Some Web Firms Say They Track Behavior Without Explicit Consent

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information’
By Ellen Nakashima / August 12, 2008

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites.

The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law.

“Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information . . . and then selling it as a commodity to other providers,” said committee member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who created the Privacy Caucus 12 years ago. “Our responsibility is to make sure that we create a law that, regardless of the technology, includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information.”

Markey said he and his colleagues plan to introduce legislation next year, a sort of online-privacy Bill of Rights, that would require that consumers must opt in to the tracking of their online behavior and the collection and sharing of their personal data.

But some committee leaders cautioned that such legislation could damage the economy by preventing small companies from reaching customers. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said self-regulation that focuses on transparency and choice might be the best approach.

Google, in its letter to committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), Markey, Stearns and Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.), stressed that it did not engage in potentially the most invasive of technologies — deep-packet inspection, which companies such as NebuAd have tested with some broadband providers. But Google did note that it had begun to use across its network the “DoubleClick ad-serving cookie,” a computer code that allows the tracking of Web surfing.

Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, stated in the letter that users could opt out of a single cookie for both DoubleClick and the Google content network. He also said that Google was not yet focusing on “behavioral” advertising, which depends on Web site tracking.

But on its official blog last week, Google touted how its recent $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick provides advertisers “insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign,” as well as “how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad.”

“Google is slowly embracing a full-blown behavioral targeting over its vast network of services and sites,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He said that Google, through its vast data collection and sophisticated data analysis tools, “knows more about consumers than practically anyone.”

Microsoft and Yahoo have disclosed that they engage in some form of behavioral targeting. Yahoo has said it will allow users to turn off targeted advertising on its Web sites; Microsoft has yet to respond to the committee.

More than a dozen of the 33 companies queried said they do not conduct targeted advertising based on consumers’ Internet activities. But, Chester said, a number of them engage in sophisticated interactive marketing. Advertisers on Comcast.net’s site, for instance, are able to target advertising based on “over 3 billion page views” from “15 million unique users.”

Source / Washington Post

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Rush to Arctic As Warming Opens Oil Deposits

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

US Coast Guard Cutter Healy will embark on Arctic Voyage this week to determine the extent of the continental shelf in Alaska and to map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration. Photo by Prentice Danner / AP.

‘It’s a scramble for the spoils of global warming’
By Zachary Colie / August 12, 2008

It’s a scramble for the spoils of global warming as the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is opening access to previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas, setting off a race by northern nations – including the United States, Canada and Russia – to claim them.

The pursuit of those resources will be underscored this week as the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy sails north from Barrow, Alaska, on Thursday to map the sea floor of the Chukchi Cap, an area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea. The maps could bolster U.S. claims to the area as part of its extended outer continental shelf.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed last month what the oil industry had long suspected when the agency released an estimate that the area north of the Arctic Circle may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or roughly 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

The dash to stake out territory across the Arctic has accelerated since Russia sent one of its submarines last August to plant the country’s flag on the sea floor beneath the North Pole, provoking an outcry by other nations that viewed it as an unauthorized land grab.

Earlier this month, Canadian officials at a geology conference in Norway detailed their territorial claims to the Lomonosov Ridge, an underseas mountain range that runs beneath the North Pole. Canada argues that the ridge is part of the North American continent, not part of Siberia, as Russia has asserted.

Denmark backs Canada

The Danish government joined in backing Canada’s argument, even though those two nations have also clashed over claims in the Arctic. Why? Because Denmark, which controls Greenland, believes Canada’s assertion could boost its own contention that part of the energy-rich ridge should be Danish territory.

These northern powers are all rushing to complete assessments of how far their underseas territory may extend. Under international law, countries control all natural resources within the “exclusive economic zone,” which extends 200 nautical miles offshore. But if a country’s continental shelf extends far into the ocean, the nation can claim underseas land up to 350 miles offshore under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The United States has signed the Law of the Sea Treaty, but the Senate has not ratified it. Margaret Hayes, who directs the State Department’s Office of Oceanic Affairs, said on a conference call Monday that while the United States moves toward ratifying the treaty, it must gather all the scientific data it will need to justify its territorial claims.

During the Healy’s three-week voyage, scientists from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and University of New Hampshire will use a device called an echo sounder to create a three-dimensional map of the sea floor. The Healy will make a second voyage, from Sept. 6 to Oct. 1, carving a path through the ice, while a Canadian ship, the Louis S. St. Laurent, follows, gathering seismic data about the thickness of the sediments along the sea floor.

While it’s a scientific mission, USGS scientist Deborah Hutchison acknowledged that oil companies will be eager to see the results, which could yield major clues about the size and location of oil and gas deposits.

“The cruises are not intended to look for energy resources. … That is not a primary or even a secondary objective,” Hutchison said. “However, it’s inevitable because there are so few data in this area (of the Arctic), there will be great interest in using this data” to assess the potential for drilling.

Alaska favors drilling

Alaskan officials, who rely on oil revenue and face declining oil fields along the North Slope, see more Arctic drilling as a way to keep the state’s oil economy afloat. While the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have been off-limits to drilling under a federal ban for nearly three decades, the Interior Department is already leasing areas of the Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea.

Environmentalists warn of the perils of oil exploration in the region. Critics say that conditions in the Arctic – shortage of natural light in winter, extreme cold, moving ice floes and high winds – make it extremely difficult to respond to an oil spill.

“Ultimately what is going to be needed is a more comprehensive ecological study of that region and some indication as to whether or not any technology that we have today is likely to be able to clean up spilled oil in that set of conditions,” said Richard Charter, a coastal advocate for Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

The voyage of the Healy this week is being made possible by the swift melting of the sea ice. Last year, Arctic sea ice retreated at a record-setting pace.

Northwest Passage open

The Inupiat residents of Barrow were stunned last fall when a cruise ship and 400 Germans showed up in their town. They had arrived from Europe via the Northwest Passage over Canada, which for the first time in recorded history was ice-free.

Larry Mayer, an oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire who helped lead a similar Arctic trip last summer, said he was shocked at how easily the team could navigate through the region. He noted the irony that the rapid melting “was bad for the Arctic, but very, very good for mapping.”

© 2008 The San Francisco Chronicle

Source / SF Gate

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Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

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Do No Harm : The Complicity of Psychologists in Cheney-Bush Torture Program

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Psychologist protesting APA complicity in torture in 2007.

APA pressured to take a stand…

‘Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody’
by Meteor Blades / August 12, 2008

Unlike the people in Stalin’s Soviet Union, no U.S. official risked disappearing into the prison for dissent. Senior State Department and Defense Department official, field commanders, intelligence and FBI officers, and frontline soldiers dissented. They were usually ignored. A few were threatened with administrative sanctions; a few were reassigned; a few requested reassignment. The possibility of dissent makes the silence and complicity of senior and frontline medical personnel in the abuse and neglect of prisoners that much more inexplicable and inexcusable.

