Will Congress Put Useless Fighter Jets Above America?

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Jon Soltz
June 22, 2009 - Huffington Post

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Let me get this straight. The latest polls say three-quarters of the American people want a public option in health care, yet it's in question. But, Congress is about to throw $369 million (on a down-payment of $2 billion) for a dozen F-22 fighter jets that even the Pentagon doesn't want. Oh, and the money for it? It's coming out of funds that were set aside to clean up dangerous nuclear waste in the U.S.

Only in Washington.

For those not familiar with the F-22 and why it's a waste, let me explain. It's one of the most - if not the most advanced air-to-air fighters in the world.... To fight the Soviet Union's next generation fighters. That's right, that's why it was developed. The fighter has limited air-to-ground capabilities, which renders it pretty much useless in the wars we're fighting right now, and might be fighting well into the future. President Obama and Secretary Gates have rightly decided to shift our procurement to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which we could actually use, because of its air-to-ground and stealth capabilities.

Nevertheless, to play it safe, we've got 187 of the obsolete F-22s on-hand or in the pipeline already, just in case the Soviet Union ever comes through with their next-generation fighters. Secretary Gates asked for only four more, to complete what the Pentagon said it could use. After that, the military doesn't want any more of them. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz have publicly withdrawn support for it saying, "The time has come to move on."

Apparently not those looking out for defense contractors, though.

And so, Congress is about to use the Defense Authorization Bill to pay for fighters we don't need from Lockheed-Martin, while taking money from cleaning up nuclear waste. Six decades of U.S. nuclear weapons research, testing, and production activities have left dozens of Department of Energy sites contaminated by radioactive and hazardous waste. The contamination threatens workers, communities, and the environment, including major water supplies.

Now, other veterans and I aren't for cutting the Pentagon budget in a way that would hurt our troops in the field, or hurt our ability to defend America now or in the future. But, our money is best spent on equipment that is so desperately needed in Iraq and Afghanistan - items like the Stryker armored vehicle, which the troops and veterans of VoteVets.org have almost unanimously raved about, for its ability to maneuver while protecting them from IEDs. That helps us a lot more than planes sitting idle somewhere.

So, a warning. To any in Congress who vote to keep this money for the F-22 in, don't try to present it as a pro-military vote. The military doesn't want it. Troops can't use it. Most veterans would say they're not for it. And none of us are for letting dangerous nuclear waste continue to seep into our land and water. So don't try to tie this pork to troops and veterans.

In fact, those who really care about the military, troops, veterans, and America will vote to strip the money for the F-22 out. We'll be watching.

Obama's Health Reform Waterloo

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Dave Lindorff
June 21, 2009 - ThisCantBeHappening.net

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The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president's congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party's toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people, while leaving the profit centers of the current system--doctors, hospitals and the health insurance industry--in charge and in a position to continue to reap profits.

Watching President Obama address the American Medical Association was a cringe-inducing experience as he assured the assembled doctors he was not going to expand Medicare payments "broadly" to cover all patients, or end the current "piece-work reimbursement" system that has so enriched physicians, or as he told them that savings would "not come off your backs." It was particularly cringe-inducing when he told the AMA that he knew that making money was not why its members were in the profession, saying, "That is not why you became doctors. That is not why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That is not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in or makes you call a loved one to say it'll be fine. You did not enter this profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this profession to be healers--and that's what our health care system should let you be."

Oh please. I know there are plenty of wonderful doctors who are dedicated to their patients and to patient care. But I also know plenty of doctors who have told me how half their classmates in medical school were mainly in it for the money, and that study halls and cafeterias of American med schools echo with the conversations about what can be made working in particular specialties. Not to mention the corrupt and insidious profit-sharing arrangements doctors enter into with labs, CAT-Scan and MRI test centers, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses, to earn profits by sending patients for unnecessary tests and treatments.

One can only imagine what he would be saying to insurance industry executives about his "reform" plans.

Because Obama and Congressional Democrats are unwilling to cut themselves off from the lucrative campaign-funding bonanza that is the health care industry, they cannot address seriously either the cost or the access crisis that plagues health care in the US, and that makes health care in this country cost 20 percent of GDP--twice what it costs in any other modern nation on a per capita or GDP basis, and that still leaves one in six Americans without ready access to even routine health care.

The answer to this crisis is obvious: a single-payer "socialized" system, in which you still have private doctors, and private or publicly run hospitals, but where the government sets the payment rates for treatment, and provides all compensation to health care providers.

If Democrats in Congress were serious about health care reform, they would immediately order the Congressional Budget Office to conduct a cost study of instituting such a program--a study that would include an estimate of the savings to individuals and employers if health care costs were lifted entirely off their backs (because obviously it would require considerable new government revenue to fund a single-payer program, but that's only half the equation--the other half, the savings, is simply ignored by critics and doomsayers on the right and in the health care industry). Instead, Obama and the Democratic Congress are studiously avoiding even allowing any mention of the single-payer option. (A New York Times report today on the various health care plans working their way through Congress, and coming out of the White House, completely blacked out any mention of a single-payer bill in the House authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee, which the House leadership has prevented from even getting a token hearing.)

Obama's unwillingness to lead on this issue will doom his health care plan. There is obviously no way Congress is going to shake off its corrupt leech-like attachment to corporate sponsors and their cash-spreading lobbyists, but had the new president wanted to make a historic mark and cruise to victory in 2012, he could have, like President Lyndon Johnson before him in his campaign for Medicare in 1965, put himself solidly behind a single-payer plan and made the case that it could cut America's collective health bill in half while opening the door to every American.

Instead, he's likely to end up with worse than nothing--that is with even more uninsured Americans come 2012, and with health care costs moving up as a share of GDP--and could well find himself out of a job. The policy that his handlers, like White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, had conceived of as Obama's ticket to re-election, health care reform, could well prove instead to be his Waterloo.

That is if his adoption of a policy of expanded war in Afghanistan--another example of a failure to lead--doesn't prove to be this president's bigger policy disaster.

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Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains, and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment". His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Barack the Zionist

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Why President Obama's approach to settlements is better for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu's is.

Gershom Gorenberg
June 17, 2009 - Slate

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It took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 10 days, but he has finally responded to President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. On June 4, Obama challenged both Israelis and Palestinians to work toward a two-state solution. On Sunday, Netanyahu responded with an assent wrapped in so many preconditions as to render it virtually meaningless. Obama also demanded that Israel freeze the growth of its settlements in the West Bank. To this Netanyahu responded with defiant rejection.

Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the classic Zionist goal of a thriving democratic state with a Jewish majority. Netanyahu is undercutting that strategic goal by sticking to a Zionist tactic that became obsolete decades ago.

A look at the history of settlement shows why. Before 1948, settling the land was one method used by Zionists in building a new Jewish society and working toward independence. "Settlement" normally referred to an agricultural community. The idea was that Jews must return not only to their homeland, but to the soil itself. The intellectuals sent themselves to the countryside. Most settlements were either communes—kibbutzim—or cooperative farming villages—moshavim. Both were intended to be the foundation of a socialist society.

