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Posted May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog
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Just Another Day in Baghdad
Iraq’s secret war of widows deepens
By Agence France-Presse / May 10, 2008
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ducking bullets and dodging car bombs may be part of daily life for millions of Baghdadis but behind black veils yet another struggle is being waged — the battle of war widows — to keep young families alive.
Iraqi housemaid Um Haidar wears a black scarf as a sign of mourning since her shop-assistant husband was gunned down two years ago. Their 10-year-old son is now working and out of school.
Um Haidar, 35, is among an estimated one million Iraqi war widows trying to eke out a living. Official figures estimate that one in six women aged 15- 49 is widowed.
Um Haidar’s son left school after his father’s death and works at a Baghdad barber’s shop. He brings in much needed dinars to support his four-year-old sister.
“I wear black, not only because I’m sad and grieving but also because of the bad security in Iraq. Everything is bad and we face the killing and bloodshed every day in our life,” she said.
Some women wear the black abaya, or the all-covering head-to-toe dress, fearing attacks from Islamic fundamentalists who insist that women should cover up and not appear in bright colors.
But for Um Haidar the real battle is to put food on the table for her children with no man to support her. The deepening sectarian violence is not making it any easier for the vulnerable.
“Since I lost my husband, I am fighting to make a living for my family,” she said, adding that only a few supported her.
Widow Wafaa Faraj, 38, a mother of two girls aged 13 and eight, has moved in with the family of her late husband, Mohammed.
She lives in a small room on the first floor of the house with just one bed. The room has a television set in a corner and minimum furniture that includes a small desk for her daughter to study.
“I can barely manage to live,” she said. “I’m living in a bad situation. There is no one to take care of me, or my two daughters. I work hard every day to be sure that my little daughters have dinner before they go to sleep.”
Her policeman husband was killed by a sniper at Al-Mutanabi street in central Baghdad. She said the police later told her that her husband’s killer was a Kuwaiti national.
“I was against the war and I will be against it always, I hate the war because it made many women lose their husbands, and many Iraqi children became fatherless,” Faraj said.
She is also bitter with US forces, who number more than 150,000 deployed across the country and are still battling militiamen, amid increasing sectarian violence that is also taking a heavy toll among civilians.
“The US forces came to Iraq to make us live in freedom, but we didn’t find freedom, we find killing and bloodshed every day and everywhere,” she said.
Read all of it here. / Inquirer.net
The Rag Blog
Peace Action for Mother’s Day
As Julia Ward Howe wrote in her Mother’s Day Proclamation, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs” To commemorate this original Mother’s Day call to Action, Peace Action invites you help protect American youth from the Pentagon’s predatory and illegal recruitment tactics. You have the power to fight the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB).
STEP 1: Educate Yourself and Your Family
The ASVAB is given to more than a half million public high school students every year under the guise of “career testing”. Unfortunately ASVAB only tests for military careers and all of the results from the four-hour test, along with sensitive personal information, are released to military recruiters – unless schools take steps to protect student privacy.
STEP 2: Educate Your School About Option 8
Most schools don’t know the ASVAB is primarily a military recruiting tool. After all, the military markets it as a public service, a free “Career Exploration Program” to assist kids in finding appropriate career paths. More importantly, most schools aren’t aware of “ASVAB Release Option 8,” which allows schools to have the military proctor the test while keeping scores and personal information private.
STEP 3: Take Action in Your School District.
Four of the nation’s largest school systems have already been persuaded to protect student privacy by selecting Option 8. Privacy advocates in Maryland recently passed legislation requiring public high schools to notify each student and their guardian of their right to prevent students’ names and contact information from being released to military recruiters (Senate Bill 428).
Peace Action has already supported successful campaigns to protect students from predatory military recruiting across the country, contact us for help doing this work in your community.
Whether you’re a mother or a father – or a grandparent – or someone without children but concerned about the future let’s rise to Julia Ward Howe’s original call to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
Let’s use the influence that we have in our own communities to protect all our children. Let’s all write to our School Boards, Superintendents, and Principals telling them about the ASVAB and Option 8.
Never before has such a simple campaign been so effective. We can end the occupation of Iraq by ending the occupation of our nation’s public schools – Take this important Peace Action Today.