Dr. Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

Despite Dr. Miles’s book, despite Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, despite reports such as the Physicians for Human Rights’ Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact, Americans still don’t have anywhere near a full picture of what happened after the Cheney-Bush administration decided to spit on the Geneva Conventions, redefine and fine-tune torture and treat human beings like the inferior creatures it thought them to be.

What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that medical personnel and psychologists violated the most basic ethics of their professions – Do No Harm – by participating in and helping to design “enhanced” interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory and sleep deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part, psychologists “reverse-engineered” the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program – designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture – as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives.

Let me repeat that. Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors’ efforts to break them down was “reverse-engineered” as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and “black sites” run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Talk about becoming the enemy.

We also know that, even after the supposed banning of some measures that had been previously approved by the Secretary of Defense, these techniques continued at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and probably other prisons, even while the Inspector General was putting a seal of approval on the whole affair.

As Josh White wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program — dubbed the “frequent flyer” program in official documents — on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.

The Defense Department claims the program stopped in 2004. A spokesperson told White that all prisoners are treated humanely.

Cough, cough.

“Frequent flyers.” Think about the kind of mentality that not only designs torture methods but turns them into a joke.

Twenty-four-year-old Mohammed Jawad, who will soon go on trial by military tribunal for trying to kill U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a grenade, has sought to have all the charges against him dropped because of abuse he suffered, including that caused by frequent moves.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, Jawad’s lawyer, said the newly revealed records demonstrate that:

“…no one actually knows the full scope of the abuses at Guantanamo” and that “all of these allegedly comprehensive investigations were whitewashes.”

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Frakt said. “This program was approved at the highest levels. … It suggests that people had simply lost their ability to distinguish right from wrong.”

With all due respect to the major, that puts the best face on it. Because among those engaged in vetting, monitoring and carrying out this program approved at the highest levels were some of the very people we count on to help us distinguish right from wrong. In some cases, they evaluated the status of a prisoner and informed interrogators that he was good for another round or two of “questioning.”

This must stop, wrote psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz in a Sunday Boston Globe Op-Ed, Ending the psychological mind games on detainees:

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques – which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer … reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will and become totally dependent upon their captors.

What angers Soldz and hundreds of other professional psychologists and psychoanalysts is that their organization, the American Psychological Association, has taken an official position that the presence of psychologists makes detainees safer at interrogations. That view, Soldz declares every chance he gets, is ludicrous. In fact, the policy enables the torturers.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn writes that, according to Mayer’s book:

…Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of “learned helplessness.”

Mr. Seligman’s widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives.

Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer’s book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman’s work.)

Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.

Soldz, and four other authors addressed the Seligman matter at some length in the July 23 issue of Dissident Voice:

This history, along with the current, well-documented authorizations for detainee abuse, should have provided sufficient warning to APA leaders and to individual psychologists about the moral risks in aiding the national security apparatus, especially under the present U.S. administration. But the APA has not taken the lead in helping psychologists confront these dangerous ethical situations. To the contrary, the APA has been insensitive to the use of psychological techniques in torture and to the role of psychologists in aiding that torture. This insensitivity itself has shocked many psychologists here and abroad.

So, for the second year in a row, the issue of torture and illegal detention will be a hot one at the APA’s annual convention, which begins Thursday in Boston. Soldz will be on hand for a protest. In addition to rejecting the APA’s position on torture and interrogations, the protesters will be backing the candidacy of Dr. Steven Reisner for the presidency of the organization as well as the “Aye” vote on a referendum that would reinforce the first principle of the APA ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

Reisner, a psychoanalyst, is a senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, an adjunct professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and a consultant to the United Nations on stress and trauma. He is a leader of Psychologists for an Ethical Psychology, and, with Soldz and others, a leading critic of the APA’s position. In April, the mail-in nominating procedure for the APA presidency gave Reisner the most votes (more than 30%) of any of the five candidates who will compete with each other for the post in October,

The mail-in referendum has tough opposition. It states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

You can read the entire resolution with all its whereases, pro and con statements and pro and con rebuttals here.

For the past few years, the APA bureaucracy and a good piece of the membership has played a game of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand regarding the role of psychologists and psychoanalysts in the kinds of interrogations brought to us by Donald Rumsfeld and other outlaws in the current administration.

There’s just one problem with the APA’s hemming and hawing approach: Torture is not a nuanced issue.

Source / Daily Kos

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ROCK ‘N ROLL : The Sixties Series from American Beat

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Sugar Sugar’: Bubblegum Gold and more…
By Margaret Moser / August 11, 2008

This American Beat series from last year languished under a stack of poorly sorted CDs until my recent excavation. The label’s sense of whimsy and willingness to produce the music pretty much as you got it back then wins my admiration. The Sixties Series divides its music among six genres that distinguished the era, and those distinctions are sometimes muddied in these collections, but it doesn’t hamper the sheer pleasure.

Bubblegum Gold, for example, chews up and spits out certified teenybopper treacle like the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” and Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” with legitimate soul numbers like Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” and the vocal pyrotechnics of Lou Christie’s “Lightning Strikes.” The Five Americans’ “Western Union” saves the day.

British Invasion Revisited does better by its title, including Merseybeat boys like Gerry & the Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross the Mersey.” Real gems glitter in this set: The Hollies “Bus Stop” and the Swinging Blue Jeans’ “Hippy Hippy Shake,” but its beauty is reminding us that three minutes or less is the perfect length for a song.

Make Love Not War: 60s Songs of Peace pushes the usual Top 40 offering with 45 versions of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” the Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” and Tommy James & the Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover.” Not exactly “Give Peace a Chance” territory though the Youngbloods’ “Get Together” and Country Joe & the Fish’s radio-clean “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die” flash the V-sign amiably enough.

Psychedelic Side of Pop is another specific-sounding collection that doesn’t quite deliver on the idea with ho-hum pop like the Lemon Pipers’ “Green Tambourine” and un-psychedelic but still enjoyable numbers like Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” and the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard.” The song selections are more than enjoyable, with requisite trippy “Itchykoo Park” from the Small Faces and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”

Sixties Harmony gathers a few of the songs that used to make me turn the radio off (notably Texan Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”), repeats at least one from another volume (the Youngbloods’ “Get Together”), and throws in other delightfully singable tunes like the 5th Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and the Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball.” “Mercy Mercy Mercy” by the Buckinghams ups it a notch.

Frat House Hits whacks it out of the ballpark with grand-slam dancefloor favorites like the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels’ “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” and Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances.” It’s a no-brainer concept but they got it mostly right, especially by using hits of songs by alternate artists, such as offering Joey Dee & the Starlighters’ “Shout” over the more famous Isley Brothers version.

