipstick on a pig” story was taking flight last week, Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, kicked off the hour by teeing up the story. In a note to viewers that telegraphed his disdain for the lipstick controversy, he announced that during the show, he’d share his own thoughts “about how, with a troubled economy, crumbling bridges, rail and roads, a failing educational system, a war that is now going on for five years, and an uncertain American economic future, we’re sitting here talking about lipstick.”

Later, he complained the story was “an insult to the intelligence of our democracy.”

Did you hear the media are mad? According to Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post, the press is angry at McCain for his patently untrue lipstick attack (“It’s false. It’s ridiculous”), and they’re seething over how Sarah Palin keeps telling her demonstrably false Bridge to Nowhere tale even after members of the media pointed out her stump-speech applause line was a lie. (A “whopper.”)

During the past week, virtually every major news outlet has produced welcomed, hard-edged fact-checking pieces about how the Republican ticket goes far beyond bending the truth and just plain snaps it out on the campaign trail.

In the past, that kind of truth-telling would have embarrassed campaigns and likely caused a dramatic change in the rhetoric. But what do McCain and Palin do in response? They pretty much ignore the press and its critiques.

Writing on The New Republic’s website, Eve Fairbanks spelled out the conundrum, capturing the dumbfounded realization that spread through the press corps. It’s like that scene in a movie when the superhero realizes his unique power (for the press, it’s collective indignation) has suddenly been rendered useless:

Reporters demolished the claim that the Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, and yet the McCain campaign insolently still uses it. Writers dismantled the McCain campaign’s untrue assertion that Barack Obama compared Sarah Palin to a pig yesterday, and yet the campaign put out an audacious ad featuring the ridiculous allegation, presumably on the assumption that Real Americans don’t care what the elite press says anyway.

Instead of recoiling, the Republican ticket seems to have adopted a post-press approach to campaigning in which the candidates simply don’t care what the press does or says about their honesty. More to the point, the candidates don’t think it will matter on Election Day.

They may be right. And that’s the media’s fault. They’ve reported their way right into the margins. Submerged in trivia and tactics for the past 18 months, the press, I think, has damaged its ability — its authority — to referee the campaign.

Proof? Let’s go back to the pissed-off Matthews for a perfect example. Raise your hand if, in the past six months, you’ve seen an entire episode of Hardball devoted to discussing our “troubled economy,” the sad state of America’s transportation infrastructure, the failings of our educational system, the never-ending war in Iraq, or the “uncertain American economic future.”

Matthews claimed those are the key issues that face our country and, by implication, are what are important to this campaign. Yet Matthews hosts a cable news program that pretty much refuses to discuss those issues.

Remember, Matthews is part of the same Beltway press crowd that told news consumers Hillary Clinton’s laugh was extremely important and needed to be analyzed for clues about her true character, that John Edwards’ haircuts raised serious doubts about the man’s candidacy, and that Barack Obama’s bowling score spelled trouble on the campaign trail.

And it wasn’t that long ago that the campaign press stressed how important it was that John Kerry windsurfed and that Al Gore spent time as a politician’s kid growing up in a Washington, D.C., hotel. These were issues of paramount concern for the media.

I think when journalists wallow in that nonsense for so long and pretend it’s newsworthy and important, the coverage of a truly important story (e.g. what the media have now identified as the Republican candidate for president trying to lie his way into the White House) comes across as just another trivial pursuit. For news consumers, it comes across as just more forced cable chatter because there’s no seriousness left in the entire endeavor.

Again, just look at the absurdity of Matthews’ performance. He basically devoted an entire program to addressing the question of whether McCain’s camp really thought Obama was referring to Palin with his lipstick comment. The entire program. And then within minutes, Matthews announced that the story insulted everyone’s intelligence.

Obvious question: So why spend an hour talking about it?

And that was just Matthews’ program. The entire charade was repeated everywhere across the Beltway landscape.

Fact: Between Monday and Friday of last week, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC aired more mentions of “lipstick” than they did “Fannie Mae.” You know Fannie Mae, that’s one of the two distressed mortgage giants (along with Freddie Mac) that the federal government had to take over last week in order to fend off insolvency, an unprecedented move that was fraught with dire economic repercussions.

But yes, the lipstick story was more newsworthy on cable television last week. It wasn’t even close. Lipstick was mentioned more than 350 times, while Fannie Mae was mentioned approximately 230 times, according to TVEyes.com.

Were some of those lipstick mentions on TV made while criticizing McCain’s empty ploy? Absolutely. (See NBC’s Chuck Todd.) But that still didn’t excuse the media’s Pavlovian response to the McCain whistle, of embracing and spreading the phony story in the first place. The proper response would have been to essentially ignore the so-called story and keep moving. Or to note that McCain’s camp tried to float the phony lipstick story. But turning the soggy affair into the day’s top news event was an embarrassment.

The media’s failure to do so wasn’t surprising. The press throughout this race has walked away from any semblance of traditional standards, yet journalists seemed oblivious to the long-term implications of their chronic embrace of fluff.

Why their embrace? Because that’s what the media feel most comfortable with; that’s what they’re good at. (They think.) They’re good at speculating for weeks on end about who might be selected as a candidate’s running mate and what that hypothetical matchup would mean on Election Day. They’re good at ruminating about polls. They’re good at trying to read politicians’ minds.

But now we’re seeing the dire consequences — when the press wants to inform voters about outrageous campaign conduct (like the Bridge to Nowhere, McCain’s untrue claim that Obama plans to raise “your” taxes, or even in the margins the lipstick fiasco), the press no longer wields the same authority, in part because the political press has consciously folded its work into the larger entertainment culture.

Honestly, do voters really (I mean really) see that big of a difference between reading about Sarah Palin in People and reading about her in Newsweek, whose 2008 campaign coverage often has been driven by an open, breathless embrace of celebrity and entertainment? I’m not so sure voters do.

As for actual issues, the media p acked those away for safe keeping sometime right around the New Hampshire primary. Ever since, it’s been T&T; trivia and tactics have ruled the print pages and airwaves.

Don’t get me wrong. I welcome the media’s current fact-checking blitz. It’s desperately needed in light of the fact that “the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully pointed out.

