TOON

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire and 10 Ways to Do So

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The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment will condemn the U.S. to a devastating trio of consequences.

Chalmers Johnson
July 31, 2009 - Tomdispatch.com

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The Obama administration's plan to end production of the F-22 Raptor has received plenty of press coverage, but the Pentagon budget itself, even though it's again on the rise, hardly rates a bit of notice. In fact, amid the plethora of issues large and small -- from health care reform to Gates-gate, from energy policy to the culpability of Michael Jackson's doctor -- that make up the American debate in the media, in Washington, and possibly even in the country, what Chalmers Johnson has called "our empire of bases" goes essentially unmentioned. Not that we don't build them profligately. At one point, we had 106 of them -- mega to micro -- in Iraq alone; right now, we have at least 50 forward operating bases and command outposts in Afghanistan to go with a few giant bases (and the Pentagon is evidently now considering the possibility of creating a single, privatized, mercenary force to defend them, according to the Washington Post).

This is all staggering expensive. In an era when the need for funds at home is self-evident, on purely practical grounds -- and there are obviously others -- the maintenance of our global imperial stance, not to speak of the wars, conflicts, and dangers that go with it, should be at the forefront of national discussion. Instead, it has largely been left to oppositional websites to keep this crucial issue alive.

Our military empire, and the vast national security state and bureaucracy that go with it, have been perhaps the central focus of TomDispatch since it launched in late 2002. This site has concentrated on our military bases, the Pentagon's blue-sky thinking about future weaponry, air war as the American way of war, the defense budget, and the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon, among many other related issues. Nick Turse, associate editor at this site and an expert on the Pentagon, has even put its properties on "the auction block."

Since Chalmers Johnson first wrote of that empire of bases at this site back in 2004, no one has more cogently analyzed the dangers of militarism, military Keynesianism, and a Pentagon budget spun out of control. His trilogy of books on the subject, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis are already classics, and assumedly on the shelves of all TomDispatch readers.

Today, he turns to the issue which should be, but isn't, central to our moment: dismantling the empire. Think of this as the American health care reform program that no one is discussing.

- Tomdispatch.com

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However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:

"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

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Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

US Should Declare Victory and Leave Iraq, Says Top Military Officer

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Ed Pilkington
July 30, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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A top US military officer in Baghdad has stirred controversy by arguing in a confidential memo that the American presence in Iraq has outlived its welcome and that it was time "for the US to declare victory and go home".

The memo, leaked to the New York Times, was written by Colonel Timothy Reese who calls for all US troops to be pulled out of Iraq by August next year. He draws on the adage "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days," adding: "Since the signing of the 2009 security agreement, we are guests in Iraq and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose."

Under that Status Force Agreement, the US has agreed with the Iraqi government to complete withdrawal by the end of 2011. Though the numbers of troops pulled out so far is limited, the US military has begun to quit Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

The disclosure of the Reese memo comes a day after the US defence secretary Robert Gates said that the pull-back from Iraq could be sped up slightly with the inclusion of an extra brigade of about 5,000 troops by the end of this year on top of the two already planned. But that still leaves most US troops still inside Iraq at the time of the sensitive Iraqi elections in January.

Reese, an author of the official US army history of the Iraq war and a current adviser to the Iraqi military in Baghdad, is double-headed in his memo. He warns that there are still big problems within the Iraqi security forces, from corruption to ongoing political pressure from Shia politicians.

He also reports that since the US withdrawal of combat troops from Baghdad, there has been a "sudden coolness" shown by Iraqi military leaders towards US advisers. Iraqi units were now less willing to work with the Americans in joint operations.

Nonetheless, he goes on to argue that staying on will only foment further resentment among Iraqis.

The idea of a rapid acceleration in the pullout from Iraq was greeted with scepticism by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, a former adviser to General David Petraeus. Biddle said that it was not in the interests of either the Iraqis or the US to speed up withdrawal.

Biddle said that the main problem facing the military in Iraq was an "identity civil war" between Shias and Sunnis and potentially between Arabs and Kurds, comparable to the Balkans.

"Our mission is peacekeeping stabilisation in Iraq. I would like to see a long, slow drawdown to the level of a peacekeeping force, as we saw in the Balkans," Biddle said.

He added that his impression was that neither General Ray Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, nor Petraeus who now heads US central command, would agree with the call for a faster departure.

A spokesman for Odierno told the New York Times that the Reese memo was not intended for widespread dissemination and did not reflect the view of the US military.

U.S. Spurned Iran Offers to Turn Over Bin Laden's Son

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Bobby Ghosh
July 30, 2009 - Time

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It may have been a case of hitting the target but missing the opportunity. Reports last week said Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's fourth son and a mid-ranking al-Qaeda operative, was killed by a recent CIA Predator strike. But six years ago, the U.S. had an opportunity to get him alive, but lost it when the Bush administration decided to pull away from cooperation with Iran.