R. Baker : Liu and the Liquidity Crisis
Recession and the Liquidity Trap
By Roger Baker / May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog
A year ago, on May 9, 2007, Henry C. K. Liu wrote an article for the Asia Times titled “Liquidity boom and looming crisis.”
So far Liu’s predictions have been mostly accurate in terms of predictive trends, although the global financial crisis he foresees has been contained for the time being.
The crisis he describes is a liquidity trap in which traditional Keynesian stimulation of the economy by the federal reserve has lost its previously strong effect, due largely to the financial problem being global. Trying to stimulate the domestic economy destabilizes the global economy; this is the basis of the trap. Enough federal stimulation to reflate the domestic economy may easily lead to self-accelerated dollar devaluation, hyperinflation, ending in a global depression.
The severe US recession that Lui forsees in the opening portion of his essay has now become a reality. The credit crisis has deepened and spread broadly enough to require an emergency bailout of Bear Stearns by the federal reserve. As Liu anticipated, high interest rates last year cooled the economy and are now leading the fed to try to try to restimulate a depressed US economy using easy credit, but so far without much impact as inflation grows worse.
The Fed’s stated goal is to cool an overheated economy sufficiently to keep inflation in check by raising short-term interest rates, but not
so much as to provoke a recession. Yet in this age of finance and credit derivatives, the Fed’s interest-rate policy no longer holds dictatorial command over the supply of liquidity in the economy. Virtual money created by structured finance has reduced all central banks to the status of mere players rather than key conductors of financial markets. The Fed now finds itself in a difficult position of being between a rock and a hard place, facing a liquidity boom that decouples rising equity markets from a slowing underlying economy that can easily turn toward stagflation, with slow growth accompanied by high inflation…
The trap is if the fed creates enough liquidity to stimulate the domestic economy, it leads to inflation and dollar devaluation, which then raises oil prices, etc. Higher oil and food prices then depress and deflate the US economy, thus requiring even more liquidity to be created.
Finally the Chinese, already choking on shrinking dollars and suffering from their own inflation, will decide to dump a tidal wave of US treasury notes. Nothing material is backing the dollar despite its key status in world trade. There are huge foreign dollar reserves that will be cashed in at some point and will flood into the world economy and amplify the desire to unload dollars and exchange them before they devalue any further:
…A liquidity trap can be a serious problem because the world is still
plagued with excess liquidity potential: massive foreign reserves held
by central banks, bulging petrodollars, hedge funds and private-equity
funds, massive increases in global monetary base, $4 trillion in
low-yielding Chinese bank deposits ready for release for higher
yields, $5 trillion in low-yielding US time deposits maturing, $10
trillion in low-yielding Japanese financial net worth, plus $27
trillion in medium-yielding US household financial net worth waiting
to be monetized for aggressive yields. A global liquidity trap of with
$50 trillion of idle assets will implode like a doomsday machine…
If I see a weakness in Liu’s economic analysis, it is perhaps that he is not so conscious of the key role of US oil addiction, which weakens the US economy relatively more than its industrialised competitors.
Further validation of some of the same trends anticipated by Liu may be seen in the following piece by Michael Klare on the end of the US as a global superpower due to oil addiction. The USA sends to the Arabs and other oil producers $1.5 billion a day to satisfy its oil addiction. The Arabs are probably just as likely to cash in and send their shrinking dollars flooding into the world economy and with as little warning as are the Chinese. I think Iran just said that it intends to start selling its oil for Euros. Here is a snip from Klare:
“An oil-addicted ex-superpower” by Michael T. Klare, May 10, 2008.
….While our economy is being depleted of these funds, at a moment when credit is scarce and economic growth has screeched to a halt, the oil regimes on which we depend for our daily fix are depositing their mountains of accumulating petrodollars in “sovereign wealth funds” (SWFs) – state-controlled investment sources of wealth. At present, these funds are already believed to hold in excess of several trillion dollars; the richest, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), alone holds $875 billion…
The Rag Blog
Both Sides Will Claim They Aren’t Prejudiced
Americans are in utter denial about this topic. But I see it and hear words from white mouthes that instantiate it every single day of the week. And I don’t see this changing here anytime soon. It is too ingrained, and it is handed down from one generation to the next the way a family heirloom might be passed to younger generations. Just another sign of a sick society.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Acknowledging the Race Chasm
By David Sirota
When it comes to race, American politics is as polarized as a red and blue election map. On one side are those who try to distract from the issue; on the other side are those who work to sensationalize it. As this campaign season shows, what unifies both is bigotry.