The press should maintain its fact-checking vigilance while avoiding future lipstick non-stories. Shedding the obsession with trivia and tactics in favor of substantive reporting would go a long way toward restoring the public’s trust and would help the media’s smart fact-checking efforts stand out and be noticed more.

But right now, I think the press’ frustration and anger, as Kurtz documented, reflects the disturbing realization among reporters and pundits that their protests have had little effect on McCain and Palin or the larger campaign. (Did you notice the Bridge to Nowhere tale returned to Palin’s stump speech?)

Rather than being cowed by the press’ mini-sermons about truth-telling, McCain and Palin are practically laughing at the press.

Can you blame them? Can you blame any sane observer for dismissing so much of today’s campaign coverage as nothing more than a farce? How could the McCain camp watch the Matthews episode and not laugh out loud at the sheer clownishness?

To recap: The MSNBC host, along with the rest of the press corps, seemed to be in heated agreement that the lipstick story was a worthless joke. And then they covered it ad nauseam. Why would the McCain camp look at that performance and think that political journalism was a serious business? Why would the McCain camp look at that sad display and care what the press said or thought about anything (including fact-checking) as long as the press dutifully spread around McCain’s campaign smears?

The campaign press has become a joke, and McCain and Palin are laughing at it.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers could not have been clearer speaking to Politico: “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

How did we enter this new media era in which general-election candidates McCain and Palin have made it quite clear they don’t even care (at least not yet) if the press calls them liars, which used to be the ultimate scarlet letter for any candidate?

It’s not only because the press corps no longer enjoys enough respect and credibility — enough authority — to pull the righteous indignation drill effectively. It’s also because the press hasn’t extracted a price from McCain or Palin for broadcasting lies.

Sure, reporters and pundits gnash their teeth and express deep disappointment at the direction of the GOP campaign. But openly ridiculing the GOP candidates as pols who can’t be trusted to tell the truth, or portraying them as delusional? Not a chance. That’s the type of mockery the press reserves exclusively for Democrats accused of bending the truth.

Writing at his blog on the Atlantic website, James Fallows noted the similarities between Palin’s Bridge to Nowhere fantasy and Hillary Clinton’s snipers-in-Bosnia fa ntasy from the primary season. He wrote:

In Senator Clinton’s case, the more often she repeated the story, the more relentlessly the press said the story was not true. All parts of the press did this: right, left, middle. They didn’t say that there was a “controversy” about her story. They said it was false. And eventually she bowed to the inevitable and stopped telling the story any more.

Fallows actually soft-peddled the press’ take on the Bosnia story. Because rather than simply “relentlessly” announcing the story was not true, lots of press players used the tall tale to emphasize that Clinton was craaaaazy. Hysterical. Irrational. Unhinged.

Perhaps that was the media’s right. (Candidates roll out whoppers at their own peril.) But if the press thought Clinton’s fabrication was telling about her character, why don’t journalists make the same assumption about Palin, who keeps repeating her fabricated tale?

And good God, imagine if Al Gore had ever uncorked a whopper like that while campaigning in 2000. As The Daily Howler wrote, “If Gore had ever told stories like these, he would have been hung from the nearest tree.”

Either that, or Matthews’ head would have exploded. Because let’s not forget that during the 2000 presidential campaign, the press couldn’t stop writing, investigating, and carrying on about Al Gore’s alleged exaggerations regarding old movies, canoe trips, and classroom seating inside a Sarasota school.

Pundits argued that Gore’s embellishments all but disqualified him from serving as president. Hooked on the story, reporters s pent an extraordinary amount of time checking in with experts — psychoanalysts, academics, political scientists — trying desperately to figure out what all the exaggerations meant.

The Washington Post, one month before the 2000 election, ran a Page One piece exploring Gore’s exaggerations — “casual lying” the newspaper called it — in which two reporters combed through decades of public statements. I’ve searched the Washington Post archives and cannot find a single reference to Sarah Palin’s “casual lying.”

Instead, the press coverage suggests that McCain and Palin’s lying simply represents a tactic — a campaign maneuver — and that the fabrications reveal nothing of their character.

No wonder they’re laughing at the press.

Source / Media Matters. Go here for links to individual stories.

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Day the Neoconservatives Nationalized AIG

Posted on September 17, 2008 by RagBlog


The AIG Rescue
By Jon Taplin / September 16, 2008

A few months ago, neoconservatives were screaming bloody murder when Hugo Chavez nationalized the phone company. Today a neoconservative U.S. Government nationalized AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, because the collective banks of the world refused to make a bridge loan to the insurer of most of the bonds they hold.

AIG was the linch pin to the shadow banking system – the $50 trillion of Credit Default Swaps – that I have be writing about for a long time. By insuring toxic bonds made up of sub prime mortgages, AIG allowed the banks to sell them to pension funds as AAA credits. It was a scam which AIG helped the banks to pull off. And then the whole house of cards collapsed and AIG was left holding the bag, potentially to pay insurance out on $ billions of defaulted bonds. So the banks that needed this insurance to load the crap into pension funds and other fiduciaries, now refuse to keep their insurer alive and win the game of chicken with the Fed.

We have been talking about the Great Deleveraging and how it puts downward pressure on the prices of all assets except government bonds. A failure of AIG would have accelerated that process into a true crash of 1929 proportions. However, AIG was the enabler for the big banks all over the world. Paulson should lay off the 2 year $85 billion note to a consortium of banks, keep 20% of the warrants in the Treasury for the rescue and attach the rest of the warrants to the loans as part of the sale to a bank consortium.

This was a big bankers game. The US taxpayers should not be left holding the bag.

Source / Jon Taplin

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Pipeline to Nowhere : Lipstick on a Pork Barrel

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Gov. Palin andFederal Coordinator for Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Projects, Drue Pearce at AGIA signing ceremony last year.

‘The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade’
By Bill Narum / The Rag Blog / September 17, 2008

[The following article incorporates material from the New York Times and other sources. See links below.]