Settlement was also—perhaps primarily—a tool in the struggle between two national movements, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, over one homeland. Particularly after the first proposal to partition Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in 1937, the placement of new settlements was intended to stake a claim to more of Palestine and to determine the borders of the Jewish state-to-be. In the 1940s, kibbutzim also served as the base for the Palmah, the nascent Jewish army. Settlement was the tactic of a revolutionary movement.

In 1948, the revolution succeeded, and the state of Israel was established. Settlement, like the secret weapons caches under kibbutz cowsheds, became an anachronism. The state had an army. Its borders were set by armistice agreements. Romantic ideals notwithstanding, Israel developed as an urban, industrial society. The elected government set economic policy and eventually left socialism behind. The state's pressing challenge was not to extend Jewish hegemony over the land but to integrate the Arab national minority into its democracy.

And yet, in the words of Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those … that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs." Diamond's dictum was born out after Israel's conquests in the unexpected war of June 1967.

Israeli leaders deadlocked on what to do with the newly occupied territories, especially the West Bank. They regarded it as part of the Jewish homeland and valued it for making Israel more defensible. Yet some officials warned from the start that giving citizenship to the Palestinians of the West Bank would turn Israel into a binational state—and that ruling them without giving them rights would be seen as colonialism. "My government has decided not to decide," Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In the absence of considered policy, leaders and activists fell back almost reflexively on the obsolete tactic of settling the land. With no agreed overall plan, each new settlement asserted a permanent claim to rule a bit more territory. Initially, Labor Party governments established kibbutzim and moshavim. When the right-wing Likud party took power in 1977, it jettisoned that approach. Instead, it subsidized bedroom communities in the West Bank.

Thus did the suburban dream replace the socialist dream. Some politicians opposed settling in a particular area, but virtually none rejected settlement as such. It was, after all, a Zionist value.

This time, though, settlement did not build the state. It undermined the state. In October 1967, the government stopped printing maps with the prewar borders. In the countryside portrayed by those maps, settlements blurred the border between Israel and occupied territory. Legal changes allowed settlers to live under Israeli law while Palestinians lived under the law of military occupation. Whatever it is called, this two-tiered legal system undercuts democracy.

The settlements became Israel's largest ongoing public project. But the costs are scattered through the national budget, woven into outlays for the ministries of Defense, Housing, Education, Interior, and others. There is no overall total available. The lack of transparency not only prevents informed debate of the costs, it is another blow to democracy.

From the start, settlement activists and supportive officials have put their cause above the law. A Cabinet minister funded the very first settlement in occupied territory—in the Golan Heights in 1967—with money designated to give jobs to the unemployed. A recently leaked Israeli army database shows that more than 30 government-approved settlements are built partly on privately owned Palestinian land. Since the mid-1990s, in a massive rogue operation, more than 100 so-called "outpost" settlements have been established without legally required government approval—but with funding and other assistance from multiple government agencies.

Through settlement, the state of Israel has reverted to an acre-by-acre struggle between Jews and Palestinians for control of land. The settlement enterprise has reversed history, turning Israel from a state into a national movement. And the dilemma remains: Israel cannot be a democracy with a Jewish majority and at the same time rule the West Bank. The solution today, as it was when the United Nations debated the Palestine question in 1947, is partitioning the land between two states.

Netanyahu, looking backward, does not see this. Settlers, he said Sunday, are a "pioneering, Zionist community with values." His choice of language is revealing: It was during the pre-independence struggle that "pioneering" was the highest ideal. Obama, looking forward, recognizes that an end to settlement growth is an essential step toward division of the land. When that division takes place, it will not only bring the establishment of a Palestinian state. It will bring the re-establishment of Israel.

Whale meat trade increases, despite ban

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Jun 21, 2009 - AFP

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Oslo, Norway – Despite being officially illegal, the international trade in whale meat between the whale-hunting nations is quietly picking up again, say enviromental campaigners.

The issue has already become one of the flashpoints between pro- and anti-whaling campaigners in the run-up to the five-day annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which opens Monday.

Delegates at the conference, which this year will be in the Portuguese island of Madeira, will also debate the issue.

Japan, Norway, Iceland -- the main whaling nations -- all want to lift the ban on the trade, which is outlawed under the terms of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Despite the 1986 international moratorium on whale-hunting, Norway and Iceland have resumed whaling, having reserved their position on the moratorium. Japan uses an opt-out that allows whaling for scientific purposes.

After a gap of two decades, Japan started importing whale meat in 2008: a few tens of tonnes of Iceland whalemeat and less than 10 tonnes from Norway.

This year, the Nordic nations want to increase that amount. One Norwegian firm, Lofothval, has obtained export licences for 47 tonnes of whale meat.

Iceland plans on exporting half its quota of 100 small Minke whales or 150 Fin whales.

For Truls Gulowsen, the head of environmental campaigners Greenpeace in Scandinavia, it is a sign of their desperation.

"That shows the despair of the whaling industry, that can't sell its products in Norway and so is trying to get rid of them abroad at any price," he said.

"But the Japanese eat less and less whale meat and their warehouses are alreday full of products that the local hunters can't get rid of."

Industry professionals reject that argument. For them, the Japanese market is a promising new market offering higher prices -- even if they will not discuss the precise figures.

"Japan, that's more than 120 million inhabitants," said Rune Froevik of Lofothval.

"Certainly, some of them still have to get their palates accustomed to a product that they haven't all tasted, but they are receptive because a large part of their diet already comes from the sea.

And the Japanese consume the fat of the whale, which in Norway is considered a waste product.

"Each catch becomes more profitable because a small Minke whale contains 1.5 tonnes of meat and 500 kilos of blubber," said Froevik.

As well as their reservations over the 1986 whaling moratorium, Japan, Iceland and Norway have also questioned the need for having whales on the CITES list of endangered species.

That position leaves them free to trade among themselves in the meat.

"We have certainly tried to get the whale off this list but we have come up against political obstruction," said Oeystein Stoerkersen, who heads up Norway's Directorate for Nature Management.

"The experts, including those abroad, agree that the species we are hunting are not under threat, but certain decision-makers in the United Sates, Britain and in Germany or France are trying to scrounge votes by pandering to ill-informed public opinion," he said.

According to the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee, the North Atlantic has 30,000 Fin whales and 174,000 Minke whales.

For Norway that is enough to all the harpooning of about 1,000 whales a year.

Neo-Zen Moment of the Day

Confidential Memo Reveals US Plan to Provoke an Invasion of Iraq

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Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
June 21, 2009 - The Observer/UK

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A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Paraphrasing Bush's comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin."

Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo's contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men's frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.

Philippe Sands, QC, a professor of law at University College London who is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, said confidential material such as the memo was of national importance, making it vital that the inquiry is not held in private, as Brown originally envisioned.

In today's Observer, Sands writes: "Documents like this raise issues of national embarrassment, not national security. The restoration of public confidence requires this new inquiry to be transparent. Contentious matters should not be kept out of the public domain, even in the run-up to an election."

The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men's thinking on Iraq by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 - 13 days before the bombing campaign started.

In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document's contents - and the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK governments.

Many senior legal experts have expressed dismay that Chilcott has been selected to chair the inquiry as he is considered to be close to the security services after his time spent as a civil servant in Northern Ireland.