Saad's death has not yet been confirmed, but U.S. officials believe he was one of the victims of a missile strike earlier this year in northern Pakistan. A counterterrorism official tells TIME: "There are some indications that he may be dead, but it's not 100% certain."

Believed to be in his late 20s, Saad is one of two bin Laden sons known to be actively involved in their father's jihadi enterprise; his older brother Mohammed is still at large, believed to be in Pakistan. (Osama has at least nine other sons, and six daughters.) Saad had only recently returned to the Afghan-Pakistani border after nearly six years under house arrest in Iran. He was one of several al-Qaeda commanders, including military chief Saif al-Adel, captured by Iranian authorities in the spring and summer of 2003, as they tried to sneak across the border from Afghanistan.

At the time, the Bush administration and the Iranian regime were secretly cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In February of that year, Iranian officials gave their U.S. counterparts photocopies of the passports of over 200 Arabs - including Saad bin Laden - who had been turned away at the Afghan border. The Iranians worried that many of them would likely enter the country illegally, through the porous border. Hillary Mann Everett, then an official with the National Security Council and one of a handful of Americans involved in negotiations with Tehran, says the Iranians were concerned that if Saad did sneak in, they would not be able to repatriate him to his native Saudi Arabia, because authorities in Riyadh were unwilling to accept any of Osama's kin.

What the Iranians wanted was a multilateral mechanism, initiated by the U.S., to get the Arab intruders off their hands. Such a mechanism would have given U.S. interrogators access to the al-Qaeda operatives (whom the Iranians would presumably have detained if they once again tried to cross the border). But, says Everett, the Bush administration insisted that the Iranians deport the Arabs without any preconditions. By May, negotiations between the two countries broke down, and the chance was lost. Shortly thereafter, Saad bin Laden succeeded in crossing the border. Details of what happened next are murky, but he didn't get far: the Iranian authorities seem to have nabbed him almost immediately.

Later that summer, after the U.S.-led coalition had toppled the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the Iranians came up with another offer: they would trade their Arab captives, including Saad, for members of the Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist group that was given sanctuary by Saddam. "It was a straightforward swap, your terrorists for ours," says a Western intelligence official familiar with the Tehran's offer. The official says the offer included assurances that the MEK operatives would not be tortured and that international human-rights organizations would have access to them. "They said, 'We'll let the Red Cross or Amnesty [International] monitor the MEK prisoners, and we won't put them into some Guantanamo-like prison,'" says the official.

But the Bush administration was having none of it. "The Americans just couldn't bring themselves to trust the Iranians, even though they had been pretty straight in their dealings over al-Qaeda and the Taliban," says the official. Instead, the U.S. decided to protect the MEK, even over the objections of Iraq's elected government.

Now, with the U.S. military presence in Iraq beginning to draw down, the government in Baghdad has made it clear it will evict the MEK, though not to Iran. (Iraqi troops forced their way into the MEK's camp north of Baghdad on Tuesday.) Given the decline of MEK fortunes in Iraq, Tehran seems to have decided in late 2008 that the al-Qaeda commanders under house arrest had lost their value as bargaining chips. Several of them, including Saad bin Laden, appear to have been taken to the border with Pakistan, and released. For Saad, however, freedom lasted only a few weeks before he was allegedly killed by a Hellfire missile.

How might the U.S. have benefited from interrogating Saad instead of killing him? We may never know. Saad "was a small player with a big name," says the counterterrorism official. "He has never been a major operational figure." (His brother Mohammed bin Laden is thought to be more influential.) But terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, author of the book Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, points out that having Saan bin Laden in custody "would have been a great propaganda victory" for the U.S., greater than his death could be. Adds the Western intelligence official: "Think of how Americans would feel about Guantanamo if one of Osama's sons was among the detainees."

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How Corporate Media, Sellouts in Congress and Industry Bigs Have Hijacked the Health Care Debate

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If we let these powerful interests get their way, we'll see more outlandish increases in premiums, and millions more people being denied care.

Joshua Holland 
July 29, 2009 - AlterNet

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If you can frame the terms of a debate, you've gone a long way towards winning it before you've begun. Tragically, Republicans, the health care industry and business-friendly Blue Dog Democrats have largely been able to do exactly that, with a substantial assist from the corporate-owned media.

They've successfully focused the health care debate on the short-term costs to the federal government's bottom line, obscuring the potential impact that a meaningful realignment of the health care system would have on the economy as a whole. In so doing, opponents of reform have hoodwinked much of the public into believing that investments in America's national health care system will wind up costing individuals more than they'd gain from the effort.

In fact, they've done such a good job that much of the discourse has revolved around what is arguably one of the least relevant aspects of the proposals being debated in Congress: whether they "cost too much" or are "deficit neutral" in terms of their impact on the federal budget over the next 10 years.

Much of that discussion has been fueled by a series of estimates issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- estimates based on incomplete drafts of the legislation now moving through Congress. Yet by and large the mainstream media have dutifully repeated the spin without mentioning that the critics are touting the CBO's preliminary projections as definitive and final.