In 2007, the Alaska Creamery Board recommended closing Matanuska Maid Dairy, an unprofitable state-owned business. Palin objected, citing concern for dairy farmers and a recent infusion of $600,000 in state money. When Palin realized that the Board of Agriculture and Conservation appoints Creamery Board members, she simply replaced the entire membership of the Board of Agriculture and Conservation. The new board, led by businesswoman Kristan Cole (friend of Palin since 3rd grade), reversed the decision to close the dairy.

The new board approved milk price increases offered by the dairy in an attempt to control fiscal losses, even though milk from Washington was already offered in Alaskan stores at lower prices. The new board reversed the decision to close the dairy. The price of milk increased by $1 a gallon. Later in 2007, the unprofitable business was put up for sale. No offers met the minimum bid of $3.35 million, and the dairy was closed. In August 2008, the Anchorage plant was purchased for $1.5 million, the new minimum bid. The purchaser plans to convert it into heated storage units.

The Palin/McCain ticket fails to tell this story when they talk of putting the plane on Ebay.

Now the (true) story of Gasline – I would rather post a link but only now is the press starting to look into the facts and have yet to do a detailed review.

The pipeline to nowhere.

The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.

Contributing to the project’s uncertainty is Ms. Palin’s antagonistic relationship with the major oil companies that control Alaska’s untapped gas reserves. Now, though, she will need the industry’s cooperation if her plan is to succeed, and just this week, her office said she intended to reach out to the North Slope oil companies.

State Senator Bert Stedman, a Republican who is co-chairman of the finance committee, said that in its contract with the chosen developer, TransCanada, the state bargained away too much leverage with little guarantee of success. “There is no requirement to lift one shovel of dirt or lay down one inch of steel,” he said.

Congress has prodded all parties involved to develop a plan to tap the gas since at least the 1970s, but the private sector has been unwilling to assume the huge cost of building a pipeline without considerable government tax breaks and other concessions.

Once elected, Ms. Palin set about fashioning an alternative that was essentially a 180-degree turn, intended to open up the bidding process to other companies. While Ms. Palin’s legislation did away with the concessions to the oil companies that she considered to be excessive, it committed the state to paying the winning bidder up to $500 million in matching money to offset costs of obtaining regulatory approvals and other expenses.

When the state solicited proposals from interested companies, it soon became apparent that the big oil companies would not participate. One of them, ConocoPhillips, submitted a proposal outside the process, but it was swiftly rejected by the Palin administration.

Of the five companies that eventually bid, Ms. Palin’s administration chose TransCanada Pipelines. TransCanada had previously tried to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Murkowski administration, but was sidelined by the governor. The proposal that TransCanada negotiated with the Murkowski administration was structured differently from the current one and had no provision for a $500 million state subsidy.

Under the most optimistic circumstances, dirt is not expected to be turned for years. TransCanada’s plan calls for it to file an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by the end of 2011, and to have the pipeline operational by late 2018. The company is not obligated to proceed with the project even if it clears all the financial and regulatory hurdles.

A number of important decisions remain in the relationship between the state and TransCanada, including whether the state will ultimately endorse the company’s application to the federal government.

The state’s commitment to match some start-up expenses, up to $500 million, is among several aspects of the deal that have prompted some legislators to second-guess their initial support.

Lyda Green, a Republican and president of the State Senate, voted for Ms. Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act but said that in the interim, it has not “shown itself to be open and competitive, and it is a very expensive risk.” “I regret the vote now,” she said last week.

Mr. Stedman, the Senate finance committee co-chairman, said he now believes that the Legislature was overly eager to support a new governor and see a pipeline project move forward. He contended that Ms. Palin’s bill seemed intentionally written to keep the three major Alaska oil producers from submitting proposals. Demonizing Big Oil, he added, could come back to haunt the state.

Beyond the $500 million subsidy, a central criticism of the deal is that for it to succeed, TransCanada needs to secure shipping commitments from the oil companies, which control most of the North Slope gas resources. Those pledges are far from certain.

Meanwhile, the oil companies seem to be charting a course of their own. A month before Ms. Palin announced the selection of TransCanada, BP and ConocoPhillips unveiled a partnership to construct their own pipeline, and started the process of seeking federal certification.

Two of the three major producers on the North Slope, BP and ConocoPhillips, announced last month that they were moving forward with building a pipeline on their own, and that demand and the high price of natural gas meant they would not need subsidies from the state. They say they have committed to spending $600 million on early development of the pipeline.

But critics are questioning TransCanada Corp.’s bid and Palin’s optimism.

And TransCanada itself is urging a radical policy shift for Palin — that her administration should negotiate taxes with the trio of oil companies controlling the North Slope’s prodigious gas reserves.

That cuts against the grain for Palin, who has taken a tough stance toward the oil giants and has shown little interest in negotiating a tax deal as a pipeline precursor.

The critics note TransCanada’s proposal is rife with clues that it will take far more than a newfangled state license and $500 million in seed money to launch the state’s most important and elusive economic development project.

While not demanding — it can’t, under terms of Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, or AGIA — the company is suggesting a pipeline might need billions in new financial backing from the U.S. government. To some, TransCanada is signaling the foundation is not yet in place for the Alaska Highway pipeline the company has proposed. And that Alaska’s government risks wasting years and huge sums of money by throwing in now with TransCanada.

“They’ve already admitted they can’t do the job, so why are we giving them $500 million and a state license?” said Andrew Halcro, an AGIA critic who in 2006 ran for governor as an independent against Republican Palin.

The critics, however, say TransCanada has salted its bid with a wish list that reaches well beyond what the Palin administration said it was prepared to offer under AGIA. The company also shows reluctance to shoulder an essential, multibillion-dollar piece of the project.

A review of TransCanada’s 300-page application turned up these items:

Ask the federal government to kick in shipping fees if the owner fails to attract enough paying customers to fill the gas line.

TransCanada says it “would rely on the state” to “reach agreement” with the North Slope oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Conoco Phillips and BP — on “reasonable and predictable” taxes on gas production.

TransCanada “proposes” to use part of $18 billion in construction loan guarantees Congress approved in 2004 to cover cost overruns. Pipeline users would have to repay a cost overrun loan only if gas prices were above a certain level.