Take the reaction to my recent In These Times article about Barack Obama winning states with either very small or very large black populations, but losing most states in the middle.
Those results, while troubling, aren’t surprising. In very white states, racial themes are simply not part of the political dialogue, and a black candidate therefore faces fewer inherent disadvantages. In states with large black populations, race is a major political force, but the African-American vote is big enough to offset a racially motivated white vote. It is in the Race Chasm — the states whose populations are more than 6 percent and less than 17 percent black — where race is a political issue but the black vote is too small to counter a racially motivated white vote.
The trend continued in the last few weeks, with Obama losing two states in the Race Chasm (Pennsylvania and Indiana) and winning one outside the Chasm (North Carolina). Nonetheless, the response to this phenomenon by some in the intelligentsia has been willful ignorance.
The Atlantic Monthly’s Reihan Salam said the data are not driven by race, but by Hillary Clinton’s “waitress-mom sensibility sell[ing] well in these regions.” The New America Foundation’s Michael Lind said the evidence does not reflect America’s historic black-white divide, but instead Germanic and Scandinavian migration patterns (I’m not kidding). This is typical behavior from the Establishment’s “serious” thinkers. When confronted with race, they become ostriches and shove their heads in the sand.
The news industry and politicians, on the other hand, are happy to discuss and exploit race, whether by manufacturing controversy (think Jeremiah Wright) or by promoting racists (think MSNBC hiring Pat Buchanan, or Republican senators re-electing Trent Lott to a leadership position). The media and political elites aren’t ostriches — they behave like minstrel show producers, portraying African-Americans as subhuman, alien and unimportant, except for their entertainment value.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example, differentiated between “regular people” and black people. Pundits refer separately to the “working class” and to African-Americans — as if they are mutually exclusive. Hillary Clinton this week claimed, “Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening” — the implication being that non-white Americans are lazy. These terms — “regular,” “working class,” “hardworking” — have become euphemisms for “whites,” who are subsequently billed as the only ones who matter.
Think I’m imagining that last part? Then you weren’t watching ABC’s “Nightline” last week. The Jeremiah Wright brouhaha may be roiling the black community, correspondent David Wright said, “but the real question now is what do white voters think.” That’s right — according to “Nightline,” painful questions in the black community aren’t “real.”
Such denigration happens all the time, and you can tell it is rooted in bigotry because the black vote is — by any mathematical measure — crucial. Political scientist Tom Schaller notes that if Clinton had won slightly more African-American votes, she might be winning. And black turnout for Democrats could decide general elections in many key swing states. Yet, we are still told “the real question” is only what white voters think.
Some will read this and go on pretending the Race Chasm doesn’t exist, while others will keep insisting that the black vote is irrelevant. Both sides will claim they aren’t prejudiced. But racism, whether from ostriches or minstrel show producers, is racism — and it will persist until we recognize it and reject it.
David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
Source / In These Times
The Rag Blog
S. Trimble : Obamamania, the Democratic Party and the Left
If we could just get on the same page…
By Scott Trimble / May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog
[These comments from Scott Trimble are the latest contribution to a Rag Blogger discussion of radical strategy and electoral politics. Go here for the rest of the conversation.}
If we could really take over the Democratic Party, that would of course be the optimal strategy. However, to believe that Obamamania is really indicative of such a takeover is equally idealistic to hoping that all progressives will suddenly realize that they should unite behind the Green Party and make it competitive with the Dems and Rethugs. Neither of these things is likely to happen in the here and now. Either of them are useful goals to work toward. I just wish we could all get on the same page, because with half of us going one way and the other half choosing the second, the DLC types and other neoliberals will continue to control the “left” in American politics, and will continue to work on behalf of their corporate masters instead of “we the people.”
Unfortunately, healing the rifts in the American left are not much more likely than a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel. So, we can debate them eternally here, but what we really need to be doing is trying to find new and utterly original ideas to break the molds imposed on us. We will basically have to fool ourselves and our potential allies into uniting behind one or the other. Obamamania has almost done it, but he is just too right wing, too pro-corporate for some of us. If it had been John Edwards, or maybe if Obama had adopted a platform somewhere between Edwards and Kucinich…but alas, what we’ve got is all we’ve got.