These CDs are also short in play length. Think of them like a time-travel iPod.

Source / Austin Chronicle

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Larry Piltz : The NeoContry Fair

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

‘George W. Bush and the Iraq’ by Werner Horvath
The NeoContry Fair

Come on up now everybody to The NeoContry Fair
drag your spouse out of your cave and all your terror-free lairs
be sure to bring your bulletproof armor-piercing underwear
and your baby’s automatic weaponized high chair
tell good old Sarge to wear his digitalized prosthetic hair
cause no one has a thing to hide at The NeoContry Fair

see the wax drunken President dance naked on a bar
with a relic of his younger days his hash pipe filled with tar
then see the brain of George Bush inside a peanut butter jar
see Dick Cheney’s heart still kept alive inside a robot duck
watch it waddle round the tent and still not give a good fuck
see Don Rumsfeld’s actual skeleton and one of a vampire bat
and the only difference is that Rummy’s fangs are worn flat

there’s William Kristol’s shrunken head and Karl Rove’s vestigial tail
have a piece of Richard Perle sent to you via U.S. mail
buy a single lock of Condeleeza’s petrified hair
when you see it you’ll be shocked but really try hard not to stare
cause it’s inside a locket made of an Iraqi family’s flesh
and when it’s opened it plays Toby Keith performed by John Tesch

come see Dougie Feith’s real cranium the smallest known to man
see the depleted uranium here hold it in your hand
see film of Arab wedding parties actually going up in smoke
watch the White House press corps laughing at it all like it’s a joke
terrorize a country like it’s your own homeboy X-Box game
highest score gets reelected without any real blame

it’s the greatest freaking show the modern world has ever seen
since the German Nazis acted like they were all squeaky clean
watch the NeoCons all squirming even while they all still preen
watch the talking heads pandering to not say what they mean
enter laughing leave crying with your sides practically split
forget about all of your troubles but please not to give a shit
cause the NeoCons were the 21st century’s first real plague
and if we’re fortunate we’ll get to warn them not to break a leg
when their next tour stop brings their act to a gig at The Hague

come on out now one and all to The NeoContry Fair
come on out and sit by me Madame LaFarge will be there
as will the ghosts of countless innocents Iraqis and GIs
when history has its way and shrinks the NeoCons to neo-size
at The NeoContry Fair when justice vindicates the wise
at The NeoContry Fair when justice opens all our eyes
at The NeoContry Fair

Larry Piltz
August 12, 2008
Indian Cove / Austin, Texas

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Fox News Suffers Another Debate Snub; Bloggers Take a Bow

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Fox News has been busy airing doctored, cartoonish images of New York Times journalists, dubbing Obama hand gestures as “terrorist fist jabs”…’
by Eric Boehlert / August 12, 2008

Coveted assignments for presidential debate moderators were handed out last week, and guess who was left off the list … again.

After suffering the bitter, and unprecedented, blow during the Democratic primary season of having candidates refuse — twice — to appear in Fox News-sponsored forums when bloggers raised hell about the news organization’s lack of legitimacy, Rupert Murdoch’s news channel was again left off the list of news anchors tapped to moderate the must-see TV events in the fall.

Instead, the questions during the three presidential forums and one vice presidential debate will be posed by PBS’ Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill, as well as NBC’s Tom Brokaw and CBS’ Bob Schieffer.

Unlike the primaries, Fox News this time won’t be locked out entirely; all the networks will be able to broadcast the debates. But the snub means that once again Fox News will be denied the chance to leave its imprint on the all-important debates. It won’t be able to build its brand on the back of Democrats who have injected extraordinary passion and interest into the White House run.

That passion and interest has helped boost ratings for Fox News’ cable competitors, while Fox’s numbers have remained stagnant. Meaning, the unfolding presidential campaign has been a ratings dud so far for Fox News and its unofficial year of woe.

Just as the 9-11 terrorist attacks catapulted Fox News’ ratings into the patriotic stratosphere, the 2008 campaign season may be viewed as the news event that marked the news channel’s fall from ratings dominance.

In turn, Fox News’ ratings woes have opened the door to a much more frank and honest discussion about the news outlet. Like when New York Times media columnist David Carr recently called out Fox News flacks as thugs. And the way MSNBC chief Phil Griffin declared that when it comes to Fox News, “you can’t trust a word they say.” Sure, Griffin’s a competitor. But before this year, that kind of blunt talk was not heard in polite Beltway media circles, and it certainly was not heard on the record.

Fox News has been taken down several notches, and the demotions can be traced back to the blogger-led debate boycott from 2007 and the repercussions it set off.

The point of that media pushback was to begin chipping away, in a serious, consistent method, at Fox News’ reputation. The goal was to portray Fox News as illegitimate, to spell out that Fox News was nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece and that Democrats need not engage with the News Corp. giant, let alone be afraid of it.

In other words, bloggers wanted to badly dent the Fox News brand.

I have no definitive proof that the blue-ribbon Commission on Presidential Debates, which organizes the televised forums, bypassed Fox News in terms of moderators because of the formal boycott that the netroots launched last year or the noisy questions it raised about Fox News’ professionalism. But if there is one thing the staid debate commission seems to detest, it’s controversy.

The commission has made it clear that it wants the forums to be all about the candidates and not about the moderators or, by extension, about the media. The last thing the commission would want this year by tapping a Fox News moderator is to spark a large, and raucous, debate over the nature of Fox News and whether it was appropriate to have one of Rupert Murdoch’s personalities host a presidential debate.

And trust me, formal petitions and online protests would be flying around the Internet right now if the commission had tapped a Fox News anchor to pose the presidential hopeful questions in September or October. You can bet Robert Greenwald at Foxnewsattacks.com and the whole MoveOn.org crew, along with bloggers like Matt Stoller, would be raising holy hell at the prospect of Sen. Barack Obama having to be on stage for 90 minutes and answer questions posed by a Fox News anchor.

It’s true that neither CNN nor MSNBC are represented this cycle in terms of moderators. But since 1988, CNN twice has had one of its anchor moderate a general-election presidential debate. No Fox News anchor has ever been tapped for that honor. For the Fox News family, which desperately wants to be seen as a legitimate news operation, that ongoing slight has got to hurt. (For years, MSNBC’s ratings were so insignificant that it had no chance of being considered for the debates.)

And based on the ongoing pushback that bloggers have unleashed on Murdoch and Co. — based on the questions the bloggers have raised about the brand of journalism being practiced there — I doubt Fox News will ever be seen as fair or professional enough to have one of its big-name hosts help talk Americans through a presidential campaign in the high-profile role of moderator.