Whether federal regulators would allow this is uncertain. Congress didn’t specify whether the loan guarantees could be used for cost overruns, U.S. Department of Energy officials said.

The plan includes pushing for the loan guarantee and bridge shipper ideas.

Unless no one else will do it, TransCanada says it won’t build or run the gas treatment plant, an enormous North Slope factory for stripping liquids and carbon dioxide out of the gas before it goes into the pipeline.

This suggests the major oil companies might need to be enlisted to build the nearly $6 billion plant, although Palin’s gas team said others such as a Native corporation might be interested.

Halcro said he can only imagine the reaction in Congress if TransCanada and the state ask for more federal financial help.

“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of laughter. Congress is going to look right back at Alaska and say, “Excuse me, you people have $40 billion in the bank,’ ” he said, referring to the state’s Permanent Fund.

“They wrote off four bidders immediately. You’ve got one left,” he said. “They’re making a special exception for TransCanada because they didn’t want to have a press conference and say, ‘Geez, nobody qualified.’ “

Cost of building a North Slope gas pipeline would exceed TransCanada’s net worth. Without shipper commitmentsand/or government guarantees, TransCanada could not finance construction of a North Slope gas pipeline.

OK – so that is the gist of it – not so positive as the Palin/McCain team wants us to believe. Here is a link to a lengthy review of the problems for further reading:

AGIA & Transcanada. Why This Dog Won’t Hunt by Andrew Halcro / Alaska State House of Representatives / AndrewHalcro.com

And here is some more info of interest:

JUNEAU — A published comment from TransCanada Corp. Chief Executive Hal Kvisle sent a chill through the Capitol halls just days after the Legislature awarded the Canadian company an exclusive license toward a pipeline project.

Some Alaska state lawmakers wondered if a review to rescind the approval should be considered before Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla, and House Speaker John Harris, R-Valdez, sign the bill approving the license. . . .

It was Harris who wondered what Kvisle meant when the Toronto’s Globe and Mail quoted him saying, “Nothing goes ahead until Exxon is happy with it.” . . .

Kvisle responded in a letter later Monday by saying: “It is a common phrase in the energy sector that ‘nothing goes ahead until Exxon is happy.’ My wry observation along those lines was not meant as a negative comment on Exxon Mobil, nor was it meant to imply that Exxon Mobil has any sort of veto on the building of an Alaska gas pipeline.” . . .

TransCanada Vice President Tony Palmer said the article changes nothing about the company understanding it needs to solicit commitments to ship gas in the proposed 1,715 mile line that would run from the North Slope to a pipeline hub in Alberta.

These are called firm transportation commitments and they underpin the financing of any pipeline. Without them, there is no project.

Palmer said the article doesn’t change the company’s long-held position that it plans to work with North Slope producers to strike a deal that would move the gas to U.S. markets. “I’ve been clear on that for many years,” Palmer said. “We need customers. We need credit in order to build the pipeline.”

Source / AP / Yahoo.com

One more thing: the Gasline is called the pipeline to nowhere because the Gasline project only takes the gas from the north slope to Alberta Canada – then we still have to find a way to get it the additional distance (almost as long as the original Gasline) to get the gas into the US in Chicago – so, we are building a pipeline to supply central Canada with gas but still wont be supplying any to us. As my favorite statesman Bugs Bunny would say “What a moroon”.

Do we really want a VP that we feel good about “shooting moose with” as we did with a President we felt good about “drinking a beer with”? When that person will be filling key top government positions without daddy’s black book as Bush had, but instead will be pulling from her high school year book?

That is what we are facing.

Please see Palin’s pipeline exists — but only on paper / Reuters / MSNBC / Sept. 4, 2008

And Palin’s Pipeline Is Years From Being a Reality by Serge F. Kovaleski and Mike McIntire / New York Times / September 10, 2008

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Thomas Cleaver : The Republicans and Socialism for the Rich

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Mr. Burns, the one secretly in charge: ‘Excellent!”

Who says the Republicans don’t believe in socialism?
By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 17, 2008

…Or at least socialism for the rich, when their incompetence threatens to kill them all.

As Harry Truman said: “The Republican Party was, is, and always will be – of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.”

(And I bang my head against the wall at the news that three polls have McCain up by 4 points over Obama nationally after FIVE FUCKING DAYS of every one of his lies being called out by every “independent observer,” and every pundit who was “in the tank” for him realizing what a worthless piece of incompetent shit he is. Mencken was right: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”)

McCain’s primary financial advisor is the guy who CREATED THE MESS – Phil Gramm (livfing proof that Ph.D. really does mean “Piled Higher and Deeper”) – the moron who overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, which would have prevented this if it was still around.

McCain’s the guy who wanted to invest Social Security in this mess, back in 1999!!!!

And he’s ahead in the polls. The mind reels.

/shriek

Government announces $85 billion loan to rescue AIG to stave off further financial turmoil

WASHINGTON — In a bid to save financial markets and economy from further turmoil, the U.S. government agreed Tuesday to provide an $85 billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG. The Federal Reserve said in a statement it determined that a disorderly failure of AIG could hurt the already delicate financial markets and the economy.

It also could “lead to substantially higher borrowing costs, reduced household wealth and materially weaker economic performance,” the Fed said.

“The President supports the agreement announced this evening by the Federal Reserve,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “These steps are taken in the interest of promoting stability in financial markets and limiting damage to the broader economy.”

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the administration was working closely with the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other government regulators to “enhance the stability and orderliness of our financial markets and minimize the disruption to our economy.”

“I support the steps taken by the Federal Reserve tonight to assist AIG in continuing to meet its obligations, mitigate broader disruptions and at the same time protect taxpayers,” Paulson said in a statement.

The Fed said in return for the loan, the government will receive a 79.9 percent equity stake in AIG.

Earlier, Fed chairman Bernanke and Paulson met with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, to brief them on the government’s option.

“At the administration’s request, I met this evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. They expressed the administration’s views on the deepening economic turmoil and shared with us their latest proposals regarding AIG,” Reid told reporters. “The Treasury and the Fed have promised to provide more details in the near future, which I believe must address the broader, underlying structural issues in the financial markets.”