Brown had believed that allowing the Chilcott inquiry to hold private hearings would allow witnesses to be candid. But after bereaved families and antiwar campaigners expressed outrage, the prime minister wrote to Chilcott to say that if the panel can show witnesses and national security issues will not be compromised by public hearings, he will change his stance.

Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff under Blair, described the memo as "quite shocking". He said that it underscored why the Chilcott inquiry must be seen to be a robust investigation: "It's important that the inquiry is not a whitewash as these inquiries often are."

This year, the Dutch government launched its own inquiry into its support for the war. Significantly, the inquiry will see all the intelligence shared with the Dutch intelligence services by MI5 and MI6. The inquiry intends to publish its report in November - suggesting that confidential information about the role played by the UK and the US could become public before Chilcott's inquiry reports next year.

Closing the Farm to Plate Knowledge Gap

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Rob Smart
June 19, 2009 - Civil Eats

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In the battle for the hearts and minds (and pocket books) of everyday Americans, the large corporate players in today's industrial food system must be pleased.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap between them has grown so expansive that misunderstandings rule the day. Credit the gap to industrial specialization and consumer marketing, which I will return to in a moment. Often times, these misunderstandings turn personal, further driving apart two groups that have much to gain by working together.

How this benefits the industrial food players may not be obvious, but by fighting amongst ourselves, we are paying less attention to the mechanized system generating massive amounts of unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly food and unprecedented concentrations of profits.

For the average consumer, and likely many farmers, the "black box" of industrial food is a mystery. There is little to no transparency, except through increasingly common investigative journalism and documentaries, which industrialists and their associations quickly line up to discredit.  Keeping us in the dark allows industrial food processors and large food retailers to paint an idyllic picture of grassy fields and red barns backed annually by an estimated $33 billion1 spent on advertising to reinforce a desired, yet highly inaccurate image of where our food comes from.

Unfortunately, they have most of us fooled, which is why it is critical that we - consumers and farmers alike - find a shared set of priorities to unite our voices in securing safe, healthy, tasty food for generations to come. Let us abandon overused stereotypes and language that divides us, and instead concentrate on educating consumers about where the food they eat comes from, including industrial and "alternative" food systems.

Closing the farm-to-plate knowledge gap won't be easy. With the earliest advances in agriculture resulting in food surpluses, people, no longer physically needed on the farm, moved to urban centers to pursue non-agricultural careers. As the years passed and the complexity of the food system increased, people came to rely, exclusively in most cases today, on food processors and retailers to provide for them. In effect, we traded knowledge for convenient, cheap food.

On the surface, this seems like a great tradeoff, and for most of agriculture's history it has been. Civilizations prospered. Farmers made a decent living. Consumers readily found fresh produce, meats, and other ingredients to prepare wholesome, nutritious, tasty meals. But things started to change. Industrialization intensified. Corporate consolidation accelerated. Seeds became intellectual property (protected by patents). High-paid lobbyists proliferated. Politicians bowed. And, most important, people stopped paying attention.

Take a snap shot of today's food system. Study the details. What you find are a number of increasingly dramatic side effects that most people are not aware of, most of which are getting worse.

  •Today's average farmer makes about 55 percent less money for the food they grow than they did 50 years ago. According to the USDA, farmers' share of consumer food expenditures dropped from about $0.40 per dollar in 1950 to around $0.19 in 2006. The balance of consumer expenditures, termed the Marketing Bill, goes to "value-add" (i.e., industrial food companies).

  •While farmers' financial situations have deteriorated, food manufacturers' fortunes have skyrocketed to the tune of $3.1 trillion in revenues per year with above average profit margins. Judging by the fact that the Top 50 Food Processors and Top 50 Supermarket & Grocery Chains all have over $1.0 billion in annual sales, with Wal-Mart topping the list at nearly $100 billion, increasing concentrations of power are clear.

  •One billion people are obese, thanks in part to value-add convenience foods (e.g., fast food, prepared meals, snacks, sodas), massive advertising campaigns, and time-constrained lifestyles (e.g., two income households with kids). This, while another one billion people go hungry, bypassed because they are unable to provide profit margins required by industrial food.
 
•According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity (one of the "western diseases" attributed to diet) accounted for $75 billion in extra medical costs in 2003. The Journal of the American Medical Association attributed some 112,000 premature deaths in 2000 to obesity. These additional health care costs, half of which are paid for by taxpayers, have all but erased the cost-of-living savings claimed by the makers of cheap, convenient food. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 
  •Analysis by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization reports that agriculture contributes 14% of human-released greenhouse gases each year, through methane from livestock and rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, and fossil fuel use during production. In an era where controlling carbon emissions is critical, the industrialized food system must change or give up market share to environmentally friendly alternatives.

We have turned our food over to a system that doesn't have our best interests in mind, despite what billions of dollars of advertising tell us. Power is concentrated, not by farms or consumers, but by multi-national corporations. Increasing complexity rules the day, making it harder for even those in industry to keep food safe. And the halls of Congress are jammed with food system lobbyists fighting for more power, or, at a minimum, maintaining the status quo.

It's up to us - farmers and consumers - to take back control of the food we eat. At a minimum, we need to fight for the checks and balances needed to ensure safe, affordable, and environmentally-friendly food for generations to come. It won't be easy given the stacked deck industry is playing with. But by thoughtfully considering each other's perspectives, while separating ourselves from the complex, concentrated, industrial food system, we will find the common ground necessary to drive the change we seek.

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Rob Smart is a food entrepreneur focusing on regional food systems and consumer retail experiences. He blogs on alternative food systems at Every Kitchen Table.

Neo-Nazis are nothing new on American scene

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Ed Tant
June 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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He was an American naval officer who became an American Nazi. He claimed to regret having "fought on the wrong side" in World War II. His hatred for Jews, black people and anyone else who was not part of his "Aryan America" brought shame and sadness to his family members, who also were victims of his mad obsession.

He was George Lincoln Rockwell, and until he was gunned down by one of his own men in 1967 he served as the model, template and evil inspiration for later American Nazis such as James von Brunn, who fatally shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington earlier this month.

Like Rockwell, von Brunn is a former military man who hates blacks and Jews and embraces the deadly doctrines of the Third Reich. Like Rockwell, von Brunn's militant madness claimed family members as its first victims. Rockwell's parents had been vaudeville performers with many Jewish friends in the entertainment world, including Groucho Marx. They were heartbroken by their son's hatred. Von Brunn's murderous hatred caused emotional distress and embarrassment for his long-suffering wife and son.

Commander Rockwell, as he liked to be called, began his neo-Nazi crusade in the America of the late 1950s. He railed against the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and, despite the laughably small size of his American Nazi Party, Rockwell had a vaudevillian's ability to garner publicity with speeches and appearances on television, radio and college campuses.

In "American Fuehrer," his biography of Rockwell, author Frederick James Simonelli says the neo-Nazi "never commanded more than a few hundred loyalists and never rose above the status of a curiosity to most Americans. Yet his influence on the racist right in American politics is lasting and profound. ... Within the racist right, Rockwell holds a place of honor and homage." Though he was deservedly disdained by the vast majority of Americans during his life, today he is championed by racists and reactionaries such as James von Brunn, who have gone even more crazy than usual now that a black man resides in the White House.