Obviously, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity aren’t ever going to be allowed with 500 yards of any commission debate’s moderating table. But what about Brit Hume, Fox News’ high-profile evening anchor who’s been a Beltway news staple, and well-liked within elite circles, for several decades? If he worked for any other network, he would almost certainly be viewed by the commission as a viable choice.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the commission’s 11-member executive board, which selects the moderators, employs an “informal” agreement not to use any of the nightly news anchors for moderators. (I assume that’s to avoid any implication that it’s playing favorites with the network or trying to boost the ratings of one of the nightly newscasts.) So that might explain why Hume hasn’t been asked to host a debate.

Additionally, the Journal reported that the commission uses three criteria for the moderators:

* Knowledge of the candidates and relevant issues.

* Experience in live broadcasting.

* Understanding that a moderator’s role is to facilitate conversation between the candidates, not to participate in it.

Doesn’t Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday and perhaps its least partisan personality, pretty much meet those criteria? But again, my guess is that as long as Wallace is cashing a Fox News paycheck, he will never moderate a presidential debate, which is seen as a pinnacle achievement in the broadcast news business.

Why? Because bloggers and the entire netroots movement have damaged the Fox News brand and sent a clear signal to Beltway institutions such as the Commission on Presidential Debates that any attempt to bring Fox News into the mainstream, to bestow it with unearned legitimacy, will be met with active protests. (Wallace’s chances for a moderator slot were probably not helped by the fact that Fox News has been busy airing doctored, cartoonish images of New York Times journalists, dubbing Obama hand gestures as “terrorist fist jab[s],” and reportedly leaking gossip about reporters to industry blogs.)

Bloggers deserve the credit because the pushback they initiated was something that members of the Democratic Party had, for years, refused to do. Instead, they adopted a go-along/get-along strategy with Fox News, hoping that if they were nice (and cooperative) with Fox News, then Fox News would be nice (and cooperative) in response.

Indeed, without the online campaign, do you think the head of the Democratic National Committee would have appeared on Fox News and publicly denounced its coverage as being “shockingly biased” the way Howard Dean did in May? I doubt it, since for years Democrats, and particularly the inside-the-Beltway party leaders, acquiesced.

Hell, in 2007 leaders of the Nevada Democratic Party wanted to partner with Fox News to sponsor a debate among the party’s presidential hopefuls.

For online activists, the idea of the Democratic Party itself anointing Fox News as some sort of standard-bearer for election coverage was too much.

The debate itself was actually rather meaningless. Bloggers didn’t really care about the actual forum and certainly were not scared about what kinds of questions the Fox News moderators would pose to the Democrats during the primary. Activists were more concerned about the other 364 days of the year and how Fox News would benefit from the legitimacy attached to moderating a presidential debate and the unspoken seal of approval it implies.

“The lies of FOX News and Roger Ailes have no place in public discourse, journalism, or the Democratic Party presidential debates,” blogger Matt Stoller wrote in 2007, further stressing it was important “to not ratify Fox News as a legitimate news source.”

One year later, the initiative is still paying dividends for Fox’s foes. Not just in terms of watching the news channel being snubbed by the debate commission, but also in watching Fox News’ continued slide in the campaign ratings race.

It’s true that after losing the first quarter prime-time ratings battle this year to CNN (marking CNN’s first quarterly win in nearly seven years), Fox News rebounded and came out on top, barely, for the second quarter. But that doesn’t mean its troubles are over because now the cable news ratings battle has been transformed into a month-to-month dogfight. Fox News no longer posts wins with ease the way it did for nearly a decade.

The simple explanation for the viewership lull is that the current campaign has produced enormous interest among Democratic news consumers, and Democrats don’t watch Fox News. It’s just that simple. Time and again on the nights of primary returns this winter and spring, Fox News floundered.

And by getting shut out of the Democratic debates, the Fox News team was denied the ratings gold the prime-time events generated. The snub also effectively turned Fox News into a bystander in the race.

Fact: Through mid-June this year, CNN added 170,000 viewers a night, on average, when compared the first five-and-a-half months of 2004, or the last time the cablers covered a presidential run. During that same period through June this year, Fox News lost about 90,000 viewers each night vs. 2004, according to The New York Times.

Back when the bloggers rolled out their successful debate boycott strategy in Nevada, Fox News executives reacted with pure venom, denouncing the netroots as “radical fringe out-of-state interest groups.” At the time, the response struck me as being wildly out of proportion. But it seems the Fox News team could see the looming trouble. They could see that a Democratic-friendly election year was going to mean ratings woes for them, and that by refusing to debate on Fox News, the Democratic candidates would be sending a damaging (irreparable?) message about the news organization’s lack of legitimacy.

One year later, the ratings surge for Fox News’ competitors remains in full view, while the selection of the presidential debate moderators confirms that Fox News’ quest for respect has suffered another setback.

Bloggers, take a bow.

Source / Media Matters

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College Students Choosing Action Over Protest

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Activism isn’t dead on the nation’s college campuses; it’s just different’
By Jeannie Kever / August 10, 2008

The Kent State shootings and other iconic protests of the 1970s are so last century.

Student activists now are more likely to run recycling stations or deliver bottled water to day laborers.

“It’s not really as much protesting as students taking charge,” said Murray Myers, a senior at the University of St. Thomas who runs the campus recycling program. “I guess protest was pretty popular in the ’60s. I see me and other students … doing positive things, rather than protesting.”

“They’re everywhere in many, many ways,” said Maria Jimenez, who was a student activist at the University of Houston during the 1970s and now advocates for immigrant and human rights.

Shifting interests, styles

For most students, college is primarily a ticket to the future, a place to gain the skills to make it in the adult world. Many juggle jobs and classes, leaving little time for saving the world.

“In my generation, maybe about 10 percent really care, but those who care are really passionate about it,” said Imelda Padilla, 21, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, who is spending the summer in Houston for an internship with the Service Employees International Union.

Some say activism is cyclical.

“We were an extremely active generation,” Jimenez said. “Then there were several generations that were not active at all. … It impresses me how important the work that young people are now doing is.”

Students during the 1980s and ’90s focused on careers and paychecks, “not so much public service,” said William Munson, dean of students at the University of Houston. “Now there’s an expectation among our students that they give something back.”

Today’s activists, however, aren’t only about food drives and charity runs. Old-style guerrilla theater is still around, too.

Two student groups at UH — Students Against Sweatshops and Students for Fair Trade — regularly storm President Renu Khator’s office. A small band of protesters has spent the past 18 months in a grove of trees on the UC Berkeley campus, hoping to save them from being cut down to make way for a sports facility.

“You walk to a football game, and you see them,” said Padilla, a political science major on the California campus. ” … I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m that kind of activist.”

She is, instead, spending the summer on Houston’s street corners, talking to day laborers about the minimum wage and other concerns.

“I want to change the world, but you have to do it one issue at a time,” she said.

A place at the table

Other students work on topics closer to home.

“There’s a lot more people going to college these days, and we have to ensure we’re preserving accessibility for everyone,” said Sam Dike, 21, president of the UH Student Government Association.