On Tuesday, shares of the insurance company swung violently as rumors of potential deals involving the government or private parties emerged and were dashed. By late Tuesday, its shares had closed down 20 percent — and another 45 percent after hours. Still, no deal emerged.

The problems at AIG stemmed from its insurance of mortgage-backed securities and other risky debt against default. If AIG couldn’t make good on its promise to pay back soured debt, investors feared the consequences would pose a greater threat to the U.S. financial system than this week’s collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers.

The worries were triggered after Moody’s Investor Service and Standard and Poor’s lowered AIG’s credit ratings, forcing AIG to seek more money for collateral against its insurance contracts. Without that money, AIG would have defaulted on its obligations and the buyers of its insurance — such as banks and other financial companies — would have found themselves without protection against losses on the debt they hold.

“It might not just bring down other financial institutions in the U.S. It could bring down overseas financial institutions,” said Timothy Canova, a professor of international economic law at Chapman University School of Law. “If Lehman Brother’s failure could help trigger AIG’s going down, who knows who AIG’s failure could trigger next.”

New York-based AIG operates an insurance and financial services businesses ranging from property, casualty, auto and life insurance to annuity and investment services. Those traditional insurance operations are considered healthy and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners said “they are solvent and have the capability to pay claims.”

Source / AP / Yahoo.com

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Roger Baker : This Ain’t Your Father’s ‘Economic Crisis’

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Great Depression: Sign of the times.

‘This is not something like the Great Depression that can be corrected by a decade of hard times and even war’
By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / September 16, 2008

I think that now that everyone is becoming aware that we are in a severe economic crisis (which became acute in August 2007 but has been papered over until now), that we should be realistic about its causes and prognosis for recovery.

This is not something like the Great Depression that can be corrected by a decade of hard times and even war and then things gradually recover on an endless upward spiral with ever more consumer goodies. This crisis (maybe “The Crash of 2008”) is about bumping up against the natural limits of the global economy to expand any more on a stressed-out planet.

Capitalist economies demand exponential growth to pay interest on investments to survive. The best visionaries have known since King Hubbert and the energy crisis of the 1970s that we would peak in world oil production some time around the year 2000, and that cheap fossil fuel energy is the limiting factor for the growth of modern industrial economies.

Therefore our modern industrial economies can’t recover from this economic crisis without a deep restructuring of capitalism that somehow breaks its deep dependence on exponential growth.

If a lack of cheap oil for transportation were not the limiting factor, it would then soon be fresh water or greenhouse gases, or arable cropland or some combination of all of these.

I am not a leading thinker on this stuff, but I have a taste of the truth and want to spread the word to those capable of listening and checking out the facts.

Read all of James Howard Kunstler’s stuff like the Long Emergency and his blog.

Read all Richard Heinberg’s stuff including The Party’s Over and his latest: Peak Everything. His blog is called Museletter.

Check out Julian Darley’s Post Carbon Institute . It’s trying to lay the basis for a transition to a community based post industrial economy.

The titans of Wall Street still don’t understand what has hit them and that conventional recovery through a materialist expanding economy is now impossible. Economic recovery will have to take the form of limiting population and living modestly and communally, and in sustainable harmony with nature, guided by the best modern scientific knowledge.

Click on “comments” to see Roger’s additional thoughts on the subject

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Reefer Madness Lives : Pot Arrests at All-Time High

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Cannabis arrests now comprise nearly 47.5 percent of all drug arrests in the United States, 89% of them for mere possession.
By Paul Armentano / September 16, 2008

If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He’s addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he’ll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.

Speaking earlier this month on C-Span, the reigning Czar stretched his usual deceit to outrageous new heights. Responding to a question from the Marijuana Policy Project’s Dan Bernath, Walters flatly denied the charge that over 800,000 Americans are arrested annually for violating pot laws.

“We didn’t arrest 800,000 marijuana users,” Walters proclaimed. “That’s [a] lie.”

If only it were.

According to data released yesterday in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, police in 2007 arrested over 872,000 US citizens – that’s nearly one out of every two Americans busted for illicit drugs — for weed. (The raw data is available from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation here and here.) That figure is a five percent increase over the total number of Americans busted in 2006. It’s more than three times the number of citizens charged with pot violations sixteen years ago.

Of those arrested in 2007, 89 percent – some 775,000 Americans — were charged with simple pot possession, not trafficking, cultivation, or sale. (By comparison, 27 percent of those arrested for heroin and cocaine offenses were charged with sales.) Three out of four were under age 30; one in four were 18-years-old or younger.

The FBI’s tally is the highest marijuana arrest total ever-reported in law enforcement history. If this pace continues, annual arrests for pot will surpass one million per year by 2010.

But to hear America’s top drug cop tell it few, if any, citizens are ever arrested for pot possession, and absolutely no one goes to jail for breaking marijuana laws.

“The fact is today, people don’t go to jail for the possession of marijuana,” Walters alleged on C-Span. “Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a unicorn. It doesn’t exist.”

Not true says the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which reported last year in black and white — perhaps the Drug Czar is reading impaired – that 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug abuse violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that, at a minimum, there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county or local jails for pot-related offenses, nor did it take into account the number of inmates serving time for violating the terms of their marijuana-related probation, such as those who submitted a ‘dirty’ urine to their parole officer.)

No matter how one slices it, that’s a lot of unicorns.

It also begs the question: Why does the Drug Czar feel the need to go to such absurd lengths to hide this overt outgrowth of American drug policy? After all, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy typically issue chest-thumping press releases when they achieve record busts for offenses involving cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine? Why then do they shy away from making similar proclamations for pot?

Perhaps it’s because, deep down, even the Drug Czar knows that the use of cannabis does not pose anywhere near the health and safety threat as does the use of other intoxicants, including alcohol, and that most Americans – rightly – would be outraged to learn that our nation’s so-called war on drugs is really just an assault on young adults caught with small bags of weed.

[Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and The NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.]

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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

David Talbot :
Baptist Minister Howard Bess of Alaska Says Sarah Palin Scares Him

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer
Photo of Pastor Howard Bess

Howard Bess, former pastor of Church of the Covenant in Palmer, Alaska. Photo by Evan R. Steinihauser / Anchorage Daily News.