Even worse, a study of cable news reporting by the media watchdog group Media Matters found that when the CBO issued a follow-up to an earlier, more pessimistic projection of the bill passed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, it went all but unreported by the cable news networks. CBO projected it would cost $611 billion, while an earlier estimate -- which was dissected eight ways to Sunday by the same cable networks -- suggested it would run an even trillion.

There are also benefits contained within the proposals that are impossible to score in limited budgetary terms. For example, if the House bill were passed as it stands today, it would all but eliminate health-care related bankruptcies by capping the amount of out-of-pocket expenses with which a family or individual can be burdened. A group of researchers from Harvard studied over 2,300 bankruptcies filed in 2007 and concluded that more than 6 in 10 were due to medical causes. What is it "worth" to our society to ease that kind of pain? It's not in the purview of the CBO to say.

That's just one of several reasons why the budgetary impact over 10 years of a program of long-term reforms is such a poor metric for judging its value. First, the very same preliminary CBO estimates that are being used to gin up fear of a budget-busting boondoggle that will saddle our grandkids with debt for generations to come also suggest that the proposals would extend health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Why such a significant improvement in the health and economic security of so many real people should be expected to come at no cost to the government's balance sheet is a mystery.

Second, it fundamentally obscures the actual terms of the debate in Congress. Leaders in both the House and Senate have promised that the final legislation will be fully-funded -- "deficit neutral" -- and the battle lines have in fact been drawn not only around what form the final bill will take, but also how to pay for it.

Moreover, the narrative is based only on the impact of the proposals on the federal budget in isolation, all but ignoring the larger effect that fixing the system (if done right) might have on the economy as a whole. Under consideration are various proposals designed to rein in the spiraling cost of health care across the entire system.

So these are not sunk costs, but investments that analysts expect will have a significant pay-off. A study by David Cutler of Harvard and the Rand Corporation's Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin estimated that just three elements within the larger proposals offered by Democrats so far -- all of which come with start-up costs in the beginning -- would result in $550 billion in savings to the larger health care system over the next 10 years (PDF):

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/pdf/2trillion_solution.pdf

Those kinds of savings are desperately needed over the longer term -- the status quo, if allowed to continue on track, threatens to undermine the competitiveness of American business and leave more and more people without coverage (researchers have found that fast-rising premiums, more than any other factor, has driven the decades-long growth in the number of uninsured Americans).  And skyrocketing premiums force employers to squeeze wages, which impacts communities' tax revenues and deprives the economy of consumer dollars.

So the more salient question is: how can we possibly afford not to fix the current system? In 1960, we spent less than 5 percent of GDP on health care and all but a small number of working-age Americans had access to care. Today, health care spending represents around 17 percent of our economic output, and about one in six lack coverage. And, according to virtually every projection out there, it's only going to get worse unless we make substantial reforms soon.

In 2007, the U.S. spent an average of $7,290 per person on health in total (both public and private care). The average costs in other wealthy countries -- generally with better outcomes -- was $2,964. Here's a graphic representation of where we're likely to go in terms of costs if we leave things as they stand:

http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/blogimage_cbohealth.gif

As economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute wrote, the non-budgetary effects of fixing the system "will pay off big for American families in the form of lower premiums, co-pays, and space for wage growth."

Bivens adds, "The reason is simple: health care is an area where the more costs are loaded up on the federal government, the more efficiently care tends to be delivered overall." Bivens points out that although the U.S. spends far more than other advanced countries on health care, far fewer of those dollars are in the public sector, and suggests that the difference is a major reason why we get far worse results (in terms of access, life expectancy at birth, our chances of living until age 60 and most other meaningful metrics).

To illustrate the savings built into public-sector health spending, he goes on to cite an analysis by the Lewin Group of competing approaches to reform that measures the impact on both federal spending and overall health spending. The results are summarized in this graphic:

http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_lewin.jpg

On the left, is Pete Stark's, D-Calif., proposal for a single-payer system (one that closely mirrors John Conyers', D-MICH., HR 676, which has 85 co-sponsors in the House). As you can see, while it extends coverage to everyone -- which obviously costs money -- it is the only approach studied that would also result in a reduction of health care spending overall.

In the middle is a hybrid along the lines of the House bill (the Lewin Group used a similar proposal promoted by the Commonwealth Fund). According to Bivens' analysis, although "federal health spending [would] rise" as the system was first implemented, the "increases in federal spending … are accompanied by large reductions in spending by households and businesses. Net total health spending would rise by less than $18 billion, an amount that is more than explained" by new funding to cover the previously uninsured.

The right column, appropriately, shows the impact of Mike Enzi's, R-WYOM., plan, a boilerplate conservative proposal based on offering tax cuts to those who purchase private insurance and slightly expanding eligibility for Medicaid. It does increase federal spending by slightly less than the other approaches analyzed, but in the process it also increases total health care costs more than the amount of tax dollars sunk into the plan, while insuring only the relatively small number of people who make just a bit more than the current cut-off for Medicaid.