I don’t want to sound like I’m just being a contrarian. I fully support your decision to back Obama, and I sincerely hope that he proves me wrong, that he turns out to be the leftist in centrist clothing that some seem to think he will be. I hope he gets us out of Iraq expediently and entirely. I wish I could hope that he’d get us out of Afghanistan just as quickly (but unless he is such a con artist that he is fooling himself, I don’t think that is at all likely). I would love to see him end the “war on terror” propaganda, and focus on sound diplomacy based on cooperation rather than domination, and on repairing our infrastructure, education system, health care system, and working toward full employment. It is just that I don’t think any of those things will really happen.
I’m sorry if I seem pessimistic, but I believe what we will actually get is a drawdown of most troops in Iraq, with a residual force to maintain neo-colonial control of the Iraqi government, an escalation in Afghanistan, a continuation of the war on terror, a somewhat less aggressive foreign policy, but one still based on military might, especially as our economic power fades, and moderate improvements in domestic social programs, while maintaining the imbalances necessary for capitalism, corporations and the wealthy to continue to thrive. In short, something a little better than we’d get from a second Clinton term (whether Bill or Hillary), and a lot better than we’d get from McCain. Better, but not necessarily good.
Oh well, at least I will be able to feel some relief, as long as the Republicans are not able to steal another one. Meh.
But I digress. My apologies. I’d love to work on a way to convince Greens and Socialists et. al. to join with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to wrest it from the grasp of the neoliberal wing. Convince me to join you in that effort. But Obama is not the vehicle that will get me there.
For the rest of the discussion, go here.
The Rag Blog
Class is not a Clinton Forte
Seeds of Destruction
by Bob Herbert / May 10, 2008
The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.
Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.
There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.
He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!
The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.
(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)
But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.
I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president — and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.
Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.
Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.
Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.
Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.
Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”
It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.
So class is not a Clinton forte.
But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
Source. / New York Times
Thanks to Steve Russell and Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog
One-Hundred Thousand Casualties a Year
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 U.S. Casualties a Year
By Alexander Cockburn / May 11, 2008
A friend of mine who’s a librarian was recently reviewing job applicants. Asked his qualifications in library skills, one man put “machine-gunner.” He was a vet who’d served in Falluja. The library is in a state school here in the US that, last fall, had 650 such vets enrolled. The young man got the job but soon became irked by what he saw as the trivial preoccupations of his colleagues. He applied for a job at a nearby police department. All over the country police departments are advertising for Iraq vets. Three-quarters of the way through the hiring process, the PD signaled to him that things looked good. Then, in rapid succession, three Iraq vets in the area were involved in lethal episodes: two murders and one suicide. The PD immediately called the young man in for a second psychological evaluation, then nixed him for the job. He’s 24. He can’t find anything satisfying to do and is thinking of re-enlisting. He’s against the war.
Those violent episodes are just part of bringing the war home. It’ll be active on the home front for years to come. Just under one in three—31 percent—of those who’ve been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from a brain injury or stress disorder or a mix of both these conditions.
On April 17 the RAND Corporation released a study of service members and veterans back home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The 500-page study was titled Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. It was sponsored by a grant from the California Community Foundation and done by twenty-five researchers from RAND Health and the RAND National Security Research Division. From last August to January, the team conducted a phone survey with 1,965 service members, reservists and veterans in twenty-four areas across the country with high concentrations of those people. Some had done more than one tour.
The Associated Press and major newspapers outlined the RAND report’s astounding numbers and then the story slid from view, which is a very bad thing, since the report disclosed in compelling numbers that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are steadily filling every American community with psychologically and physically mutilated victims of war. Many of them will endure lives saturated with physical pain and mental turmoil or confusion. A proportion will be prone to alcoholism, drug use and violence, sometimes deadly. Their partners and their children will suffer all measure of scarring.
Pentagon data show that more than 1.6 million military personnel have deployed to the conflicts since the war in Afghanistan began in late 2001. The RAND study put the percentage of those suffering from PTSD and depression at 18.5 percent, thus calculating that approximately 300,000 current and former service members were suffering from those problems at the time of its survey.
Some 320,000 service members, about 19 percent, according to RAND, may have experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while in a war zone. These injuries have ranged from concussions to severe head wounds. Julian Barnes, in the Los Angeles Times, pointed out in his April 18 story that “a chief difference is that in Iraq and Afghanistan all service members, not just combat infantry, are exposed to roadside bombs and civilian deaths. That distinction subjects a much wider swath of military personnel to the stresses of war.”
“We call it ‘360-365’ combat,” Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, told Barnes. “What that means is veterans are completely surrounded by combat for one year. Nearly all of our soldiers are under fire, or being subjected to mortar rounds or roadside bombs, or witnessing the deaths of civilians or fellow soldiers.”
The RAND report says that about 7 percent suffered from both a probable brain injury and current PTSD or major depression. Only 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for their head injuries. Only 53 percent of service members with PTSD or depression sought help over the past year. Various reasons were offered to RAND researchers for not getting help, including worries about the side effects of medication, reliance on family and friends to help them with the problem and fear that seeking care might damage career prospects.
The news stories tended to lay stress on the fact that almost half of those with brain injuries or suffering from depression and stress disorder were seeking help. As Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-leader and a researcher at RAND, told the Associated Press, “There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Missing amid the brief stir aroused by this devastating report was any adequate editorial commentary, or inquiry to political candidates, about the obvious fact that every month that US troops remain deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan adds inexorably to this terrible total. But discretion is the order of the day, exemplified by Dr. Ira Katz, top mental health official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who, as CBS News reported on February 13, e-mailed an aide, “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities.”
Here’s how the figures add up, just for Americans. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have thus far produced 300,000 psychological casualties, 320,000 brain injury casualties, plus 35,000 (probably understated) officially reported “normal” casualties. This adds up to 655,000 US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an average of just under 101,000 Americans killed or wounded every year since the wars began. If the idea of 101,000 casualties for every extra year in Iraq and Afghanistan gets out and infects the voting public, imagine the effect on the currently torpid national debate over leaving in five years versus fifteen years!
Source / CounterPunch
The Rag Blog
Wall Street Always Rides a Wave Until It Crashes
Will the Mortgage Industry Pay for Its Crimes?
By Danny Schechter / May 10, 2008
There is a time in the life of every writer when you find yourself fearing that you have become a robo call phone machine — repeating the same message over and over and with diminishing results.
That’s how I felt after 8 months of silence after labeling the credit crisis a “subcrime” scandal, lashing out at the fraudulent activity at its core and calling for the investigation and prosecution of wrongdoers. Almost no media outlets accepted this way of framing the problem, although as usual, the British press was ahead of its American cousins in putting the blame on the bankers, not the borrowers.
When the FBI announced a probe of 14 mortgage companies, I thought that finally some investigators were on the case. But then, word leaked that they were only going after small fish even as big banks reported losses in the billions.
Bank robberies have always been up the FBI’s alley, and after all, this is a bank heist case, perhaps one of the biggest in history. Only it was the banks that were doing the heisting.
The New York Times reported May 5th that a new criminal investigation was finally underway.
A G-Man explained anonymously: “The latest inquiry is broader and deeper. This is a look at the mortgage industry across the board, and it has gotten a lot more momentum in recent weeks because of the banks’ earnings shortfall.”
At last, institutional fraud may be on the agenda. At last, deeper questions are being asked. There have been some Congressional hearings but so far none have risen to a Watergate-type level prompting in-depth investigations fueled by subpoenas.
Slowly, oh so slowly, news outlets are recognizing this is a big crime story, one they missed for years, or at least since 2002 when subprime securities started being packaged for sale.
Reports the Washington Independent:
“As loans made to borrowers with decent credit begin to fail at a surprisingly rapid rate, it’s becoming clear that widespread fraud helped support the entire mortgage system — from borrowers who lied on their loans, to brokers who encouraged it, to lenders who misled some low-income borrowers, to the many lenders, investors and ratings agencies that conveniently and deliberately looked the other way as profits rolled in.
Despite its widespread role, fraud hasn’t yet been at the forefront of proposed rescue plans, which center on refinancing people out of loans now resetting to higher rates.”
Why would reputable bankers and respected investment houses engage in these dishonest activities? The short answer: money, and lots of it.
Read the rest here. / ZNet / AlterNet
The Rag Blog
We Are Settling for a Child’s Bargain
Even the symbols of Amerikkkan politics are child’s toys. When will we find the courage to end the cycle of destructive, fear-based politics and throw out the people who wish it upon us? When will we grow up?
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
America’s Difficult Adolescence
by Carol Davidek-Waller
Nothing shows the immaturity of our nation more than the way we select our leaders. The majority of our power rests on this simple act of citizenship yet we permit it to be treated like an episode of American Idol.
We allow entrenched power to narrow our choices and even determine which qualities are important for the men and women we grant the power to make decisions over our lives.
In the sixties and seventies, populist leaders were assassinated outright. Today their careers are destroyed by a White House spy network that would have been the envy of the Kremlin, as well as their commandos in the media who host right-wing mullahs, hypocritically fanning the fires of outrage of a 15th-century morality.
Americans may be great innovators, but we do not produce many great leaders. In the decades since the Kennedys and King, there has been a dearth. Can we really afford to throw away those we do have because they do not live up to a moral code that is at odds with human biology and that most of us fail to live up to at some point in our lives?
The same right-wing tarts who preach an America as a Christian nation experience amnesia when confronted with living Christian values; love, tolerance and forgiveness.
These people do not deserve our trust. Their concerns do not reflect true spirituality but rather the pursuit of personal power. They take an unholy pleasure in destroying anyone who stands in their way.
No one but a naïve child, mesmerized by their frightening single-mindedness, would surrender their future to them.
The US Constitution makes no mention of political parties, yet today they wield far more power than any group should in a true representative democracy. They are private corporations who operate corrupt machines that shut out voters, steal elections and stand between us and the candidates we need and deserve. Yet we continue to give them our money and our energy, even though they betray us time and again.
War is an anathema to ordinary citizens. Our children, our brothers and our sisters are stolen from us and their lives thrown away on useless military adventures decade after decade. We pay crippling taxes to fund these debacles and endure ruinous inflation. We still haven’t learned to turn our backs on those who would lead us toward disaster. We listen when the client press laughs at Dennis Kucinich’s proposed Department of Peace.
A just society cannot exist unless there is economic justice. We allow a system of legal bribery to buy the services of our representatives. We shake our heads at the personal indiscretion of men like Eliot Spitzer and allow him to be driven out of office while the real evil-doers who they are pursuing–the men and women who abused their power, profited from the housing bubble and left taxpayers footing the bill–go free.
We have to stop thinking that the gross injustices that exist in our society are not our problem. They are our problem and, to the extent that we don’t act, our fault.
We are settling for a child’s bargain. Everyone is bigger and more powerful than we are. We sell them our vote for the promise of safety and security that is never delivered. And why should it be? The powerful only retain their privilege by keeping us fearful of each other and our global neighbors, and by insisting the way to solve our problems is to annihilate anyone that stands in our way.
We cannot continue to wander in a perpetual springtime of childhood and hope to live our lives in dignity. If we do not grow up and take on our adult responsibilities right now, the lives of our children and grandchildren will be unspeakable.
Source / Eat the State
The Rag Blog
The High Cost of Waste in Our Society
Food waste on ‘staggering’ scale
Axis Commentary / May 10, 2008
Editor’s Note: This is a report from a survey carried out in England and Wales. The BBC report does not mention this in the context of famine now being predicted in some developing countries due to rising food and fuel prices. This is the first survey of its kind ever conducted. Considering that the report is only referent to a small portion of Europe, we have to ask how much food is being wasted every day, worldwide. 3 billion people are still living on a dollar a day in a world dominated by the capitalist model. This is an incredible indictment of the world food pricing and distribution system and hence capitalism itself. – LMB
People are needlessly throwing away 3.6m tonnes of food each year in England and Wales, research suggests.
The Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) found that salad, fruit and bread were most commonly wasted and 60% of all dumped food was untouched.
The study analysed the waste disposed of by 2,138 households.
Environment Minister Joan Ruddock said the findings were “staggering” at a time of global food shortages and WRAP added it was an environmental issue.
‘Value of food’
The study found that £9bn of avoidable food waste was disposed of in England and Wales each year.
It is mostly food that could have been consumed if it had been better stored or managed, or had not been left uneaten on a plate.
Much of that food waste goes into landfill rather than into council food disposal and composting programmes, it said.
“There are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin.” – Joan Ruddock, Environment Minister
Based on the data for England and Wales, WRAP estimated that householders across the UK throw away £10.2bn of avoidable food waste every year.
Using the same extrapolation, they also estimated the average UK household needlessly throws away 18% of all food purchased. Families with children throw away 27%.
The study also suggested £1bn worth of food wasted in the UK was still “in date”.
Nearly a quarter, in terms of cost, was disposed of because the “use by” or “best before” date had expired.
Liz Goodwin, chief executive of WRAP, said food waste had “a significant environmental impact.
“What shocked me the most was the cost of our food waste at a time of rising food bills, and generally a tighter pull on our purse strings,” Ms Goodwin said.
“It highlights that this is an economic and social issue, as well as about how much we understand the value of our food.”
Yoghurts and chickens
The study also found that:
* Bakery goods made up 19%, by weight, of all avoidable food waste. Vegetables contributed 18%.
* Meat and fish also made up a large proportion – 18% – of the total money wasted on food. WRAP said 5,500 whole chickens were thrown away each day in the UK.
* “Mixed foods” like ready meals made up 21% of the total cost of waste, with 440,000 thrown away each day.
* The two most significantly wasted foods that could have been eaten were potatoes and bread
* Yoghurt was a commonly abandoned product, with an estimated 1.3m unopened pots disposed of each day.
WRAP receives government funding from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The body says The Food We Waste survey is the first of its kind in the world, surveying both household habits and the actual waste they throw away.
The survey interviewed 2,715 households in England and Wales and several weeks later, analysed the rubbish of 2,138 of them.
Ms Ruddock said: “This is costing consumers three times over.
“Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don’t eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates.
“And there are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin.”
READ THE REPORT: The Food We Waste [1.44MB, PDF format]
Source / Axis of Logic / BBC
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Made in the USA?
Let’s remember that the USA is the biggest arms manufacturer in the world. Using nothing but Las Vegas odds, the likelihood that all those “Iranian” arms being found in Iraq actually came from the USA is rather high. “[T]he US Congressional Research Service estimates that of arms transfers to developing countries in 2003, around 89% came from just 5 members of the G8: the US, Russia, France, the UK and Germany.” (‘Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1996-2003’ by Richard F. Grimmett, Congressional Research Service, 2004.) Of those five, the US exports more than 50% of their total arms exports.
As we see more and more examples of the US press lying outright to us as a result of Pentagon and other US government prompting, perhaps we should keep some basic facts in mind. Perhaps all this crowing about Iranian arms is nothing more than diversionary bullshit to keep us from looking where the guilt is greatest.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
For more about world arms trade, click here.
IRAQ: The elusive Iranian weapons
By Tina Susman / May 10, 2008
BAGHDAD — There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner’s introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word “Iran,” or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen.
Among other things, Bergner cited 20,000 “items of ammunition, explosives and weapons” reported by Iraqi forces in the central city of Karbala; an additional Karbala cache containing 570 explosive devices, nine mortars, four anti-aircraft missiles, and 45 RPGs; and in the southern city of Basra alone, 39 mortar tubes, 1,800 mortars and artillery rounds, 600 rockets, and 387 roadside bombs. Read his remarks here.
Not once did Bergner point the finger at Iran for any of these weapons and munitions, which is a striking change from just a couple of weeks ago when U.S. military officials here and at the Pentagon were saying that caches found in Basra in particular had revealed Iranian-made arms manufactured as recently as this year. They say the majority of rockets being fired at U.S. bases, including Baghdad’s Green Zone, are launched by militiamen receiving training, arms and other aid from Iran.
Today brought fresh attacks, including an unusual barrage fired at a military base used by British and U.S. forces in Basra, in southern Iraq. A statement said “several” rockets hit the base during the afternoon, and that initial reports indicated two civilian contractors were killed, and four soldiers and four civilians injured.
It was the first reported attack of its kind since March 27 in Basra.
Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and had echoed the U.S. accusations of new Iranian-made arms being found in Basra. But neither the United States nor Iraq has displayed any of the alleged arms to the public or press, and lately it is looking less likely they will. U.S. military officials said it was up to the Iraqis to show the items; Iraqi officials lately have backed off the accusations against Iran.
A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.
When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.
Iran, meanwhile, continues to seethe after an Iraqi delegation went to Tehran last week to confront it with the accusations. It has denied the accusations, and it says as long as U.S. forces continue to take part in military action in Iraq’s Shiite strongholds, it won’t consider holding further talks with Washington on how to stabilize Iraq.
Source / Los Angeles Times
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