Reverend Howard Bess, who wrote a book Palin wanted banned and who fought her on abortion and gay rights, says the country should fear her election

By David Talbot | September 16, 2008

The Wasilla Assembly of God, the evangelical church where Sarah Palin came of age, was still charged with excitement on Sunday over Palin’s sudden ascendance. Pastor Ed Kalnins warned his congregation not to talk with any journalists who might have been lurking in the pews — and directly warned this reporter not to interview any of his flock. But Kalnins and other speakers at the service reveled in Palin’s rise to global stardom.

It confirmed, they said, that God was making use of Wasilla. “She will take our message to the world!” rejoiced an Assembly of God youth ministry leader, as the church band rocked the high-vaulted wooden building with its electric gospel.

That is what scares the Rev. Howard Bess. A retired American Baptist minister who pastors a small congregation in nearby Palmer, Wasilla’s twin town in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley, Bess has been tangling with Palin and her fellow evangelical activists ever since she was a Wasilla City Council member in the 1990s. Recently, Bess again found himself in the spotlight with Palin, when it was reported that his 1995 book, “Pastor, I Am Gay,” was among those Palin tried to have removed from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor.

“She scares me,” said Bess. “She’s Jerry Falwell with a pretty face.

“At this point, people in this country don’t grasp what this person is all about. The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology.”

Bess — a fit-looking, 80-year-old man in a gray University of Illinois sweatshirt and blue jeans – spoke with me over coffee at the Vagabond Blues, a cafe in Palmer with a stunning view of the nearby snow-capped Chugach Mountains. The retired minister moved to the Mat-Su Valley with his wife, Darlene, in 1987, after his outspoken defense of gay rights at Baptist churches in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area and Anchorage landed him in trouble with church officials. In the Mat-Su Valley, Bess plunged into community activism, helping launch an assortment of projects, from an arts council to a shelter for the mentally disabled.

Inevitably, his work brought him into conflict with Palin and other highly politicized Christian fundamentalists in the valley. “Things got very intense around here in the ’90s — the culture war was very hot here,” Bess said. “The evangelicals were trying to take over the valley. They took over the school board, the community hospital board, even the local electric utility. And Sarah Palin was in the direct center of all these culture battles, along with the churches she belonged to.”

Bess’ first run-in with Palin’s religious forces came when he decided to write his book, “Pastor, I Am Gay.” The book was the result of a theological journey that began in the 1970s when Bess was asked for guidance by a closeted homosexual in his Santa Barbara congregation. After deep reflection on the subject, Bess came to the conclusion that “gay people were not sick, nor they were special sinners.”

In his book, Bess suggests that gays have a divine mission. “Look back at the life of our Lord Jesus. He was misunderstood, deserted, unjustly accused, and cruelly killed. Yet we all confess that it was the will of God, for by his wounds we are healed … Could it be that the homosexual, obedient to the will of God, might be the church’s modern day healer-messiah?”

When it was published in 1995, Bess’ book caused an immediate storm in the Mat-Su Valley, an evangelical stronghold dotted with storefront churches. Conservative ministers targeted the book, and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it — Shalom Christian Books and Gifts – soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess’ church.

And after she became mayor of Wasilla, according to Bess, Sarah Palin tried to get rid of his book from the local library. Palin now denies that she wanted to censor library books, but Bess insists that his book was on a “hit list” targeted by Palin. “I’m as certain of that as I am that I’m sitting here. This is a small town, we all know each other. People in city government have confirmed to me what Sarah was trying to do.”

Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.

At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer’s Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”

Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin — a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude — standing one step away from the Oval Office. “It’s truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level,” Bess said. “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it. Talking with the enemy is not part of their plan. That puts someone like Obama on the side of evil.

“Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That’s trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It’s her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she’s ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.

“Alaskans liked that certitude when she was dealing with corrupt politicians and the oil industry — and there is something admirable about it. But when you’re dealing with a complex and dangerous world as commander in chief, that’s a different story.”

Bess said that he and fellow valley residents have long been charmed by the Sarah Palin who is now dazzling the American public. Despite their strong political differences, “she always has a warm greeting for me when we bump into each other. She’s the most charming person you’ll ever know.”

“But,” Bess adds, “this person’s election would be a disaster for the country and the world.”

Source / salon.com

Thanks to Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Houston : Media Restricted From Covering Hurricane Ike’s Devastation

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Devastation caused by hurricane Ike: media coverage was restricted. Photo from Getty Images.

Television reporter Wayne Dolcefino presses Gov. Rick Perry: ‘That is unprecedented and quite honestly not appropriate’
By Amanda / September 15, 2008

Yesterday in a local report on KTRK-TV in Houston, reporter Wayne Dolcefino revealed that media have been blocked from covering Hurricane Ike’s devastation. In a press conference, Dolcefino pressed Gov. Rick Perry on why media aren’t even allowed to fly over parts of Galveston Island, noting that media access was far better in Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Perry tried to brush off Dolcefino’s concerns, but eventually passed blame to federal officials:

DOLCEFINO: because it’s our job to inform people. Why can’t we go to Bolivar and West End?

PERRY: I think when the local officials decide it was appropriate, whether it’s the media or first responders or what have you. The fact of the matter, that is actually a local decision, Wayne, that is made by the local county judge and by the mayor of those —

DOLCEFINO: They don’t control that area.

PERRY: Last time, the state of Texas doesn’t even.

DOLCEFINO: So it’s the federal government?

PERRY: I don’t know.

Watch it:

Officials Restricting Hurricane Coverage

Transcript:

REPORTER: Wayne, we know you are covering that press conference that took place in Galveston with Gov. Rick Perry. Could you give us some perspective as to what was going on in that press conference?

DOLCEFINO: Actually, we covered the press conference in Galveston. I was in Ellington field when the Governor stopped there.