But even that standard doesn't tell the whole story. Looking only at how the current proposals impact health spending over a 10-year window ignores the longer-term impact they might have. For example, contained within both the Senate and House bills are provisions that would create more incentives for preventive care. Most analysts agree that prevention costs a lot less than waiting for people to develop serious illnesses and then treating them, as we now do, but those savings can only be fully realized over the long term. If a young obese person visits a doctor whom he or she might not have seen because of a lack of insurance, and as a result of that visit makes changes that prevent him or her from developing diabetes -- with all its attendant complications -- it will save the health care system a small fortune, but probably not for several decades.

Finally, there's a sad irony to this whole discussion -- one that few commenters have bothered to note. It is true that the potential savings contained in the proposals currently on the table are limited, but it is also true that the reason for that shortcoming is that Congressional leaders have ushered through a series of bills that are far less expansive than progressive reformers have long advocated, and that's only been done to mollify the very same Dems and Republicans -- those ideologically opposed to the effort and/or especially cozy with the "disease-care" industry -- who are now complaining about the limited potential for savings (It's enough to make your head spin).

Just consider the "public insurance option." While progressives were promised a "robust" public insurance program that would be open to all comers, what emerged from the Senate HELP Committee and from the leaders of three House committees was a pale shadow of what had been touted during last fall's campaign season. Instead of insuring as many as 130 million Americans as candidate Obama suggested his public option would, lawmakers restricted eligibility for the program in such a way that the CBO's preliminary estimate suggested that just 10 million Americans would be enrolled in the public insurance plan by 2019. (That's out of about 30 million who could buy insurance -- either public or private -- through the publicly-run insurance exchanges.) This was a nod to the power of the insurance industry -- nothing more, nothing less.

In designing a (pretty good) system, but then tightly controlling who could gain access to it, the potential for cost-containment -- through greater economies of scale, more bargaining power with providers and a decrease in the shuffling of paperwork that's estimated to account for about 30 percent of our health spending -- has been greatly diminished.

So, next time you see some congressional meat-puppet on TV discussing how much a plan will cost, or lamenting its limited potential for cost-containment, keep in mind that it's his or her ideology that is directly to blame for those shortcomings.

It's only because of pressure from industry groups, Republicans and Blue Dog Dems that congressional leaders took single-payer off the table (and threw advocates out of the room) and gave us a limited public insurance option -- a pale shadow of what reformers had been promised. Now, those same forces are bent on killing an already watered-down proposal. If they succeed, we can expect more human suffering, more outlandish increases in premiums, more people being denied care, an increase in the numbers of uninsured and a continued drag on the American economy.

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

The Truth about Socialized Medicine

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Audrey Mayer
July 28, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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I have been hearing a lot of pundits and politicians bemoan "socialized medicine" and its supposed inefficiencies and inequities. These horror stories are never accompanied by data, just hearsay and anecdotes from "a friend of a friend" in Canada or the United Kingdom. Rarely have I heard from people who have themselves experienced a universal public health care system. As one of those people, I thought I should speak up.

While living in Finland for three years, I experienced socialized medicine up close and personal. I gave birth to my son there.

Finland's public health care system is run by a government agency called KELA, and the doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health care workers are government employees. KELA usually covers 100% of the cost of most services at public clinics, with small copayments for prescriptions and hospital stays that are scaled to a patient's income. Finland also has many private clinics that are available to those who want to use them, where patients pay the extra cost of the private service (KELA will pay up to what the service would cost at a public clinic). When you visit a clinic or hospital you present your KELA card at the reception desk, and if a payment is necessary you can pay at the clinic, or a bill can be sent to your home.

All Finnish citizens and permanent residents are eligible for KELA benefits, as are immigrants on work and political asylum visas. I was eligible for the KELA system because I was in Finland on a work visa, and I paid income and social services taxes from my paychecks. Yes the taxes were high, about 40% of my gross pay. However, it is comparable to my take-home pay here in the US once I factor in my health insurance premiums, deductibles, and copayments, along with my income and social security taxes.

The care that I received in Finland throughout my pregnancy and childbirth, and for the first 9 months of my son's life, was simply amazing. I saw the same nurse and doctor for monthly pregnancy checks (and later they were my son's primary medical caregivers); their offices were in the same hallway. Both women knew us by name and by sight, and always remembered what we had discussed for the previous visit. Routine ultrasounds were performed at the maternity hospital; my nurse made each appointment for me and I simply showed up at the hospital for the procedure. When my labor started I headed to the maternity hospital, and the hospital's nurses and doctors knew exactly who I was, as my medical files were available to them through KELA's computerized filing system. (Patients must sign a form that allows their medical files to be accessible by other medical facilities, so a patient's privacy rights are protected.) Every nurse coming on duty
reviewed my file before seeing me, and so my discussions with them were focused on what my son and I needed at the moment, not what had been done during the previous shifts. After my emergency Cesarean operation and a four day stay in the hospital, only one bill was waiting for us when we got home, for a total of 260 Euros.

I never had to wait to see a medical professional, nor was any necessary procedure delayed or denied. Every nurse and doctor I saw was caring and knowledgeable, and spent whatever time was necessary to make sure that I received the care I needed.

I have now been living and working back in the US for 6 months, and already I have had problems with my health insurance plan through my employer. I found out the hard way (that is, at the doctor's office after my son's vaccination visit) that my son had been arbitrarily dropped from my plan months before, even though I had been paying the premiums for the family plan all along. It took almost a week of phone calls to get him reinstated. All the while, I privately wondered if the two ear infections he had had in the spring had prompted some computer at the health insurance company to calculate that he was "overusing" the system, and automatically drop his coverage.

That may seem like paranoid thinking, but I have seen it all before. In 2001, my mother was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Instead of focusing her strength and attention on recovering from a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, she spent much of her time arguing with the health insurance company and the hospital over bills she had already paid, and routine treatments that should have been covered by her insurance plan. Ultimately she lost her insurance altogether when she lost her job, and she has since been living in remission, uninsured.

When these pundits and politicians go onto national television and spew all sorts of false rhetoric about the evils of socialized medicine, it makes my blood boil. They are doing an incredible disservice to their fellow Americans, both those with and without health insurance. For every anecdote they have about a Canadian waiting six months for necessary open heart surgery, I can find twenty Americans for whom that equally necessary surgery is completely out of reach. Now is the time for an honest assessment about what (if anything) can be salvaged from our current system, and to put a system in place that does what it is supposed to do: provide health care.

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Audrey Mayer is an assistant professor at Michigan Technological University, focused on sustainability research and education.

The 'Bipartisan Compromise' Scam

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Cenk Uygur
July 28, 2009 - Huffington Post

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So, some of the top corporatist Democrats and Republicans in the Senate sat around a table in the Finance Committee for awhile pretending to sweat out a compromise and then came out with exactly what we thought they would -- a health care proposal that benefits the health care companies above all. Shocking. What did we expect?

Max Baucus is the ring leader of this merry band of six senators. Seven out of his top ten donors are ... health care companies (he has received close to $4 million from the health care industry). You don't say? And then he crafts a proposal that screws the average citizen and helps those same companies. I never could have predicted.

Look at the two Democratic proposals they decided to jettison: The public option and employer mandates. The public option would clearly make health insurance cheaper for the average American and for the government overall. But it would also give the private insurance companies real competition -- so, we can't have that.

Employer mandates might bother some of the top corporations in the country, so we can't have that either. Better to let employees get siphoned off into government subsidies. But wait, wouldn't that make our budget problem worse and not better? Aren't all of these senators pretending to care about the budget and deficit? Oh I forgot, as long as the corporations get their way, none of the rest of this really matters.

In fact, if it turns out health care reform costs more in the long run, well, that's great because then you can kill real reform easier the next time around by pretending it costs too much. Everyone wins -- except you.

So, why are the Democratic senators going along with this scam? Because they get paid by the same guys as the Republicans. That's how life usually works -- you follow the orders of whoever paid you. In this case, the politicians get elected by raising more money than their competitors, and they get their money from corporate lobbyists. So, whose orders do you think they're going to follow?

Given this state of affairs, it's a minor miracle there are as many Democrats for the public option as there are now. But the ones who actually care to get this done are not the ones coming up with fake compromises with Republicans and the health care industry. They are the ones insisting on a public option. If you negotiate that away, you never had any real interest in reform.

Saying you're going to do health care reform without a public option is kind of like saying you're going to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by invading Iraq. It misses the point -- on purpose. It promises to do more harm than good. And it's what was planned all along.

So, will this be our Waterloo if we allow the American people to be tricked into a "bipartisan compromise" that actually compromises real reform?

It will be so easy for the politicians to pretend to be brave and sign on to this as if they are doing something magnanimous by compromising and getting some sort of health care package through. And you can bet your bottom dollar the press will go along with the charade.

So, that only leaves us to object. And we can't do it meekly. We have to scream it from the rooftops. Otherwise, they will be perfectly happy to ignore us and sign on to this fraudulent proposal as if it's real health care reform. So, are you going to let them do it? Or are you going to insist on real reform and real change this time around?

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Cenk Uygur is host of The Young Turks, the first ever live, daily web television talk show. The Young Turks are now on XM Satellite Radio 8-10AM ET (XM 167).

TOON

World Will Warm Faster Than Predicted in Next Five Years

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New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics

Duncan Clark
July 27, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun's activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.

The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.

The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind's paper suggests. A particularly hot autumn and winter could add to the pressure on policy makers to reach a meaningful deal at December's climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Bob Henson, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said: "To claim that global temperatures have cooled since 1998 and therefore that man-made climate change isn't happening is a bit like saying spring has gone away when you have a mild week after a scorching Easter." Temperature highs and lows

1998

Hottest year of the millennium

Caused by a major El Niño event. The climate phenomenon results from warming of the tropical Pacific and causes heatwaves, droughts and flooding around the world. The 1998 event caused 16% of the world's coral reefs to die.

1957

Most sunspots in a year since 1778

The sun's activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. The late 1950s saw a peak in activity and were relatively warm years for the period.

1601

Coldest year of the millennium

Ash from the huge eruption the previous year of a Peruvian volcano called Huaynaputina blocked out the sun. The volcanic winter caused Russia's worst famine, with a third of the population dying, and disrupted agriculture from China to France.

An Incoherent Truth

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Paul Krugman
July 27, 2009 - The New York Times

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Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

But he can't — because the Blue Dogs aren't making sense.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.

On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they're currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies — subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.

Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.

The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.

So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?

Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it's tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year's big Bush tax cut — a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?

But it's actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan's cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.

There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.

But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid — and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.

So what do the Blue Dogs want?

Maybe they're just being complete hypocrites. It's worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition's founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group's creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.

One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin's footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it's because they're nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.

But I guess I'm not quite that cynical. After all, today's Blue Dogs are politicians who didn't go the Tauzin route — they didn't switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.

Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can't extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We'll soon find out.

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Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

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Bill Maher
July 24, 2009 - Huffington Post

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How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population ­-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

TOON

The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide

Satellite images of polar ice sheets taken in July 2006 and July 2007 showing the retreating ice during the summer.

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Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Damian Carrington
July 26, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanize Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometers of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

"These are one-meter resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic," said Thorsten Markus of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-metre resolution is the dimension that's been missing."

Disappearing summer sea ice poses considerable dangers, scientists have warned. Ice shelves are used by animals such as polar bears as platforms for hunting seals and other sea creatures. Without them, they could starve. In addition, ice reflects solar radiation. Without that process, the Arctic sea could warm up even more. The phenomenon threatens to set off runaway heating of the planet, say climatologists.

The latest revelations have triggered warnings from scientists that they no longer have the funds to keep a comprehensive track of climate change. Last week the head of the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Professor Jane Lubchenco, warned that the gathering of satellite data - crucial to predicting future climate changes - was now at "great risk" because America's aging satellite fleet was not being replaced.

"Our primary focus is maintaining the continuity of climate observations, and those are at great risk right now because we don't have the resources to have satellites at the ready and taking the kinds of information that we need," said Lubchenco, who was appointed by Obama. "We are playing catch-up."

Even before her warning, scientists were saying that America, the world's scientific superpower, was virtually blinding itself to climate change by cutting funds to the environmental satellite programs run by the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. A report by the National Academy of Sciences this year warned that the environmental satellite network was at risk of collapse.

In February, a NASA satellite carrying instruments to produce the first map of the Earth's carbon emissions crashed near Antarctica only three minutes after lift-off.

The satellite would have measured carbon emissions at 100,000 points around the planet every day, providing a wealth of data compared to the 100 or so fixed towers currently in operation in a land-based network.

The NOAA is under additional pressure to provide environmental data because of the re-emergence of the El Niño climate phenomenon, where warming of the tropical Pacific causes heatwaves, droughts and flooding around the world. June's land and sea surface temperatures were the second hottest on record, and scientists are predicting this will be the warmest decade in recorded history. The last major El Niño was in 1998, the hottest year in recorded history.

The Obama administration has already taken steps to tackle America's flagging scientific lead. The president's economic recovery plan allotted $170m (£100m) to help close the gaps in climate modelling. The NOAA is seeking an additional $390m in its 2010 budget to upgrade environmental satellites, and help make data more available to researchers and government officials.

Why Nuclear Energy Is Not the Answer to Climate Change

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Ben Williams
July 26, 2009 - Examiner.com

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It's funny. People really believe that nuclear power is emissions free. Powering cities with nuclear, they propound, is the panacea to climate change. And yet, if you really take a look at the fuel cycle, it is obvious nuclear energy is, in fact, emissions intensive.

First off the ore needs to be mined. This involves drilling, explosions, heavy equipment. Even at the EPA standard of 15 grams of carbon per break horsepower engine hour, this translates to a lot of carbon. Then the ore needs to be shipped to a processing facility, or mill.

Here, twenty-four hours a day, heavy equipment loads the ore into a hopper, the intake into the semi-autogenous grinding mill. This grinding mill uses electricity (coal) to turn an enormous steel drum filled with metal tumbling balls. Additionally, tons -- yes tons -- of concentrated sulfuric acid are needed to help leach the uranium from the ore, among quantities of other highly caustic chemicals, all of which must be prepared on industrial scales and shipped to the facility.

After a number of other mechanical operations, all of them energy intensive, the ore must be dried in an oven, where, twenty-four hours a day, countless kilo-watt hours are burned heating the rock to temperature.

Finally, the processed ore, now 'yellow cake', has to be boxed up, sealed in steel drums (refined and produced industrially), and then shipped to market.

Then, of course, it needs to be reacted with hexaflourine, or some other chemical, to be refined and turned into the uranium rods that are used in the reactor core. Only now can the power be said to be emissions free: once the rods are installed and operational, powering generators with their nuclear heat.

Of course, after a few months the rods are spent. They then need to be safely disposed of -- or, more accurately, buried somewhere where no one will notice them, contained for 1,000 years, after which they become someone else's problem (probably the DOE or EPA). They must be safely interred for over four billion years. Yes, they need to be baby-sat for an amount of time that exceeds the current age of the Earth.

Because a nuclear core demands fresh, refined uranium, there is a constant use-cycle -- an unstoppable appetite -- that, ultimately pollutes in manifold ways:

1.The diesel burned in extracting the ore produces CO2, CO, NOX, SOX, dioxins, VOCs among the other expected particulates from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels.

2.The dust produced from mining becomes airborne and settles on downwind communities, increasing the cancer rate noticeably.

3.The diesel burnt in shipping the heavy rock to processing produces the same slew of pollutants as the heavy mining machinery, while trailing radioactive dust along the way.

4.The mill itself burns up millions of KWh every year, KWh generated, in this day and age, almost exclusively from burning coal -- high SO2, H2SO3 and H2SO4 meet heavy metals like Hg with the clouds of greenhouse gases.

5.The mill must vent many toxic gases as it processes the ore. It must store radioactive slurry in the ground, hoping it will evaporate so the tailings can be capped. Groundwater and runoff pollution occurs. Once capped, the tailings are radioactive for billions of years. Future contamination becomes a certainty. (Just, the mill operators hope, not in their lifetime.)

6.Shipping the yellow cake to market. There are only two enrichment plants in the Northern United States, and one of them is in Canada. Long trips equal large emissions. Much of the yellow cake will be shipped overseas, adding emissions from large container vessels and potential maritime spills to the list.

7.The enrichment facility then vents toxic gases from the reagents used in reducing the yellow cake to weapons-grade uranium.

8.The rods are shipped to power plants, necessitating the fourth round of distribution-related emissions.

9.The rods are used, then spent, sealed up, and transported to a nuclear waste dump -- more emissions, more radioactive decay along public roads and waterways.

10.Countless emissions result from policing the waste site.

Of course, none of this includes the emissions from the industrial-scale production of the reagents needed by the uranium refining cycle. Not to mention their weekly delivery to processing mills and enrichment facilities.

Nor does it take into account the 'depleted' uranium used as munitions (which, despite what you might infer from its name, is actually enriched -- it is depleted of the less radioactive isotopes). That causes enough pollution to contaminate our armed-forces personnel before it's even fired! Let alone the land where it is unleashed.

The whole thing is utterly non-sustainable. And no model on which to base future, responsible energy production. So why all the hoo-ha? Simple. Uranium allows, not so much for clean energy, but centralized energy production. Centralized energy production -- aside from being grossly inefficient from the distribution angle, losing more than 7% of all energy generated -- means centralized profits. Same, boring story we're all tired of hearing about. Corporate profits should no longer trump the public right to choose viable, alternative energy. Making the right choice means sharing the benefits of energy production: Not letting a small group of corporate elitists eat the whole pie while pushing the future costs (which approach infinity) onto every subsequent generation of human beings, ever.

Wake up. This is madness. And it won't stop until we hold CORPORATE GREED accountable. Haven't you had enough of this yet?

.....

Ben Williams is the executive Director of the Colorado Renewable Energy Cooperative and Manager of the Energy Services and Consulting company, Getting Climate Change Handled, LLC (GCCH). He lives in Southwest Colorado, in San Miguel County, at the fork in the road – between a sustainable future & the wreckage of an unchecked energy agenda.

Top 1% Receive One-Third Of All Pay In The U.S., But Congress Is Still Afraid Of A Surtax

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Pat Garofalo
July 21,2009 - ThinkProgress.org

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The New York Times reported today that Democratic leaders, "bowing to unease among lawmakers and governors in their own party," are reconsidering the House Ways and Means committee's proposal to implement a surtax on the richest one percent of Americans as a way of financing a portion of health care reform.

There has indeed been a lot of pushback against the surtax proposal, which prompted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to suggest that only households making more than $1 million should be subject to it, instead of the graduated scale starting at $350,000 that Ways and Means proposed.

But those feeling squeamish about the tax should take a look at this analysis in the Wall Street Journal, which shows how big a slice of the income pie the rich are currently receiving:

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries. Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total U.S. pay in 2007, the latest figures available. The compensation numbers don't include incentive stock options, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock units and certain benefits.

In the five years ending in 2007, earnings for American workers rose 24 percent, while the highest-paid saw a 48 percent increase. So as Kevin Drum noted, "in other words, the executives got a 48% increase, the rest of us got approximately nothing, and it all averaged out to 24%." And to top it all off, median pay raises for this year and next are set to be the lowest in decades.

Income growth in America for the last few decades has been overwhelmingly concentrated at the top. Between 1979 and 2006, the inflation-adjusted after-tax income of the richest 1 PERCENT of households increased by 256 percent, compared to 21 percent for families in the middle income quintile. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, households in that richest one percent "had $617 billion more income in 2006 (or $656 billion more if measured in 2009 dollars) than they would have had if the 1979 income distribution still prevailed."

Increasing taxes on this small percentage of people — who have done very well for a very long time — would raise revenue to put toward health reform, which is the single biggest problem for America's bottom line. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said, "it certainly is okay for me to tell my friends on Wall Street, who just got a bonus of $600,000, they're going to pay more in taxes so we can lower health care costs in America."

TOON

Sorta nice but also creepy and disturbing.

In a trend so rich in weirdness it deserves a John Prine song, D.C. lobbyists are hiring homeless people to stand in line for them in order to get coveted seats at key hearings. The practice – complete with a website – gives money and stature to people who desperately need it, while using them to facilitate policies that often work against their interests.

"I'm a part of something today and I'm very happy about that," says Williams Howard Johnson Jr., in line since midnight for a 10 a.m. climate-change bill hearing.

- Common Dreams

Morgan Stanley Sets Aside 72% of Revenue for Employees’ Pay

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Christine Harper
July 22, 2009 - Bloomberg

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Morgan Stanley set aside 72 percent of its second-quarter revenue for compensation and benefits, more than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or JPMorgan Chase & Co., amid a "war for talent" with rivals that generate more money.

"It was a very good quarter to be a Morgan Stanley employee," said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. "I'm not so sure it was so good to be a Morgan Stanley shareholder."

The average ratio of compensation to revenue at securities firms this decade has been about 48 percent, Hintz said, calling Morgan Stanley's figure "pretty extraordinary." Chief Executive Officer John Mack, 64, is under pressure to increase pay after Goldman Sachs set aside a record $11.4 billion for salaries, benefits and bonuses in the first half and JPMorgan Chase & Co. boosted investment-bank compensation by 37 percent.

First-half compensation expenses at Morgan Stanley, the biggest U.S. brokerage, dropped 14 percent to $5.91 billion as revenue plunged 40 percent. (See table, below.) The firm reported a second-quarter loss from continuing operations of $159 million that was bigger than analysts estimated. Goldman Sachs last week posted record earnings of $3.44 billion.

"The war for talent seems to be as hot as ever, I'm not sure that's sustainable," Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, said in an interview today.

The number of employees rose to 62,215 at the end of June, which included 20,004 people from the company's new Morgan Stanley Smith Barney retail brokerage joint venture with Citigroup Inc.

Repaying TARP

Morgan Stanley last month repaid $10 billion to the U.S. government plus dividends to shake off restrictions on the size of bonuses it can award.

"If it's seen that Goldman's the place where you're going to get compensated, that's obviously going to lead to some type of a talent drain at some point," said Ben Wallace, an analyst at Grimes & Co. in Westborough, Massachusetts, which manages $750 million in assets. "Morgan Stanley's big challenge, whether it's compensation or risk or earnings outlooks, is going to be differentiating themselves from Goldman Sachs."

Last year Morgan Stanley slashed compensation costs by 26 percent, including a 50 percent average reduction in bonuses for all employees except for financial advisers, as the firm's revenue tumbled 12 percent. The firm also changed pay practices so it can recoup a portion of employees' cash bonuses if problems arise in subsequent years.

This year, as competition for workers increased, Morgan Stanley raised base salaries for top executives to make up for a decline in bonuses.

Six Months

In the second quarter, Morgan Stanley's compensation expense of $3.88 billion was 72 percent of the quarter's $5.41 billion of revenue. For the first six months of the year, the firm's $5.91 billion expense was 71 percent of the $8.36 billion of revenue.

Goldman Sachs's first-half expenses for pay were up 33 percent from a year earlier and was enough to give each worker at Goldman Sachs $386,429 for the period. Goldman set aside 49 percent of revenue in the first six months of the year for salaries, benefits and bonuses.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. set aside $6.01 billion in the first half for investment bank employees' compensation, up 37 percent from a year earlier, even as the number of people employed at the investment bank fell 30 percent. The division's compensation makes up 38 percent of the revenue it generated in the six-month period, down from 51 percent in the same period a year earlier.

Investment banks have traditionally awarded a large portion of employees' compensation in the form of year-end bonuses tied to the performance of the firm and the individual. The more senior an employee, the bigger percentage of their pay typically comes in the form of the year-end bonus. Payments are often made in restricted stock that can't be cashed out for several years.

The following table compares revenue, compensation and employee numbers at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase's investment bank in the first half:

First-Half Revenue, Compensation and Head Count:

               Revenue       Comp       Employees Comp/Employee

Morgan Stanley $8.36 bln     $5.91 bln  62,215*   $95,009

Goldman Sachs  $23.2 bln     $11.4 bln  29,400    $386,429

JPMorgan
Investment
Bank           $15,672 bln   $6.01 bln  25,783    $232,983

*Includes 20,004 employees related to the Morgan Stanley Smith
Barney joint venture with Citigroup Inc.

Source: Company reports.