Nazis are nothing new in America. Two decades before Rockwell agitated for an Aryan America, the German-American Bund gained thousands of members during the Great Depression. The Bund packed New York City's Madison Square Garden with a throng of thousands who rallied for homegrown Hitlerism here in the land of the free that is fertile soil for the growth of fascism during uncertain economic times.

In 1984, members of a neo-Nazi group called The Order shot and killed Alan Berg, a liberal, Jewish radio host whose talk show broadcast from Denver reached listeners in more than 30 states. Several years before right-wing radio's Rush Limbaugh had a national stage, Berg was informing and entertaining large and growing audiences with liberal lambastings of the reactionary right-wingers until he was killed by the cowardly curs and neo-Nazi nutcases of The Order.

Today, such hate groups as American Nazis are once again at work sowing their poison seeds of domestic terrorism and discord. One does not have to look far to read sentiments like those voiced by James von Brunn and his ilk who howl that President Obama is a Muslim or a socialist who was not born in America.

Back in 1950, nearly 60 years before the Department of Homeland Security would infuriate conservative TV talkers and online right-wing squawkers with warnings of terrorism from the reactionary wing of politics, journalist George Seldes was prescient and correct when he wrote, "The main threat to democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure."

Politicians screw around because they can

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Doug Thompson
June 17, 2009 - Capitol Hill Blue

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When then-President Bill Clinton had a chance to come clean about allowing White House intern Monica Lewinsky to nosh on the First Member, he looked America in the eye and lied, saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman...Ms. Lewinsky."

Years later, after he left office and appeared on 60 Minutes to promote his book, Clinton offered this admission on why he dallied with young Monica in the Oval Office.

"Because I could," he said.

Yes, he could. That's why so many politicians screw around. Because they can. Because politics gives them a chance to score. Were they not elected officials with at least the aura of power, most of these clowns couldn't get laid in a whorehouse.
Sen. John Ensign is the latest to admit he porked a campaign aide. He's not the first and he sure as hell won't be the last. But his position as a member of Congress provided him with more opportunity simply because he is there and some flock to elected officials like groupies to rock stars.

Politics is a heady business and the chance to score extends not only to elected officials but those who work for them. When I worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984, White House staffers and campaign aides would slip off their wedding rings as soon as Air Force One cleared the runway. The motto: Wheels up, rings off. Women who wouldn't give me a second look in ordinary life invited me back to their hotel room because I worked, at the time, for the President of the United States.

The lure of easy sex makes politicians risk their careers and their reputations without a second thought. Colorado Senator Gary Hart challenged reporters to follow him around when he ran for President and they did just that, catching Washington party girl Donna Rice sneaking out of his DC townhouse after spending the night.

John Edwards screwed around while his wife battled cancer. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was nailing a House committee staff member while publicly chastising Clinton for his adultery. Gingrich later dumped his wife to marry the staffer -- the second time he divorced because of an adulterous affair.

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer banged high-priced call girls. So does Lousiana Sen. David Vitter.

In the interest of equality, we should note that it's not just the male politicians who mess around. Congresswoman Mary Bono was a coed when she met Sonny Bono in his Palm Springs restaurant. Their affair led to the breakup of his marriage to his third wife. After Bono died in a skiing accident, May Bono ran for his Congressional seat and dated around before entering an adulterous relationship with Rep. Connie Mack IV. Mack dumped his wife of nine-and-a-half years to marry Bono.

Sexual stupidity is not limited to married politicians or heterosexual ones. Rep. Barney Frank, the most openly-gay member of Congress, suffered political embrassment when police arrested his live-in boyfriend for running a gay prostitution ring out of the Congressman's Capitol Hill home.

Former New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato may have summed it up best. When asked why so many elected officials get caught with their pants down, D'Amato replied: 'When the little head gets hard, the big head goes soft.'

Zen Cough of the Day

Deaths from tobacco far outstrip deaths from any individual and all other 'illicit' drugs combined.

Why don't countries who grow poppies, hemp, or coca, that the US has bombed with pesticides or sent in armies to destroy the crops, reciprocate and attack the tobacco fields in the US for growing such a dangerous drug?

- anonymous

Zen Moment of the Weekend

The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four points from April.

Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie.

- AlterNet

Resistance Is Puerile

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Ted Rall
Jun 16, 2009 - UExpress.com

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NEW YORK, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH -

At first glance, everything looks fine. Sixty-five years after the Nazi victory at D-Day brought this North American city into the fold of the Greater German Reich, the security situation is calm. Families stroll the sidewalks. Stores that haven't been boarded up are filled with browsers. Travelers line up to take the express elevator to the top of Manhattan's Adolf Hitler Tower to board express zeppelin service to Germania.

But not everyone is happy. Decades after being conquered by Germany, North American subjects of the Greater Reich are growing restive. "We would greatly appreciate it if you would consider withdrawing," reads the pointed graffiti on the side of a local SS recruiting station.

Why the anger? Six months after a new chancellor came to power amid promises of dramatic change, the Reich remains at war. Between the officially unemployed and the long-term dispossessed, 20 percent of North Americans are out of work. Auschwitz is closing and torture has been banned, but dissidents say Adolf Hitler III's reforms are merely window-dressing.

"He still reserves the right to use 'enhanced interrogation techniques,'" points out Seth, a 26-year-old who says he lives in the 'still cool' section of the Williamsburg gau of Brooklyn. "OK, so maybe he needs them. But the Auschwitz detainees are being transferred to Buchenwald and Dachau. What's with that? And now this 'Soviet surge.' This isn't the change we hoped for."

Seth is the twisted face of the Resistance, an umbrella term for the motley mix of militant factions dedicated to the overthrow of the occupation regime. Some are liberals opposed to human rights abuses. Some are leftists who want economic equality. Others oppose the Reich's wars, which they consider pointless and immoral. All say they're willing to use any means necessary.

Seth is so furious that he has even started a blog, SomewhatAnnoyed.net, where he catalogues a litany of complaints against Nazism. "People are afraid to post comments but I know they're out there, lurking. And I earn serious mid two-digits from BlogAds."

Whether it's Twittering, posting to Facebook pages or creating an iPhone app like iResist, such radical action against the authorities takes many forms. After her boyfriend was deported to the east, Greta vowed to write a letter to the editor to her local newspaper. "Once you commit yourself to the path of resistance against the fascist oppressor," she said, "you must accept that you will either end up dead or in prison. I'm OK with that." Although she hasn't gotten around to writing the letter yet-"I've been super busy with my book club, not to mention transferring my files from Blogger to Wordpress"-she says nothing can stop her from "ruthlessly smashing the infrastructure of dictatorship."

Bob and Ken blame GAFTA, the Germano-Antipodes Free Trade Agreement, for the loss of their jobs when their employer moved to New Zealand. Bored and broke, they wile away their afternoons plotting their revenge over chocolate-flavored caffeinated beverages at chain coffee shops with other disaffected partisans. "The German pigs have to go," says Bob. "We'll get them where it hurts." He is planning to think about organizing a poetry jam.

Terrorist sabotage was on the agenda at a recent meeting of their cell. "We should totally march around holding signs and chanting slogans," Bob suggested. "Maybe it would slow down traffic or something," he said, fantasizing that a busload of deportation victims might then go to their deaths later than scheduled. But getting a protest permit might require filling out a form, countered Ken. "Not to mention a fee," agreed Bob. "Anyway, protesting didn't work in the '60s. Did it?"

Denise, a fierce brunette in her late 30s, represents the ruling elite's worst nightmare. First, she obtained an MBA. Then she got a job on Wall Street. "I'm infiltrating the corporate capitalists' den, learning their methods from the inside," she said. "Once I've spent 30 or 40 years allaying their suspicions by doing everything they want and then some, I'll pose as a harmless retiree. They'll never see it coming!"

At this writing, the Gestapo had inexplicably disbanded the American division of its counterinsurgency operations.

Out of the Shadows

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Paul Krugman
June 19, 2009 - The New York Times

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Would the Obama administration's plan for financial reform do what has to be done? Yes and no.

Yes, the plan would plug some big holes in regulation. But as described, it wouldn't end the skewed incentives that made the current crisis inevitable.

Let's start with the good news.

Our current system of financial regulation dates back to a time when everything that functioned as a bank looked like a bank. As long as you regulated big marble buildings with rows of tellers, you pretty much had things nailed down.

But today you don't have to look like a bank to be a bank. As Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, put it in a widely cited speech last summer, banking is anything that involves financing "long-term risky and relatively illiquid assets" with "very short-term liabilities." Cases in point: Bear Stearns and Lehman, both of which financed large investments in risky securities primarily with short-term borrowing.

And as Mr. Geithner pointed out, by 2007 more than half of America's banking, in this sense, was being handled by a "parallel financial system" - others call it "shadow banking" - of largely unregulated institutions. These non-bank banks, he ruefully noted, were "vulnerable to a classic type of run, but without the protections such as deposit insurance that the banking system has in place to reduce such risks."

When Lehman fell, we learned just how vulnerable shadow banking was: a global run on the system brought the world economy to its knees.

One thing financial reform must do, then, is bring non-bank banking out of the shadows.

The Obama plan does this by giving the Federal Reserve the power to regulate any large financial institution it deems "systemically important" - that is, able to create havoc if it fails - whether or not that institution is a traditional bank. Such institutions would be required to hold relatively large amounts of capital to cover possible losses, relatively large amounts of cash to cover possible demands from creditors, and so on.

And the government would have the authority to seize such institutions if they appear insolvent - the kind of power that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation already has with regard to traditional banks, but that has been lacking with regard to institutions like Lehman or A.I.G.

Good stuff. But what about the broader problem of financial excess?

President Obama's speech outlining the financial plan described the underlying problem very well. Wall Street developed a "culture of irresponsibility," the president said. Lenders didn't hold on to their loans, but instead sold them off to be repackaged into securities, which in turn were sold to investors who didn't understand what they were buying. "Meanwhile," he said, "executive compensation - unmoored from long-term performance or even reality - rewarded recklessness rather than responsibility."

Unfortunately, the plan as released doesn't live up to the diagnosis.

True, the proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would help control abusive lending. And the proposal that lenders be required to hold on to 5 percent of their loans, rather than selling everything off to be repackaged, would provide some incentive to lend responsibly.

But 5 percent isn't enough to deter much risky lending, given the huge rewards to financial executives who book short-term profits. So what should be done about those rewards?

Tellingly, the administration's executive summary of its proposals highlights "compensation practices" as a key cause of the crisis, but then fails to say anything about addressing those practices. The long-form version says more, but what it says - "Federal regulators should issue standards and guidelines to better align executive compensation practices of financial firms with long-term shareholder value" - is a description of what should happen, rather than a plan to make it happen.

Furthermore, the plan says very little of substance about reforming the rating agencies, whose willingness to give a seal of approval to dubious securities played an important role in creating the mess we're in.

In short, Mr. Obama has a clear vision of what went wrong, but aside from regulating shadow banking - no small thing, to be sure - his plan basically punts on the question of how to keep it from happening all over again, pushing the hard decisions off to future regulators.

I'm aware of the political realities: getting financial reform through Congress won't be easy. And even as it stands the Obama plan would be a lot better than nothing.

But to live up to its own analysis, the Obama administration needs to come down harder on the rating agencies and, even more important, get much more specific about reforming the way bankers are paid.

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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.

Religious right leaders say it is anti-Christian to oppose hate... SAY WHAT?

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Ron Moore
June 17, 2009 - Examiner.com

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In the war of ideas those who believe only they have Truth on their side often find they provide the best ammunition for their opponents. This is certainly true in the hysterical reaction on the extreme religious right's opposition to hate crime legislation. They worry that prohibiting the encouragement of violence against certain groups will have a "chilling effect" on religious free speech.

Majority Leader Harry Reid has reaffirmed his plans to have the Senate take up a so-called hate-crimes bill before Congress' August recess.

In a Monday news conference, Reid, D-Nev., called hate crimes "a unique brand of evil."

"A violent act may physically hurt just a single victim and cause grief for loved ones," he said. "But hate crimes do more. They distress entire communities."

In response, Ashley Horne, federal policy analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said Reid has it backwards. A hate-crimes law, she said, could distress entire communities – particularly Christian churches.

"As we've seen in other nations where such laws are passed, they can have a chilling effect on the free speech of those who would simply share from the Bible God's views on issues such as homosexuality," she explained. "Hate-crimes laws are unnecessary in a civil society like ours based on the rule of law.

"All crimes are hate crimes," she added, "To give special status to certain groups of people allows courts to reach beyond punishing people for the illegal acts they commit and judge them for what they may or may not be thinking as they commit those acts."

As for Reid's pledge to push for a vote on a hate-crimes bill before the end of summer, Horne said its old news.

"That's nothing new," she said. "What we do see here is that Democrats in Congress who are pushing this legislation forward really just have a solution looking for a problem."

The religious right seems to believe that opposing hatred of gays may remove the stigma they wish society to brand on certain individuals. In a bizarre video found below, Gary Bauer explains that hate crime laws are fronts for advancing the "homosexual agenda". He even trots out a black minister who explains that in the race to be oppressed gays have nothing on African-Americans. It would appear that American fundamentalist right wing Christians have added an 11th Commandment: Thou shalt hate gay people above all others.

http://www.citizenlink.org/hatecrimes/

Time for Obama to Start Spending Political Capital

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Lincoln Mitchell
June 18, 2009 - The Huffington Post

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Throughout his presidential campaign, but more notably, during his presidency, President Obama has shown himself to have an impressive ability to accumulate political capital. During his tenure in the White House, Obama has done this by reaching out to a range of constituencies, moderating some of his programs, pursuing middle of the road approaches on key foreign policy questions and, not insignificantly, working to ensure that his approval rating remains quite high.

Political capital is not, however, like money, it cannot be saved up interminably while its owner waits for the right moment to spend it. Political capital has a shelf life, and often not a very long one. If it is not used relatively quickly, it dissipates and becomes useless to its owner. This is the moment in which Obama, who has spent the first few months of his presidency diligently accumulating political capital, now finds himself. The next few months will be a key time for Obama. If Obama does not spend this political capital during the next months, it will likely be gone by the New Year anyway.

Much of what President Obama has done in his first six months or so in office has been designed to build political capital, interestingly he has sought to build this capital from both domestic and foreign sources. He has done this by traveling extensively, reintroducing to America to foreign audiences and by a governance style that has very cleverly succeeded in pushing his political opponents to the fringes. This tactic was displayed during the effort to pass the stimulus package as Republican opposition was relegated to a loud and annoying, but largely irrelevant, distraction. Building political capital was, or should have been, a major goal of Obama's recent speech in Cairo as well.

Significantly, Obama has yet to spend any of his political capital by meaningfully taking on any powerful interests. He declined to take Wall Street on regarding the financial crisis, has prepared to, but not yet fully, challenged the power of the AMA or the insurance companies, nor has he really confronted any important Democratic Party groups such as organized labor.

This strategy, however, will not be fruitful for much longer. There are now some very clear issues where Obama should be spending political capital. The most obvious of these is health care. The battle for health care reform will be a major defining issue, not just for the Obama presidency, but for American society over the next decades. It is imperative that Obama push for the best and most comprehensive health care reform possible. This will likely mean not just a bruising legislative battle, but one that will pit powerful interests, not just angry Republican ideologues, against the President.

The legislative struggle will also pull many Democrats between the President and powerful interest groups. Obama must make it clear that there will be an enormous political cost which Democrats who vote against the bill will have to pay. Before any bill is voted upon, however, is perhaps an even more critical time as pressure from insurance groups, business groups and doctors organizations will be brought to bear both on congress, but also on the administration as it works with congress to craft the legislation. This is not the time when the administration must focus on making friends and being liked, but on standing their ground and getting a strong and inclusive health care reform bill.

Obama will have to take a similar approach to any other major domestic legislation as well. This is, of course, the way the presidency has worked for decades. Obama is in an unusual situation because a similar dynamic is at work at the international level. A major part of Obama's first six months in office have involved pursuing a foreign policy that implicitly has sought to rebuild both the image of the US abroad, but also American political capital. It is less clear how Obama can use this capital, but now is the time to use it.

A cynical interpretation of the choice facing Obama is that he can remain popular or he can have legislative and other policy accomplishments, but this interpretation would be wrong. By early 2010, Obama, and his party will, fairly or not, be increasingly judged by what they have accomplished in office, not by how deftly they have handled political challenges. Therefore, the only way he can remain popular and get new political capital is through converting his current political capital into concrete legislative accomplishments. Health care will be the first and very likely most important, test.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Financial Sector Regulation

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Robert Weissman
June 18, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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There are major gaps and shortcomings in the Obama administration's financial regulatory proposals, formally released today, and the proposals alone leave the financial sector vulnerable to future crisis. Still, it's nice to be able to say that the proposal does contain meaningful reforms.

Whether those meaningful reform proposals become law is no sure thing, and will depend on the administration's willingness to stare down Wall Street -- which still retains immense political power, despite its partial self-immolation -- and on whether a mobilized public demands Congress act for consumers, not contributors.

The 85-page draft released today is qualitatively different than the bullet-point plans previously issued by the Treasury Department. It contains detailed proposals, spanning across the financial regulatory spectrum, not easily summarized. Here are only some key elements -- first, the good, then the bad.

The Good

1. The administration supports creation of a strong Consumer Financial Regulatory Agency.

It proposes to give this new agency very strong powers, and jurisdiction over consumer protection rules -- taking away authority from existing regulators (like the Federal Reserve) that have failed utterly to protect consumers. It favors simplicity and gives the new agency the authority to mandate financial firms offer "plain vanilla" loans along with the more complicated packages they prefer. It gives the agency authority to ban mandatory arbitration provisions that strip consumers' right to go to court for redress of scams and rip-offs. And it establishes that the new agency's rules will be a regulatory floor, with states permitted to adopt stronger protections.

2. The administration proposes to reduce speculative betting, through new standards on leverage.

One reason the financial crisis spun out of control was financial firms' excessive use of "leverage" -- borrowed money. Heavily leveraged, the top commercial banks and investment banks overreached with very risky loans and investments. The administration proposes that all systemically important financial firms be subjected to higher capital reserve standards (meaning they can rely less on borrowed money). The administration properly says these rules should apply to any systemically important firm, whether or not it is a bank. It defines systemically important as a firm "whose combination of size, leverage and interconnectedness could pose a threat to financial stability if it failed." There are still important details to be worked out here, including how much capital such firms must maintain. And there is the very worrisome element that it is the Federal Reserve that is given primary responsibility for overseeing these systemically important firms.

3. Through "skin-in-the-game" rules, the administration aims to prevent predatory and reckless lending.

One reason lenders were willing to make so many predatory and bad-quality mortgages -- including but not limited to the class of "subprime" loans -- was that mortgage originators did not hold on to the loans. Mortgage brokers cut deals on behalf of banks and non-bank originators, which in turn sold the resulting mortgages to other banks. These banks, in turn, sliced and diced the mortgages, combined them into packages of pieces of thousands of other mortgages, and sold them to all kinds of investors. Because the initial lender did not maintain an ongoing interest in the mortgage, they did not have any incentive to ensure they were making a quality loan.

The administration proposes that loan originators be required to keep, at minimum, a 5 percent exposure in loans.

4. The administration seeks power to take over failing, systemically important financial firms.

The government already has such "resolution" power for commercial banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation regularly takes control over failing banks and "resolves" them outside of the bankruptcy process. This typically means selling off the failing bank to another bank, often after separating its good assets from bad. FDIC is expert at this process, moves very quickly, and averts the harmful consequences from extended bankruptcy processes.

The government does not have the legal authority to undertake comparable measures for important non-bank firms. This includes investment banks (think Lehman Brothers) and insurance companies (think AIG). Giving the government resolution power for non-banks should help control financial panic.

The Bad

1. The administration does not propose to do anything serious about executive pay and top-level compensation for financial firms.

The administration does support "say-on-pay" proposals, which give shareholders the right to a non-binding vote on executive compensation. But a non-binding vote isn't worth too much; and, more importantly, shareholders are often willing to support excessive compensation while risky bets are paying off.

In terms of financial stability, the imperative is to do away with the Wall Street bonus culture, where executives and traders are given extraordinary bonuses -- often four or more times base salary -- based on annual performance. This bonus culture gives traders and executives alike an incentive to take big bets -- because they get massive payoff if things go well, and don't suffer if they go bad, or go bad sometime in the future.

This is a structural problem, not a symbolic one. Anyone who thinks pay isn't of overriding importance in financial regulation should have been set straight by the desperation of the bailed out Wall Street firms to pay back their loans from the government. That desperation is overwhelmingly tied to a desire to escape the extremely modest pay standards issued by the Obama administration.

Besides financial stability, there are important questions of economic justice and taxpayer rights related to executive compensation. The Wall Street hotshots -- including the major hedge fund players -- have paid themselves unfathomable amounts of money over the last decade. They have set an aspirational standard for other executives and professionals, and helped drive wealth and income inequality to outrageous and unhealthy levels. Ultra compensation should be taxed at very high rates; and, at a bare minimum, the loopholes that let hedge fund managers pay taxes at about half the rate of regular folks must be closed. The case for aggressive tax reform on ultra rich financiers was overwhelming last year; now, with the financial system completely dependent on taxpayer largesse, there shouldn't be anything left to debate. No one in finance can say they made their money just by working hard or being clever -- their system was saved by the government.

2. The administration does not propose structural reform of the financial sector.

Although it proposes some meaningful regulatory reform, and modest alteration of the structure of regulatory agencies, the administration does not propose to alter the structure of the financial sector itself.

There is no discussion of returning to Glass-Steagall principles, to separate commercial banking from other financial activities including the speculative world of investment banking. Glass-Steagall was adopted during the Great Depression, as a response to financial abuses that closely parallel those of the previous decade. Repeal of Glass Steagall -- following a decades-long erosion -- came in 1999, and helped pave the way for the present crisis.

Nor is there any discussion of shrinking the size of goliath financial firms. Everyone now recognizes the problem of too-big-to-fail and too-interconnected-to-fail financial firms. The administration proposes to deal with the problem through regulation alone; a more fundamental approach would break up giant firms (or at least commit to prevent further consolidation going forward).

Addressing structure and size is important not only because of the economic power accreted by the goliaths, but because of their political strength -- about which, see below.

3. The administration's approach to regulating financial derivatives is too timid.

To its credit, the administration proposes to repeal recent deregulatory statutes and establish regulation of financial derivatives. But its plan does not go far enough. It creates a regulatory exemption for customized derivatives -- a loophole that will create lots of business for corporate lawyers ready to change terms in derivative contracts so that they differ somewhat from standardized terms.

Nor does the administration propose to ban classes of dangerous financial instruments that cannot be justified. A clear example of a product that should be banned is a credit default swap -- a kind of insurance against a certain outcome, like the inability of a bondholder to make required payments -- in which neither party has a stake in the underlying transaction. Such credit default swaps have no insurance component, and are nothing more than bets -- but they are bets that can vastly exceed the value of the transaction being bet on, and can spread financial contagion, as AIG demonstrated. George Soros argues that all credit default swaps basically share this feature, and should be banned altogether.

The administration proposal also fails to require that exotic financial instruments be subjected to pre-approval requirements. Under such an approach, financial firms would be required to show that new instruments offer some social benefit, and do not pose excessive risk.

4. The administration does not propose to empower consumers.

There is enormous merit to the proposal for a Consumer Financial Products Agency. But it is not a substitute for giving consumers the power to organize themselves to advance their own interests. Simply mandating that financial firms include in bills and statements (whether mailed or e-mailed) an invitation to join an independent consumer organization would facilitate tens of thousands of consumers -- and likely many more -- banding together to make sure the regulators do their job, and to prevent Wall Street from "innovating" the next trick to scam borrowers and investors.

The Ugly

Identifying the merits and gaps in the administration's proposal is important. But the proposal does not exist in a vacuum, and it doesn't become law just because the administration has proposed it.

The Wall Street types don't know shame. Having benefited from literally trillions of dollars of taxpayer largesse, one might expect that they would be embarrassed to lobby on Capitol Hill. Or, that Members of Congress would be unsympathetic to their pleas.

But that's not how Washington works. Having spent $5 billion on political investments over the last decade, Wall Street continues to pour cash into the political process -- and those investments continue to pay handsomely.

To understand how things work, consider the fate of the proposal to give bankruptcy judges the power to adjust mortgages, so that they could reduce the principal owed on loans on homes now worth less than value of the loan. Then-candidate Barack Obama campaigned in favor of such "cram-down" provisions. In a rational world, banks would agree to these adjustments to principal on their own, because they do better if people stay in their homes and continue paying on the loan, rather than by forcing foreclosure. Not long ago, it was widely expected that cram-down would quickly become law. But the banks deployed their lobbyists, and this vital though totally inadequate measure was defeated in May. The Obama administration sat quietly by.

Now, Wall Street is already trashing the good parts of the administration's proposals.

"Congress is not going to impose a 'skin-in-the-game' requirement on all loans," Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Washington Research Group, a division of Concept Capital, flatly tells American Banker.

The Chamber of Commerce and other industry groupings are attacking the idea of a Consumer Financial Product Agency, including with the extraordinary claim that it will improperly relieve consumers of their duty to do "due diligence" on financial products.

Hedge funds are hiring ever more lobbyists and floating the claim that the administration's requirements for some modest disclosure requirements for secretive hedge funds could do more damage than good. One purported reason: the disclosures may be too complicated for regular people to understand.

There's no question that Wall Street is going to mobilize -- is already mobilized -- to defeat the administration's positive proposals.

What remains very much in question is the administration's willingness to engage in bare-knuckled political fighting to defend these proposals, as well as whether the public will be mobilized to support these and other moves to control Wall Street.

A new public interest coalition -- Americans for Financial Reform -- aims to do just that, but they are fighting on occupied territory. As Senator Majority Whip Richard Durbin says, "the banks are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

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Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,  and director of Essential Action.

Where Are They Now?

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Ex-Bush Loyalists Cash In

Nick Turse
June 18, 2009 - TomDispatch.com

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In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.

While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies," a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.

The Memoirists

Many of the top figures of the Bush years are joining the ranks of (or reaffirming their credentials as) men and women of letters. Following in the footsteps of 2003-2006 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote the tell-some exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Now penning his life story for Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, he has announced that he is forgoing an advance and donating all proceeds to charity. Similarly, 2006-2009 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly donating the "author's profits" from his forthcoming "insider's account of [his] experiences as Treasury Secretary." Many other former colleagues are, however, apparently intent on cashing in on their public service.

Last month, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld's long-time pal, former Vice President Dick Cheney, "is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations" and seeking multi-millions. In the same way, back in 2007, Bush's right-hand man Karl Rove, aka his "brain," agreed, for a reported seven figures, to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint Threshold. Earlier this year, Bush's first term National Security Advisor and second term Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, signed a gaudy three-book deal, reportedly worth at least $2.5 million, with Random House's Crown imprint.

Following her to Crown (also the publisher of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope) was former President Bush himself. His book, tentatively titled Decision Points, will reportedly recount "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life" for a cool $7 million. Former First Lady Laura Bush has already inked a book deal with Scribner reportedly worth $3.5-5 million.

Only one prominent Bush loyalist who cared to try appears to have been unable to cash-in. In late 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel (2001-2005) and attorney general (2005-2007), "said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration," but could interest no publisher in the manuscript. This followed an earlier report in the New York Times that Gonzales had been "unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster..."

Law and Orders

One Bush administration lawyer who did land a job with a law firm was Gonzales's successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), who became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a firm "offering sophisticated legal services" which "places the highest value on collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to provide clients with seamless representation across practice areas and across continents."

Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001-2005, is now a partner with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld where he "focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector." Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005–2009, is serving as "senior of counsel," and a "member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group" at the firm of Covington & Burling.

Meanwhile, Harriet Miers, who served Bush from 2001-2007 as Staff Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Counsel to the President -- and whose Supreme Court bid crashed and burned in 2005 -- returned to Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell in May 2007 to serve as a member of the law firm's "Litigation and Public Policy sections." That firm is also home to Karin Torgerson, a partner who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, one of several White House positions she held from 2003-2005.

Speak Easy

In addition to his book-writing duties, former President Bush recently signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which already represents his wife. The Bureau is to arrange lucrative speeches for him worldwide. In fact, just last month, the New York Times reported that the former president had "earned more than an estimated $150,000" to "discuss national and international policy" alongside fellow former President Bill Clinton at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.

Together the Bushes joined a speakers' roster of former administration heavyweights, including Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State, 2001-2005), John Bolton (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-2006), Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff, 2001-2006), Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary, 2001-2003), Michael Mukasey, Colin Powell (Secretary of State, 2001-2005), Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge (Secretary of Homeland Security, 2003-2005), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Snow (Secretary of the Treasury, 2003-2006), as well as Bush family consigliere James Baker III.

Meanwhile, at Leading Authorities, another top-of-the-line speakers bureau, the list of ex-Bush loyalists includes Dan Bartlett (Counselor to the President, 2002-2007), Christopher Cox (Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005-2009), Ed Gillespie (Counselor to the President, 2007-2009), Porter Goss (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2005-2006), Stephen Hadley (National Security Advisor, 2005-2009), Michael Hayden (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2009), Keith Hennessey (Director of the National Economic Council, 2007-2009), Dana Perino (White House Press Secretary, 2007-2009), and Margaret Spellings (Secretary of Education, 2005-2009).

A third lecturers' stable, the Leigh Bureau, boasts John Negroponte who served Bush as Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, Director of National Intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State.

Talking Heads and Lobbyists

Some Bush loyalists have nabbed other sorts of speaking gigs. Karl Rove, for one, took a job as an analyst for Fox News. (He also writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and, in 2007, signed a two-year deal to be a columnist for Newsweek magazine.)

Ari Fleischer was hired as a media consultant to the Green Bay Packers in 2008 and serves as the president of Ari Fleischer Communications, Inc., which bills itself as a "unique media training and consultancy company [that] brings to the world of sports the lessons of how to successfully handle the toughest situations with the most aggressive reporters." (Clients reportedly include Major League Baseball, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and "several other leading sports figures.")

Many more Bush loyalists, however, are involved in another lucrative form of communication. For example, Michael Chertoff quickly launched the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that "will advise clients on a range of security concerns, including cyber security, terrorism, fraud, border protection and supply-chain security." Tom Ridge, when not serving as a keynote-speaker-for-hire (as he did recently at the 2009 CoBank Energy Directors Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is now a security and crisis-management consultant for his own firm, Ridge Global, whose self-professed "expertise encompasses risk management and global trade security, leadership guidance and strategic business generation, event security, crisis management and communications, campus security, technology innovation and integration and more."

In fact, a recent analysis by USA TODAY found that "more than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." And it's not just heads of executive departments like Homeland Security who are cashing in.

John Ashcroft (Attorney General, 2001-2005) co-founded the Ashcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm that advises and invests "in companies in the security and law enforcement marketplaces." Not surprisingly, the firm has become a home for Bush loyalists like Juleanna Glover, who served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and was then "the registered U.S. government affairs advisor for Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States."

Recently, according to the Quad City Times, Jim Nussle, Bush's director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (2007-2009) "formed a company that will offer consulting, government relations and lobbying services." The Nussle Group, its website proclaims, "specializes in recruiting a talented team and developing creative solutions to assist clients in navigating the complicated and challenging intersections of public policy, government relations, public relations, international relations and politics."

According to his company bio, the senior policy director at lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide, Gene Hickok, "joined the George W. Bush Administration as Under Secretary of Education. He became Deputy Secretary in 2003 [and] was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act." And he isn't alone. Kent Sholars, a Senior Associate at Dutko, "was a political appointee during both terms of the administration of George W. Bush, serving as the Confidential Assistant to the Controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC," while Karen Yeager, a Dutko vice president, "serve[d] in the White House for President Bush in 2001."

Spin-Mistresses

Karen Hughes helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and, for the first two years of his first term, served him as a "counselor." In 2002, she left the White House to spend more time with her family in Texas. In 2004, however, she was back at work on Bush's campaign and then, in 2005, signed on as an undersecretary of state. In 2007, she left again, the White House said, "to spend more time with her family." Nonetheless, in 2008, she was in an office yet again, this time as Global Vice Chair at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. In 2009, she was joined there by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who now serves as Chief Issues Counselor for the company in the U.S.

Here, too, Michael Chertoff has gotten into the act. The announcement of the formation of the Chertoff Group, wrote the Wall Street Journal, "was made by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller, which said it formed an alliance with Mr. Chertoff."

Board to Death

Bush Administration officials have also been popping up on various boards of directors. Richard Armitage is perhaps typical. He sits on the board at military-corporate complex member ManTech International. He also serves on the boards of oil giant ConocoPhillips, "pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical" company Transcu Ltd., and his own firm, Armitage International, which, according to its website, provides "multinational clients with critical support in the areas of international business development, strategic planning, and problem-solving."

In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.

That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the Board of Directors of the National Interest Security Company, an "information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services" provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).

Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific, but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

In the Tank

If you can't get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation's think-tanks to fall back into -- and they've become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.

Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior adviser to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he "wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs" and even "helped craft an op-ed column… which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates."

Ivory Tower Power

While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for "business initiatives in media, sports and communications." Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution.

Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as "a distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the "Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies."

"Torture memo" author John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 2001-2003, is, of course, a professor of law at the School of Law of that bastion of leftist radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley. (As Liliana Segura of AlterNet recently reported, he also just landed a gig as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Hope on the Horizon

Last year, for many Americans, Barack Obama became synonymous with hope. (And last year, Obama's The Audacity of Hope as well as his Dreams from My Father earned him an eye-popping $2.4 million in royalties.) This year, for struggling job-hunters nationwide, it's former Bush administration officials who offer a glimmer of hope in tough economic times. Their ease in finding gainful employment suggests that, even if your prior work has been judged ruinous by many and been roundly repudiated, there's still hope for you on the job front.

Even former Vice President Cheney, a man about whom 55% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion, has realistic prospects of receiving a multimillion dollar book deal. After all, his former boss is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Americans and look how he's done.

Since most jobless Americans don't have nearly the unfavorable polling numbers of Bush or Cheney, nor do they face the distant threat of possible war crimes prosecutions like John Yoo, they should perk up. Maybe the problem is that none of them have signed up with the right speakers bureau to discuss their disastrous life circumstances. Maybe they haven't had that extra little bit of help tweaking their book proposals for their proposed tell-littles and tell-nones. Maybe they hadn't thought to check with Burson-Marsteller, just in case a few top slots with grandiose titles are still open. Maybe the Hoover Institution will now extend distinguished visiting fellowships to a few of the residents of modern-day Hoovervilles.

With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land. In but a few short months, they've managed to prove that, no matter how spectacularly you fail, those inside-the-Beltway never have to tighten a belt. In our world, they will always fail upwards -- generally in lucrative, prestigious, and glamorous ways.

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Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the recent winner of a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.