Ispecifically drove down from Houston after coming back from Galveston earlier this morning to sort of ask the Governor the question and put him on the spot. We’ve been trying ever since the storm to get somebody to take some responsibility for who is in charge, who has decided that the public does not have the right to see the devastation essentially in our hometown. The folks in Bolivar worried about friends and family and their businesses have a right to see it. […]

[PRESS CONFERENCE]

DOLCEFINO: The lack of media access and information from Bolivar and the West End is unprecedented. We’ve covered many storms. We were in Mississippi and Louisiana the very next day. What is the situation in bolivar how many fatalities are there and why has the media — hasn’t been allowed because it’s our job, be in to show what people is going on with their homes?

GOV. RICK PERRY: Well, Wayne, I don’t know where you’ve been. We just got back from Galveston and there was huge room of media there. Looked to me like –

DOLCEFINO: I’ve been down there three days. I’m talking about the Bolivar Peninsula and West End, where we’ve been denied access and denied permission to be in helicopters. That is unprecedented and quite honestly not appropriate because it’s our job to inform people. Why can’t we go to Bolivar and West End?

PERRY: I think when the local officials decide it was appropriate, whether it’s the media or first responders or what have you. The fact of the matter, that is actually a local decision, Wayne, that is made by the local county judge and by the mayor of those —

DOLCEFINO: They don’t control that area.

PERRY: Last time, the state of Texas doesn’t even.

DOLCEFINO: So it’s the federal government?

PERRY: I don’t know. You are delving into issues — I don’t control federal airspace.

Source / ThinkProgress

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Anchorage : Massive Protest Greets Sarah Palin

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Demonstrators in Alaska say ‘No!’ to Sarah Palin.

Alaska Women Reject Palin: ‘ Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage’
By AKMuckraker / September 14, 2008

See Video below.

ANCHORAGE — I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.

After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.

The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.

So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.

Source / Mudflats

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Landmark Ruling : Cell Phone Location Protected by Fourth Amendment

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Boston artist Nick Rodrigues’ Personal Cell Phone Booth won’t protect him from triangulation or global positioning.

Chalk up one small victory for privacy
By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / September 15, 2008

A powerful and easily-implemented feature of cell phones is the capability to locate the cell phone at any time when it is switched on by cell tower triangulation or the Global Positioning System (GPS). This feature is indicated by the “target” icon on the cell phone screen. True to marketing strategy this capability is promoted as a safety feature for use in 911 calls and more recently, for a few dollars more, parents may use it to track their kids whereabouts at any given time. It doesn’t require much imagination to see the desirability of unfettered access to such information on the part of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

A Federal Court decision has set the bar a little higher for access to that personal information by finding that probable cause and a duly constituted warrant are required for that access. Before Fourth Amendment enthusiasts become too elated, we might pause to realize this is only one scrimmage in a continuing struggle between defending our right to be let alone and those whose think that it’s their job it is to know everything about everybody.

Anyway, it’s good to win one now and then.

New Court Decision Affirms that 4th Amendment Protects Location Information
September 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO – In an unprecedented victory for cell phone privacy, a federal court has affirmed that cell phone location information stored by a mobile phone provider is protected by the Fourth Amendment and that the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing such records.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had asked the federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania to overturn a magistrate judge’s decision requiring the government to obtain a warrant for stored location data, arguing that the government could obtain such information without probable cause. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), at the invitation of the court, filed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the government’s appeal and arguing that the magistrate was correct to require a warrant. Wednesday, the court agreed with EFF and issued an order affirming the magistrate’s decision.

EFF has successfully argued before other courts that the government needs a warrant before it can track a cell phone’s location in real-time. However, this is the first known case where a court has found that the government must also obtain a warrant when obtaining stored records about a cell phone’s location from the mobile phone provider.

“Cell phone providers store an increasing amount of sensitive data about where you are and when, based on which cell towers your phone uses when making a call. Until now, the government has routinely seized these records without search warrants,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “This landmark ruling is hopefully only the first of many. Just as magistrates across the country have begun denying government requests to track cell phones in real-time without warrants, based on arguments first made by EFF, so too do we hope this decision will spark new scrutiny of the government’s unconstitutional seizure of stored cell phone location records.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU Foundation of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) joined EFF’s brief.

Source / Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Boeing’s Streak of Greediness and Arrogance

Posted on September 15, 2008 by RagBlog


Ask Not What Your Company Can Do For You … The Boeing Strike
By David Macaray / September 15, 2008

There’s an axiom in labor relations: When business is suffering, management will approach the workers and ask them to make the necessary sacrifices.

When the market tightens up, or a recession hits, or when the chickens of woefully short-sighted management decisions come home to roost, the company will approach the union and plead with them to forego wage increases, renegotiate their pension plan, pay more for health insurance coverage, and, basically, do “more with less” all the way down the line. Having no real choice in the matter, the union reluctantly agrees.

A corollary to that axiom: When business is once again flourishing, management will forget that any sacrifices have been made.

When things are rosy—when the company is wallowing in money and six-figure executive bonuses are being passed out like donuts—and the union approaches the company, reminds them of the sacrifices (the give-backs, the trade-offs, the extra burdens), and asks for a larger, more proportional slice of the pie, management will refuse.

They will close ranks. They will recite phrases like “maintaining a competitive edge” and “being responsible to the stockholders.” They will pretend they never heard of you. Call it ingratitude, call it playing hardball, call it an example of capitalism in its purest form; but whatever you call it, it’s a corollary to an axiom in labor relations.

At one minute after midnight on September 5, 27,000 machinists working at Boeing Corporation plants in Oregon, Washington and Kansas, and represented by the IAM (International Association of Machinists), went on strike. This followed many weeks of acrimonious negotiations between the two sides, and was IAM’s second strike against the mammoth airplane manufacturer in three years. The last one occurred in 2005 and lasted 28 days.

Even with Boeing virtually awash in extra money—with employee productivity and company profits at record highs, and a huge backlog of lucrative orders for its state-of-the-art Dreamliner 787 jet airplane pointing to nothing if not a bright future—the company, nonetheless, attempted to low-ball the union.

Besides coming in cheap, Boeing arrogantly attempted to circumvent the traditional bargaining process by e-mailing a copy of their final offer directly to every union member affected, hoping that the rank-and-file would, in the privacy of their own computer screens, be persuaded to accept the very contract their leadership had urged them to reject.