Dike served on a university committee considering tuition increases last spring and reluctantly agreed to support a 6 percent increase.

But he also is trying to revive the dormant Texas Student Association, a statewide group he hopes will lobby for student interests, such as tuition and financial aid.

“For far too long, we have not had a legitimate place at the table,” said Dike.

Another group of students work on behalf of people halfway around the world, a trend Jimenez links to the increased ease of international travel.

“They will take off by plane to protest at the Republican convention or the World Social Forum in Brazil,” she said.

Tiffany Le, 21, a creative writing student at UH, says her family’s ties to Vietnam helped drive her support for fair-trade coffee, harvested by workers paid a living wage.

She grew up in the North Texas suburb of Plano but has traveled to Vietnam.

“I saw what it was like to live in that kind of poverty,” she said. “In the ’60s, (student issues) were domestic, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war or the civil rights movement. Now we’re looking at globalization and our impact on the world.”

UH Students for Fair Trade is aligned with a national group that advises campus affiliates. A similar group, United Students Against Sweatshops, works with students on 250 campuses to demand the schools sell only items produced in factories offering decent wages and working conditions.

Poverty, justice

Working conditions in a Chinese factory or Central American coffee plantation may seem far removed from a college campus in Texas.

Student activists don’t see it that way.

“I think there is more and more the realization that any human problem, it is part of our human lives and we have a role to play,” said Rogelio Garcia-Contreras, an assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas’ Center for International Studies.

His students want to end poverty, ensure justice and provide food and shelter everywhere in the world.

But sometimes, their work is less dramatic.

At 24, Myers wants to fight global warming and urban sprawl. For now, he’s the recycling czar at the University of St. Thomas.

Myers, an environmental studies and political science student, inherited the job when the previous coordinator graduated.

“There are a lot of other areas I’d rather be working on, but because this is my responsibility, it’s what I’ve been doing,” he said.

He could have graduated in May but put it off because there was no one to take over.

This fall, he has a new goal: “Finding my replacement.”

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Source / Houston Chronicle

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Feds Have Erected Barriers : Help Our Veterans Vote

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Veterans Affairs has banned nonpartisan voter registration at federally financed facilities
By Susan Bysiewicz / August 10, 2008

WHAT is the secretary of Veterans Affairs thinking? On May 5, the department led by James B. Peake issued a directive that bans nonpartisan voter registration drives at federally financed nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and shelters for homeless veterans. As a result, too many of our most patriotic American citizens — our injured and ill military veterans — may not be able to vote this November.

I have witnessed the enforcement of this policy. On June 30, I visited the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Haven, Conn., to distribute information on the state’s new voting machines and to register veterans to vote. I was not allowed inside the hospital.

Outside on the sidewalk, I met Martin O’Nieal, a 92-year-old man who lost a leg while fighting the Nazis in the mountains of Northern Italy during the harsh winter of 1944. Mr. O’Nieal has been a resident of the hospital since 2007. He wanted to vote last year, but he told me that there was no information about how to register to vote at the hospital and the nurses could not answer his questions about how or where to cast a ballot.

I carry around hundreds of blank voter registration cards in the trunk of my car for just such occasions, so I was able to register Mr. O’Nieal in November. I also registered a few more veterans — whoever I could find outside on the hospital’s sidewalk.

There are thousands of veterans of wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan who are isolated behind the walls of V.A. hospitals and nursing homes across the country. We have an obligation to make sure that every veteran has the opportunity to make his or her voice heard at the ballot box.

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, and I wrote to Secretary Peake in July to request that elections officials be let inside the department’s facilities to conduct voter education and registration. Our request was denied.

The department offers two reasons to justify its decision. First, it claims that voter registration drives are disruptive to the care of its patients. This is nonsense. Veterans can fill out a voter registration card in about 90 seconds.

Second, the department claims that its employees cannot help patients register to vote because the Hatch Act forbids federal workers from engaging in partisan political activities. But this interpretation of the Hatch Act is erroneous. Registering people to vote is not partisan activity.

If the department does not want to burden its staff, there are several national organizations with a long history of nonpartisan advocacy for veterans and their right to vote that are eager to help, as are elected officials like me.

The department has placed an illegitimate obstacle in the way of election officials across the country and, more important, in the way of veterans who want to vote. A group of 21 secretaries of state — Republicans and Democrats throughout the country, led by me and my counterpart in Washington State, Sam Reed — has asked Secretary Peake to lift his department’s ridiculous ban on voter registration drives.

Bills that would require the department to repeal the ban have been filed in both houses of Congress. They need to be signed into law no later than Oct. 1, so that veterans in V.A. care don’t miss their states’ deadlines to register to vote in the fall elections.

But federal legislation shouldn’t be needed for the Department of Veterans Affairs to lift the ban on voter registration drives by state and local election officials and nonpartisan groups.

The federal government should be doing everything it can to support our nation’s veterans who have served us so courageously. There can be no justification for any barrier that impedes the ability of veterans to participate in democracy’s most fundamental act, the vote.

[Susan Bysiewicz is the secretary of state for Connecticut.]

Source / New York Times

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It Is Not Too Late to Redeem the Situation

Posted on August 12, 2008 by RagBlog


Suskind on America’s declining moral authority
John Walbridge / August 12, 2008

Most of the discussion of Ron Suskind’s new book, “The Way of the World,” has focused on a single anecdote. Citing CIA sources, he claims that the White House ordered the production of a rather clumsy forgery of a letter from the head of the Iraqi intelligence service to Saddam purporting to prove that Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers trained in Iraq and that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger. The forgery was leaked to a sympathetic British journalist in 2003 and had little impact. The content was immediately seen to be implausible. Though the anecdote is juicy, and apparently true–the letter exists, after all–it is somewhat beside the point and tends to confirm my suspicion that those who discuss such books read only the first and last chapters (or their reviews). Having by chance had a tedious trans-Atlantic flight to endure, I read the whole book in a single sitting. There is much more than the not wholly surprising news that someone at the White House panicked and tried to cover himself politically by forging a document. It is a book of singular beauty and importance.

First, and less important, the forgery anecdote is part of a larger story about the failure and misuse of American intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, especially in human intelligence. Suskind reveals that skillful British agents had managed to develop two highly placed sources within the Iraqi government prior to the start of the war–the head of intelligence who supposedly wrote the incriminating letter and the foreign minister. Both told the British that there were no weapons of mass destruction and explained why. This news was passed to the White House, which chose to ignore it. Suskind points out that the CIA had been totally unable to develop such sources. He also tells an even more alarming tale about how George Bush deliberately blew the British operation that was watching the development of the plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic. Despite American urgings to shut the plot down immediately, the British wanted to wait until the plotters revealed their plans and contacts. They were forced to act prematurely when the US had Pakistan arrest a key intermediary between the plotters in Britain and al-Qaeda. The purpose was apparently to allow Bush to claim progress in preventing terrorism in the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections.

Much more important is the main theme of the book, the role of moral authority in the struggle against terrorism. Suskind argues that American democratic ideals retain a powerful appeal throughout the world. He makes this point by telling the stories of a number of individuals: an American official desperate to prevent terrorists from getting enriched uranium, an Afghan teenager in America on an exchange program, a lawyer from Illinois and her client in Guantanamo, a young Pakistani man educated in the US and living and working in Washington who is arrested by the Secret Service one day when walking to work past the White House, a former US ambassador to Pakistan who wants to see something like the Peace Corps to express what is best about America, Benazir Bhutto, who despite herself finds herself at the head of genuine democratic movement but went to her death believing that America had been unwilling to protect her, and others. Their stories are often touching and beautiful; Suskind can write. The Illinois lawyer convinces her new client in Guantanamo that she is genuine by laying twenty-six annual bar association membership cards on the table between them. The young Pakistani emerges from hours in the interrogation cell beneath the White House (God help us, there apparently is such a thing) to find that his co-workers are waiting with a cake to welcome him back. Later, when Musharraf declares martial law and shuts down the Pakistani media, he and his Pakistani-American fiancée set up an impromptu news service funneling information back to the leaders of the democratic lawyers’ movement in Pakistan. The young Afghan exchange student is asked for the first time in his life what he thinks is right. A former military judge remembers seeing the key to the Bastille at Mount Vernon and writes a memo exposing the trials at Guantanamo as farces.

Contrasted with these people and their hopes and ideals are the lies, the cruelty, the ruthlessness, and the sheer injustice that have characterized America’s prosecution of the “Global War on Terror.” We have been told that these abuses have been necessary to fight a new kind of enemy. Suskind does not dwell on these abuses; they have been summarized with white anger in Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side,” a book that can be usefully read with this one. Suskind argues that these abuses have actually undermined the struggle against terrorism.

Suskind points out that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda have tapped an old folk tale theme: the prince who leaves the palace behind to live with the people and defend justice. He argues that people like Ayman al-Zawahiri have skillfully deployed this myth to make Osama Bin Laden a champion of justice and Islam. Suskind argues that the ethical corner-cutting of the War on Terror has simply confirmed the jihadist portait of a hypocritical America whose real interest is the colonization of the Islamic world. Guantanamo stands as proof that American pretensions are hollow.

But there were not only torturers at Guantanamo; there were also American lawyers— even American military lawyers—who chose to defend the detainees out of a stubborn commitment to law and justice. Suskind argues passionately that it is not too late to redeem the situation, that there is a counter-narrative in which American democratic ideals do prevail, in which America does the right thing, not because it is good public diplomacy and will advance America’s interests, but simply because it is moral and ethical and the right thing to do. The world needs and desperately wants America to lead with its moral ideals.

Suskind is right about this. I have been living for the last year in Turkey, once a fervently pro-American country. A year ago public opinion polls showed that only 9 percent of Turks had a favorable impression of America. That has risen somewhat of late, partly due to simple relief that George Bush’s term would soon be over but also out of astonishment that America might elect a Black man with a Muslim name as President. The corresponding thing here, electing a Greek or Armenian as prime minister of Turkey, is inconceivable—but people want America to be different. They are beginning–very cautiously–to let themselves believe that the old America, Lincoln’s “last best hope of mankind,” might return. Suskind’s goal is to urge us Americans to let this happen, both through new government policies and through the actions of individual Americans. May it be so.

John Walbridge / Indiana University

Source / Informed Comment

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Assessing the Meaning of the Confict in Ossetia

Posted on August 12, 2008 by RagBlog

Credit: ABC News

Bush’s war in Georgia: Will it be the flyswatter or the blunderbuss?
By Mike Whitney / August 11, 2008

“I saw bodies lying on the streets, around ruined buildings and in cars. It’s impossible to count them now. There’s hardly a single building left undamaged.” Lyudmila Ostayeva, resident of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia

Washington’s bloody fingerprints are all over the invasion of South Ossetia. Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili would never dream of launching a massive military attack unless he got explicit orders from his bosses at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After all, Saakashvili owes his entire political career to American power-brokers and US intelligence agencies. If he disobeyed them, he’d be gone in a fortnight. Besides an operation like this takes months of planning and logistical support; especially if it’s perfectly timed to coincide with the beginning of the Olympic games. (another petty neocon touch) That means Pentagon planners must have been working hand in hand with Georgian generals for months in advance. Nothing was left to chance.

Putin needs to carefully weigh his options. Then, on Monday, he should announce that Russia will sell all $50 billion of its Fannie Mae mortgage-backed bonds, all of its US dollar-backed assets, and will accept only rubles and euros in the future sale of Russian oil and natural gas. Then watch as the Dow Jones goes into a death-spiral. Why use a blunderbuss when a flyswatter will do just fine?

Another tell-tale sign of US complicity is the way President Bush has avoided ordering Georgian troops to withdraw from a province that has been under the protection of international peacekeepers. Remember how quickly Bush ordered Sharon to withdraw from his rampage in Jenin? Apparently it’s different when the aggression serves US interests.

Saakashvili has been working closely with the Bush administration ever since he replaced Eduard Shevardnadze as president in 2003. That’s when US-backed NGOs and western intelligence agencies toppled the Shevardnadze regime in the so-called color-coded “Rose Revolution”. Since then, Saakashvili has done everything that’s been asked of him; he’s built up the military and internal security apparatus, he’s allowed US advisers to train and arm Georgian troops, he’s applied for membership in NATO, and he’s been a general nuisance to his Russian neighbors. Now, he has sent his army into battle ostensibly on Washington’s orders. At least, that is how the Kremlin sees it. Vladimir Vasilyev, the Chairman of Russia’s State Duma Security Committee, summed up the feelings of many Russians like this: “The further the situation unfolds, the more the world will understand that Georgia would never be able to do all this without America. In essence, the Americans have prepared the force, which destroys everything in South Ossetia, attacks civilians and hospitals.”

True. That’s why Bush is flying Georgian troops back home from Iraq to join the fighting rather than pursuing peaceful alternatives. Bush still believes that political solutions will naturally arise through the use of force. Unfortunately, his record is rather spotty.

But that still doesn’t answer the larger question: Why would Saakashvili embark on such a pointless military adventure when he had no chance of winning? After all, Russia has 20 times the firepower and has been conducting military maneuvers anticipating this very scenario for months. Does Uncle Sam really want another war that bad or is the fighting in South Ossetia is just head-fake for a larger war that is brewing in the Straits of Hormuz?

Mikhail Saakashvili is a western educated lawyer and a favorite of the neocons. He rose to power on a platform of anti-corruption and economic reform which emphasized free market solutions and privatization. Instead of raising the standard of living for the Georgian people, Saakashvili has been running up massive deficits to expand the over-bloated military. Saakashvili has made huge purchases of Israeli and US-made (offensive) weapon systems and has devoted more than “4.2% of GDP (more than a quarter of all Georgian public income) to military hardware.

The Chairman of Russia’s State Duma Security Committee, Vladimir Vasiliyev, summed it up like this:

“Georgia could have used the years of Saakashvili’s presidency in different ways – to build up the economy, to develop the infrastructure, to solve social issues both in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the whole state. Instead, the Georgian leadership with president Saakashvili undertook consistent steps to increase its military budget from US$30 million to $1 billion – Georgia was preparing for a military action.” Naturally, Russia is worried about these developments and has brought the matter up repeatedly at the United Nations but to no avail.

Israeli arms manufacturers have also been supplying Saakashvili with state-of-the-art weaponry. According to Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

“In addition to the spy drones, Israel has also been supplying Georgia with infantry weapons and electronics for artillery systems, and has helped upgrade Soviet-designed Su-25 ground attack jets assembled in Georgia, according to Koba Liklikadze, an independent military expert in Tbilisi. Former Israeli generals also serve as advisers to the Georgian military.” (“Following Russian pressure, Israel freezes defense sales to Georgia” Associated Press)

The Israeli news source DebkaFile elaborates on the geopolitical implications of Israeli involvement in the Georgia’s politics:

“The conflict has been sparked by the race for control over the pipelines carrying oil and gas out of the Caspian region….The Russians may just bear with the pro-US Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili’s ambition to bring his country into NATO. But they draw a heavy line against his plans and those of Western oil companies, including Israeli firms, to route the oil routes from Azerbaijan and the gas lines from Turkmenistan, which transit Georgia, through Turkey instead of hooking them up to Russian pipelines.

Jerusalem owns a strong interest in Caspian oil and gas pipelines reach the Turkish terminal port of Ceyhan, rather than the Russian network. Intense negotiations are afoot between Israel Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Azarbaijan for pipelines to reach Turkey and thence to Israel’s oil terminal at Ashkelon and on to its Red Sea port of Eilat. From there, supertankers can carry the gas and oil to the Far East through the Indian Ocean.” (Paul Joseph Watson, “US Attacks Russia Through Client State Georgia”)

The United States and Israel are both neck-deep in the “Great Game”; the ongoing war for vital petroleum and natural gas supplies in Central Asia and the Caspian Basin. So far, Putin appears to have the upper-hand because of his alliances with his regional allies–under the Commonwealth of Independent States—and because most of the natural gas from Eurasia is pumped through Russian pipelines. An article in “Today’s Zaman” gives a good snapshot of Russia’s position vis a vis natural resources in the region:

“As far as natural resources are concerned Russia’s hand is very strong: It holds 6.6 percent of the worlds proven oil reserves and 26 percent of the world’s gas reserves. In addition, it currently accounts for 12 percent of world oil and 21 of recent world gas production. In May 2007, Russia was the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

As for national champions, Putin has strengthened and prepared Gazprom (the state-controlled gas company), Transneft (oil pipeline monopoly) and Rosneft (the state-owned oil giant). That is why in 2006 Gazprom retained full ownership in the giant Shtokman gas field (7) and took a controlling stake in the Sakhalin-2 natural gas project. In June 2007, it took back BP’s Kovytka gas field and now is behind Total’s Kharyaga oil and gas field.” (“Vladimir Putin’s Energystan and the Caspian” Today’s Zaman)

Putin–the black belt Judo-master–has proved to be as adept at geopolitics as he is at “deal-making”. He has collaborated with the Austrian government on a huge natural gas depot in Austria which will facilitate the transport of gas to southern Europe. He has joined forces with German industry to build an underwater pipeline through the Baltic to Germany (which could provide 80% of Germany’s gas requirements) He has selected France’s Total to assist Gazprom in the development of the massive Shtokman gas field. And he is setting up pipeline corridors to provide gas to Turkey and the Balkans. Putin has very deliberately spread Russia’s influence evenly throughout Europe with the intention of severing the Transatlantic Alliance and, eventually, loosening America’s vice-like grip on the continent.

Putin’s overtures to Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkozy are calculated to weaken the resolve of Bush’s neocon allies in the EU and put them in Russia’s corner. Putin is also attracting considerable foreign investment to Russian markets and has adopted “a ‘new model of cooperation’ in the energy sector that would ‘allow foreign partners to share in the economic benefits of the project, share the management, and take on a share of the industrial, commercial and financial risks’”. (M K Bhadrakumar “Russia plays the Shtokman card”, Asia Times) All of these are intended to strengthen ties between Europe and Russia and make it harder for the Bush administration to isolate Moscow.

Putin has played his cards very wisely, which makes it look like the fighting in South Ossetia may be Washington’s way of trying to win through military force what they could not achieve via the free market.

On Saturday, President Bush issued this statement from Beijing: “We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for an end to the Russian bombings and a return by the parties to the status quo of August 6th.”

That was it. Bush then quickly returned to the Olympic festivities. He was last spotted at a photo op with the US girls volleyball team jumping up and down on the beach-sand in his wingtips. The pretense that Bush is leading the country has seemingly been abandoned altogether. Cheney is in charge now.

Meanwhile, Putin boarded a plane to Moscow as soon as he heard about the Georgian invasion and after angrily waving his finger in Bush’s face. It’s doubtful that the friendship between the two leaders will survive the present storm. America’s gambit in the Caucasus has aroused the sleeping bear and put Russia on the warpath. There’s no telling when the hostilities might end. The conflagration could sweep across the entire region. Currently, news agencies are reporting that Russian warplanes are pounding Georgia’s military bases, airfields, and the Black sea port of Poti.

According to Bill Van Auken on the World Socialist Web Site:

“Much of the city (Tskhinvali) was reportedly in flames Friday. The regional parliament building had burned down, the university was on fire, and the town’s main hospital had been rendered inoperative by the bombardment.”

Vesti radio reported that Georgian forces burned down a church in Tanara in South Ossetia where people were hiding, to the ground, with all the people inside. The Deputy Director of an information agency as an eye witness reported that fragments of cluster bombs of were found in Tskinvali. There have also been reports by a South Ossetian reservist that civilians who were hiding in basements were shot dead by Georgian soldiers.

Wikipedia reports that, “Russian soldiers captured group of American mercenaries on territory of South Ossetia. Group was captured near of Zare village.”

An estimated 1,500 people have died in the onslaught and 30,000 more fled across the Russian border. Large swaths of the city have been reduced to rubble including the one hospital that was pounded by Georgia bombers. Georgia has cut off the water supply to the city.The Red Cross now anticipates a “humanitarian catastrophe” as a result of the fighting.

“I saw bodies lying on the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars,” Lyudmila Ostayeva, 50, told the Associated Press after fleeing the city with her family to a village near the Russian border. “It’s impossible to count them now. There is hardly a single building left undamaged.”

At least 15 Russia peacekeepers were killed in the initial fighting and 70 more were sent to hospital. Georgia’s army stormed the South Ossetia capital, Tskhinvali, killing more than 1,000 fleeing civilians. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told news agencies in an interview how the hostilities began:

Russian peacekeepers “were killed by their own [Georgian] partners in the peacekeeping forces. There is a Russian battalion, an Ossetian battalion, and a Georgian battalion… and all of a sudden the Georgians, Georgian peacekeepers, begin shooting their Russian colleagues. This is of course a war crime. I do not rule out that the Hague and Strasbourg courts and institutions in other cities will be involved in investigating these crimes, and this inhuman drama that has been played out.”

According to South Ossetia’s president, Eduard Kokoyti, Georgian troops had been taking part in NATO exercises in the region since the beginning of August. Kokoyti claims that there is a connection between the NATO’s activities and the current violence.

Clearly, no one was expecting Russia to react as quickly or as forcefully as they did. In a matter of hours Russian tanks and armored vehicles were streaming over the border while warplanes bombed targets throughout the south. The Bush-Saakashvili strategy unraveled in a matter of hours. The Georgia president is already calling for a cease-fire. He’s had enough.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to spend $400 million to rebuild parts of South Ossetia. Large shipments of food and medical supplies are already on the way.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday:

“The actions of Georgia have led to deaths – among them are Russian peacekeepers. The situation reached the point that Georgian peacekeepers have been shooting at Russian peacekeepers. Now women, children and old people are dying in South Ossetia – most of them are citizens of the Russian Federation. As the President of the Russian Federation, I am obligated to protect lives and the dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are. Those responsible for the deaths of our citizens will be punished.”

Indeed, but how will Medvedev bring the responsible people to justice; with tanks and fighter pilots or is there another way?

PUTIN’S OPTIONS: Flyswatter or Blunderbuss?

Sometimes war provides clarity. That’s certainly true in this case. After this weekends fighting, everyone in the Russian political establishment knows that Washington is willing to sacrifice thousands of innocent civilians and plunge the entire region into chaos to achieve its geopolitical objectives. Bush could call the whole thing off right now; Putin and Medvedev know that. But that’s not the game-plan. So, the two Russian leaders have to make some tough decisions that will end up costing lives. What choice do they have?

Putin needs to carefully weigh his options. Then, on Monday, he should announce that Russia will sell all $50 billion of its Fannie Mae mortgage-backed bonds, all of it US dollar-backed assets, and will accept only rubles and euros in the future sale of Russian oil and natural gas. Then watch as the Dow Jones goes into a death-spiral. Why use a blunderbuss when a flyswatter will do just fine.

Source / Information Clearing House

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Privatizing Iraq Doesn’t Seem to Have Worked

Posted on August 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Workers leaving the Diyala State Company for Electrical Industries in Baquba recently. Photo Credit: Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Iraq Private Sector Falters; Rolls of Government Soar
By Campbell Robertson / August 10, 2008

BAGHDAD — Hampered by years of violence, a decimated infrastructure, a lack of foreign investors and a flood of imports that undercut local businesses, Iraq’s private sector, particularly its small non-oil economy, has so far failed to flourish as its American patrons had hoped.

In its absence, the Iraqi government has been sustaining the economy the way it always has: by putting citizens on its payroll. Since 2005, according to federal budgets, the number of government employees has nearly doubled, to 2.3 million from 1.2 million.

The impetus is not only economic: In exchange for abandoning the insurgency that plunged the nation into civil war, many of the 100,000 members of civilian patrols known broadly as the Awakening movement have been promised jobs in the security forces or in reconstruction, though many Sunni Muslim members complain it is not happening quickly enough.

But this growth has not come without problems. Already, a huge wage increase to government workers that was instituted — but then suspended because of fears that it was pushing up inflation — has underscored the difficulties of being far and away the largest employer in an unstable country.

In 2006, 31 percent of Iraq’s labor force was working in the public sector, according to the agency for statistics in the Ministry of Planning. The agency expects that figure to reach 35 percent this year, about 5 percentage points short of where the C.I.A. estimated it to be on the eve of the 2003 invasion.

This figure is not atypical for the region, but it hardly indicates the free market state initially envisioned by the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which pushed for full and rapid privatization in its first few months.

“For all the talk about the private sector taking off in Iraq, it didn’t materialize,” said Haider al-Abbadi, who is on the parliamentary economic committee, and is disappointed by Iraq’s reversion to its old statist habits. “People would say, ‘Well, these people are poor; we need to help them.’ It’s true, but we didn’t create jobs. I think this is a huge problem.”

While some ministries need to keep growing — the Defense and Interior Ministries, which each include Iraqi security forces, account for about a third of government employees — others have tried to curtail hiring.

“I think that the government itself has been concerned about keeping a cap on the number of people that can join the public sector,” said Jorge Araujo, the lead economist for Iraq at the World Bank.

But to combat unemployment, a factor contributing to much of Iraq’s violence, there are few other options right now. Nothing sent recent graduates and out-of-work Iraqis scrambling to land civil service jobs more than the hefty raises that went into effect in June.

Given how large a proportion of the country’s population is on the government payroll, this series of wage increases, like the two that came before, in 2003 and 2007, was essentially a form of widespread economic relief. The salaries of many Iraqis were more than doubled.

Some economic advisers and members of Parliament worried that a raise for government workers could be a nightmare for others when a sudden flood of cash poured into the market. They argued that the raises should be phased in gradually to prevent a spike in inflation, which, at around 14 percent — a sea change from two years ago, when it neared 70 percent — has largely been tamed by a disciplined fiscal policy, robust oil revenues and an influx of low-cost imports.

But Iraqi citizens were desperate for the money. And lawmakers were thinking about elections.

“When people see a sudden pay raise, they will spend,” said Mr. Abbadi, who supported the phased approach. “To be frank, we have not been fair to the poorer people, or people without jobs, or people not on the payroll of the government.”

For a short time, the raises were a windfall for a handful of privately owned businesses — like the gold shops and car dealerships that cater to the doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers of the public sector.

“This is the best season I’ve ever had,” said Muhammed Aziz, 36, sitting behind the counter of his bustling gold shop in the Kadhimiya neighborhood.

But even government employees were wary. “When our salary was increased, it came along with rising prices in the market,” Tamathaer Hameed, 27, a professor of Arabic who was browsing for rings in Mr. Aziz’s gold shop, said of the last round of wage hikes. “It’s an economic circle.”

Read the rest here. / The New York Times

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