But Boeing’s attempt to outflank the union negotiators backfired. The membership called the company’s bluff. By a vote of 87%, they rejected what Boeing had called its “last, best and final” offer, and by a mandate of 80%, voted to strike. Under IAM bylaws, a two-thirds majority is required for a strike.

A couple of things about the walkout are worth noting. First, the IAM membership showed itself to be more militant, aroused and hip to what was really happening than the IAM bargaining team was, a circumstance exceedingly rare in union circles. Usually, it’s the other way around—usually it’s the bargaining team that has to whip a twitchy membership into shape, get them in a rebellious enough mood to hit the bricks.

In this case, however, IAM members were already champing at the bit. In fact, after their overwhelming rejection of the company offer, the membership was furious, outraged, that the bargaining team didn’t immediately call a strike. Instead, in a conciliatory, last ditch effort to avoid a shutdown, the union negotiators gave the company 48 hours to improve their “final” offer, a good faith gesture that ultimately failed.

Basically, there are two types of strike votes. There’s the largely “symbolic” kind, taken well in advance of the company’s final offer, where the union bargaining team goes to the membership and asks them to give the negotiators strike authorization, which they use more or less as leverage.

And then there’s the “grown-up” kind—the scary kind, the kind the IAM conducted—where the membership’s rejection of the final offer is understood to be a prelude to actually shutting down the operation.

The second thing worth noting is that in 2005, when Boeing took its last strike, BusinessWeek magazine (not exactly a repository of pro-union sentiment) reported that Wall Street had roundly criticized the company’s decision to stonewall. The magazine suggested that Boeing had been too stubborn and greedy to see the wisdom in settling the contract for a few dollars more than they intended to pay, rather than taking what turned out to be a money-losing, debilitating strike.

Three years later, that same streak of greediness and arrogance seems to be alive and well. Despite the fact that Boeing’s business is flourishing and its future appears unambiguously bright, the company took a defiant stand, drawing a line in the sand and practically daring the workers to cross it.

And what was the outcome of that defiant posture? Not only are 27,000 workers now on strike, and the two sides engaged in a lively pissing match, but, according to industry insiders, as orders for Boeing’s jetliners continue to pile up and production remains at a standstill, the company is losing more than $100 million a day—a staggering loss, and one that didn’t need to happen.

[David Macaray, a playwright and writer in Los Angeles, was a former labor union rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net.]

Source / CounterPunch

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

It Is Remarkable How Prescient Eisenhower’s Concerns Were

Posted on September 15, 2008 by RagBlog


Sanders Demands Answers on War Profiteering, Corruption
By Bob Geiger / September 15, 2008

Invoking Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s warning against the rise of the “military industrial complex,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave a good speech on the Senate floor late last week in which he demanded further Congressional oversight of military contractors, while considering the latest Defense Authorization bill.

“The legislation we are dealing with today authorizes more than $500 billion, and even in Washington that is a heck of a lot of money,” said Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats. “That expenditure comes at a time when we have massive amounts of unmet needs in our country, when there is a crumbling infrastructure, a need to invest in sustainable energy, a need to address education, and many other needs.”

“Our job as Members of Congress is to make sure we do our best to see that not one nickel — not one nickel — is spent in waste or in fraud or unwisely. But just as we should do that with the Department of Agriculture or with Human Services, we should also do it with the Defense Department; in fact, even more so with the Defense Department, because their budget is so huge. It appears that not a week goes by when one doesn’t open a newspaper or see a television program which deals with another example of horrendous waste, fraud, or abuse which takes place within the Department of Defense.”

The Vermont Senator, who is often a more staunch defender of Democratic-party ideals than the majority of Senate Democrats, then went on to give examples of how the Bush administration has allowed billions of dollars to be wasted — in a wasted, Iraq war — while so many pressing needs go unmet at home.

Here’s Sanders:

“In March of this year, we learned that a 22-year-old Defense contractor peddled as much as $300 million in old ammunition, much of it defective, to the Afghan Army and to their police forces. That is right. AEY, a fly-by-night company, landed the huge contract, despite its record of botched dealings with the State Department and Defense Department. In fact, the State Department had placed this company on a watch list of companies suspected of illegal arms transactions.

“The Pentagon inspector general revealed that $321 million was paid out to cover salaries of 1,000 anonymous employees in the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. That amounts to $320,000 per employee–not bad in Iraq where people do very well if they make $50 or $60 a week, but we are not even sure that the employees saw any of this money.

“We also learned not terribly long ago that the Army ousted the contracting officer overseeing Kellogg, Brown & Root’s huge Iraq support contract when this distinguished public servant refused to approve paying the company more than $1 billion in questionable charges. In other words, he did his job. He took a hard look at where this money was going. There were red flags popping up all over the place. He said: Wait a minute. We are not going to pay this money. His reward was not a commendation but his firing.

“The Air Force paid a private U.S. contractor $32 million to construct a Ramadi, Iraq airbase. That is OK, except the only problem is the contractor cashed a check and the facility was never built–$32 million for a project never undertaken.

“Another contractor was paid $142 million to construct Iraqi prisons, fire stations, and police facilities that were either never started or never completed–$142 million.”

Sanders also talked about the Truman Committee that then-Senator Harry Truman created in the 1940s to root out similar fraud among defense contractors and said the Pentagon’s leaders are not doing enough to see that Americans get their money’s worth for national defense.

“Was Harry Truman unpatriotic for demanding increased congressional oversight on the War Department and defense contractors at a moment of national crisis during World War II?” asked Sanders. “The answer is, of course, no, he was not.”

And the Vermont Senator brought up Eisenhower’s famous words in which the Republican president seemed to see the Bush-Cheney reign coming from almost 50 years away.

“A few days before he left office in 1961, President Eisenhower gave one of the most prophetic speeches ever given in the White House. Here is what Eisenhower — a Republican, I should add — what Eisenhower said: ‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.'”

Concluded Sanders: “Fast forward 48 years to the last months of George W. Bush’s Presidency. It is remarkable how prescient Eisenhower’s concerns were.”

Source / Bob Geiger

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment