| By Prof. Jean Bricmont | |
Global Research, September 6, 2007 | |
Many people in the antiwar movement try to reassure themselves: Bush cannot possibly attack Iran. He does not have the means to do so, or, perhaps, even he is not foolish enough to engage in such an enterprise. Various particular reasons are put forward, such as: If he attacks, the Shiites in Iraq will cut the US supply lines. If he attacks, the Iranians will block the Straits of Ormuz or will unleash dormant terrorist networks worldwide. Russia won't allow such an attack. China won't allow it -- they will dump the dollar. The Arab world will explode. All this is doubtful. The Shiites in Iraq are not simply obedient to Iran. If they don't rise against the United States when their own country is occupied (or if don't rise very systematically), they are not likely to rise against the US if a neighboring country is attacked. As for blocking the Straits or unleashing terrorism, this will just be another justification for more bombing of Iran. After all, a main casus belli against Iran is, incredibly, that it supposedly helps the resistance against U.S. troops in Iraq, as if those troops were at home there. If that can work as an argument for bombing Iran, then any counter-measure that Iran might take will simply "justify" more bombing, possibly nuclear. Iran is strong in the sense that it cannot be invaded, but there is little it can do against long range bombing, accompanied by nuclear threats. Russia will escalate its military buildup (which now lags far behind the U.S. one), but it can't do anything else, and Washington will be only too glad to use the Russian reaction as an argument for boosting its own military forces. China is solely concerned with its own development and won't drop the dollar for non-economic reasons. Most Arab governments, if not their populations, will look favorably on seeing the Iranian shiite leadership humiliated. Those governments have sufficient police forces to control any popular opposition-- after all, that is what they managed to do after the attack on Iraq. With the replacement of Chirac by Sarkozy, and the near-complete elimination of what was left of the Gaullists (basically through lawsuits on rather trivial matters), France has been changed from the most independent European country to the most poodlish (this was in fact the main issue in the recent presidential election, but it was never even mentioned during the campaign). In France, moreover, the secular "left" is, in the main, gung-ho against Iran for the usual reasons (women, religion). There will be no large-scale demonstrations in France either before or after the bombing. And, without French support, Germany--where the war is probably very unpopular -- can always be silenced with memories of the Holocaust, so that no significant opposition to the war will come from Europe (except possibly from its Muslim population, which will be one more argument to prove that they are "backward", "extremist", and enemies of our "democratic civilization"). All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American "left". The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not according to our views -- but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specially in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law. Israel and its fanatical American supporters want Iran attacked for its political crimes--supporting the rights of the Palestinians, or questioning the Holocaust. Both U.S. political parties are equally under the control of the Israel lobby, and so are the media. The antiwar movement is far too preoccupied with the security of Israel to seriously defend Iran and it won't attack the real architects of this coming war--the Zionists-- for fear of "provoking antisemitism". Blaming Big Oil for the Iraq war was quite debatable, but, in the case of Iran, since the country is about to be bombed but not invaded, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Big Oil wants the war, as opposed to the Zionists. In fact, Big Oil is probably very much opposed to the war, but it is as unable to stop it as the rest of us. As far as Israel is concerned, the United States is a de facto totalitarian society--no articulate opposition is acceptable. The U.S. Congress passes one pro-Israel or anti-Iran resolution after another with "Stalinist" majorities. The population does not seem to care. But if they did, but what could they do? Vote? The electoral system is extremely biased against the emergence of a third party and the two big parties are equally under Zionist influence. The only thing that might stop the war would be for Americans themselves to threaten their own government with massive civil disobedience. But that is not going to happen. A large part of the academic left long ago gave up informing the general public about the real world in order to debate whether Capital is a Signifier or a Signified, or worry about their Bodies and their Selves, while preachers tell their flocks to rejoice at each new sign that the end of the world is nigh. Children in Iran won't sleep at night, but the liberal American intelligentsia will lecture the ROW (rest of the world) about Human Rights. In fact, the prevalence of the "reassuring arguments" cited above proves that the antiwar movement is clinically dead. If it weren't, it would rely on its own forces to stop war, not speculate on how others might do the job. Meanwhile, an enormous amount of hatred will have been spewed upon the world. But in the short term, it may look like a big Western "victory", just like the creation of Israel in 1948; just like the overthrow of Mossadegh by the CIA in 1953; just like the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine seemed to be a big German victory after the French defeat at Sedan in 1870. The Bush administration will long be gone when the disastrous consequences of that war will be felt. PS: This text is not meant to be a prophecy, but a call to (urgent) action. I'll be more than happy if facts prove me wrong.
| |
Friday, September 07, 2007
When Wishful Thinking Replaces Resistance: Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran
Staging Nukes for Iran?
By Cliff Schecter
Posted on September 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//61916/
This post, written by Cliff Schecter, originally appeared on Cliff Schecter's Blog
This is the title of a blog post by Larry Johnson, formerly of the CIA, on what may have occurred the other day when a live nuke happened to find it's way onto a B-52.
No conspiracy theorist is Larry. He is a friend who I have spoken to at length about international affairs, and he has forgotten more than the entire Bush Administration has ever known on the subject.
Let me quote from his piece at length:
So I called a old friend and retired B-52 pilot and asked him. What he told me offers one compelling case of circumstantial evidence. My buddy, let's call him Jack D. Ripper, reminded me that the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site.
Then he told me something I had not heard before.
Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can't imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?
His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.
Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can't think of one.
Nor can I. You guys know what to do. GO SIGN THE LETTER and stop a war.
Cliff Schecter blogs at cliffschecter.com.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//61916/
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Challenging Corporate Power: California Community Says Companies Are Not People; Bans Campaign Donations
By Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, YES! Magazine
Posted on September 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61737/
In 2006, Humboldt County, California, became the latest, and largest, jurisdiction to abolish the legal doctrine known as "corporate personhood."
Measure T was successful because our all-volunteer campaign came together to pass a law that bans non-local corporations from participating in Humboldt elections. The referendum, which passed with 55 percent of the vote, also asserts that corporations cannot claim the First Amendment right to free speech.
By enacting Measure T, Humboldt County has committed an act of "municipal civil disobedience," intentionally challenging "settled law." But voters also recognize that Measure T is an act of common sense. We polled our community and found that 78 percent believe corruption is more likely if corporations participate in politics.
The Measure T campaign was led by women and young people, with critical support from elders and feminist men. This diverse leadership created a culture of cooperation and collaboration that permeated the campaign, and made it as much about community as about a win on election day. For example, the law itself was written using a consensus process, the advice of volunteers was valued just as highly as input from experts and consultants, and we organized numerous parties and social events to help spread the word.
The local Democratic and Green Parties formally endorsed the effort, and leaders of both worked arm-in-arm during the campaign. They were joined by organized labor and every peace, justice, and environmental protection group in the community. Humboldt County modeled a campaign carried out with respectful unity.
This effort did not spring up out of thin air. It was the result of years of old-fashioned community organizing by Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County that included workshops and educational programs explaining how corporations have acquired more rights under the law than people have.
We designed the campaign with "big picture" goals in mind from the beginning. We knew we wanted to claim for our campaign the best and most noble ideals of American history--especially self-governance and protecting people's rights against abusive power. We realize that the founding of this country is deeply flawed, but we used the national creation story to put Measure T on the side of truth and justice.
To that end, our PAC was named the Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights, and our website was VoteLocalControl.org. Our primary outreach tool was a tea bag that reminded voters of the proud history of the Boston Tea Party as an act of rebellion against the most powerful corporation of the day, and called for a modern-day T(ea) Party of our own.
Like the populists of the 19th-century agrarian movement, we believe that genuine change cannot be imposed from the top down. It must proceed from the ground up, and the battles must be waged in local communities.
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap is director of Democracy Unlimited, a fellow for Liberty Tree: Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, and a principal with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. She was spokesperson and campaign co-manager for Measure T.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/61737/
HRC active in right-wing religious cult
When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.
Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan. . .
The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voter - God . . .
When Time put together a list of the nation's 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe's entry was "The Stealth Persuader." . . .
Coe's friends include former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Reaganite Edwin Meese III, and ultraconservative Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.). Under Coe's guidance, Meese has hosted weekly prayer breakfasts for politicians, businesspeople, and diplomats, and Pitts rose from obscurity to head the House Values Action Team, an off-the-record network of religious right groups and members of Congress created by Tom DeLay. The corresponding Senate Values Action Team is guided by another Coe protege, Brownback, who also claims to have recruited King Abdullah of Jordan into a regular study of Jesus' teachings. . .
The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance.
JOSHUA GREEN, THE ATLANTIC, 2006 - Clinton's proficiency in this innermost sanctum has unnerved some of the capital's most exalted religious conservatives. "You're not talking about some tree-hugging, Jesus-is-my-Buddha sort of stuff," says David Kuo, a former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who worked with Clinton to promote joint legislation and who, like Brownback, has apologized to her for past misdeeds. "These are powerful evangelicals she's meeting with."
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Justice Souter Nearly Quit Supreme Court Over Bush v. Gore Decision
By Liliana Segura
Posted on September 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/liliana/61608/
Poor David Souter.
Not only is the famously mild-mannered Supreme Court judge a solitary voice of reason among the crazies overrunning the Bench; now it turns out he hates his job.
It should come as no surprise (and yet it kinda does) that the judge who was nominated by Bush I only to become one of the most reliably liberal members of the bench "was shattered" by the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore--so shattered, in fact, the decision would move him to tears (repeatedly) and lead him to contemplate leaving the Court altogether.
Also, he hates Washington D.C.
According to a new book on the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin:
"For many months, it was not at all clear whether [Souter] would remain as a justice...That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same."
This is more sad than juicy, really, but given that the Supreme Court doesn't exactly lend itself to dishy prose, one has to wonder what other interesting human tidbits lie within Toobin's provocatively titled book. (It's called "The Nine," which sounds a lot like a reality TV show or some sort of "24"-inspired drama in which team of swashbuckling judges argues the merits of torture based on the superhero tactics of a certain Jack Bauer...what's that? Scalia's way ahead of me? Oops, my bad.
Lest we be moved to tears ourselves, perhaps it's best not to review what has happened since Bush v. Gore went down--especially not the Supreme Court term that ended this summer, a Roberts/Alito reign of terror peppered with nasty 5 to 4 decisions and prompting various pundits' declarations that the rightward shift of the Court will be the sole success story of Bush's legacy. Best just to sum it up with a line from one of Souter's many dissents this term. "It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way," he wrote after the Court upheld the death sentence of a man who botched an appeal deadline because he was misdirected by a federal judge.
That's for sure. Let's just hope he can tolerate his job--and D.C.--for a few more years. Like, oh...25?
"At this moment," Toobin recently wrote about the future of the Court: the "liberals face not only jurisprudential but actuarial peril. Stevens is 87 and Ginsburg 74; Roberts, Thomas, and Alito are in their fifties."
Liliana Segura is a writer and activist living in New York
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/liliana/61608/
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Great Moments with Condaleeza Rice
|||| Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor who is one of the secretary of state's closest friends, recalls going into a shop where Rice asked to see earrings. The clerk showed her costume jewelry. Rice asked to see something nicer, prompting the clerk to whisper some sass under her breath.
Blacker remembers Rice tearing the woman to shreds.
"Let's get one thing straight," he recalls her saying. "You are behind the counter because you have to work for minimum wage. I'm on this side asking to see the good jewelry because I make considerably more."
A manager quickly brought Rice better baubles.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/29/condi-scoffs-at-minimum-wage-worker/
The War Criminal In The Living Room
The former Wall Street Journal editor marvels at how "media is silent, Congress is absent and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran."
U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.... U.S. Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations inside Iran.... U.S. war doctrine has been altered to permit first-strike nuclear attack.... The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.... Meanwhile the U.S. media focuses on whether Republican Sen. Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying to be one of them.... The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact.
See also Informed Comment Global Affairs: Post-Labor Day Product Rollout: War With Iran (8/29/07) by Barnett R. Rubin and AfterDowningStreet.org: Do We Have the Courage to Stop War With Iran? (8/31/07) by Ray McGovern on the unfolding marketing plan for an attack on Iran.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Three Cheers for the Libido, as Entrapment Snares Senator Larry Craig
Larry Craig has gone, forced out by a frantic Republican leadership. None will cheer more loudly than the survivors of those endangered and depleted species this serf of the mining and timber companies spent much of his career depleting with one legislative barrage after another. Better that he would have been gored or stomped, than finally cut down by an undercover cop way over the border line of entrapment.
Actually, I think a good lawyer could have got Craig off, if it hadn't been for the panic-stricken Guilty plea copped by Craig already frantic that local paper was about to out him. The cop, Dave Karsnia, entrapped him. It's not against the constitution, at least yet, to adopt a wide stance. All he did was stamp his foot and waggle it about and put his hand down. It's not as though he made any verbal suggestions to Karsnia, or exhibited his genitals. Karsnia says he was peeping. That's just the word of a policeman against a US senator. Senators probably have a better record for keeping their word at least in political bargains, tho not in campaign promises than the folks in blue.
When people whine fearfully about the Christian right, I always tell them to relax. Sooner or later the evangelist or the pol be caught in a whorehouse or a public convenience. With closet Republicans on the Hill, all the Democrats need to do is load some nice looking lad on the plane the pol takes home each week, and just wait for nature to take its course.
The casualty list of senior Republican politicians nailed for frequenting hookers, propositioning policemen, sending hot emails to page boys and so forth is beginning to look like one of those interminable genealogies in Chronicles or the Book of Kings. The name of David Vitter, Louisiana's Republican senator, was recently discovered on the "DC Madam's" escort service list. Vitter was regional chair of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Last year, two congressmen, Mark Fowley (R-FL) and Don Sherwood (R-PA), lost their House seats because of problematic interactions with underage male interns (Fowley) and adultery (Sherwood).
At least Vitter and Sherwood were nailed for what Republicans used to categorize as natural practices, and so the Republican leadership didn't try to force Vitter out. But many of the Republican fallen are closet cases, repressed and desperate, battling Sodom by day in the halls of Congress, by night trolling for rough trade in Gomorrah. They gave the liberating Seventies a wide birth, hammered faggotry at a thousand prayer breakfasts, fought to protect Family Values. What does them down is usually some high-odds piece of risk-taking, sexually exciting until the moment the object of desire flashes his Police ID and the jig is up.
Larry Craig of Idaho was a three-term senator. En route to this sanctuary of Republican virtue on June 11 Craig, co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, used a stop-over at Minneapolis-St Paul airport to prowl through a lavatory in the Lindbergh terminal. He spotted under a stall door lower extremities belonging to a man we now know to have been undercover cop Karsnia, who patient as any spider had been sitting on the john for 13 minutes, waiting for prey which he could entrap.
Americans following the case have learning with fascination how easily some innocent action in a public convenience known in the argot of gay patrons as "tearooms" -- can be misconstrued. Don't put your bag in front of the door. That's what Craig did and Karsnia, a youthful-looking blonde decoy, says in his report, "My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall. " Keep your feet still. "At 12:16 hours," Karsnia relates, " Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area."
Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider several times. That did it. Karsnia put down his police ID for Craig to check out. Craig quickly plead guilty to disorderly conduct and "peeping", which is defined in Minnesotan statutory lingo as "interference with privacy by surreptitiously gazing, staring or peeping in the window, or other aperture of a sleeping room in a hotel, a tanning booth this is Minnesota, after all]or other place where a reasonable person would have an expectation of privacy and has exposed or is likely to expose their intimate parts, as defined in Sec. 609. 341, subd 5, or the clothing covering the immediate area of the intimate parts and doing so with the intent to intrude upon or interfere with the privacy of the occupant. A Gross Misdemeanor."
Craig copped a $500 fine and hoped no one would notice. No one did for a few weeks until someone leaked the story to the Capitol Hill paper, Roll Call. Craig tried to back into his guilty plea, saying it's all a dreadful misunderstanding and that he traditionally "adopts a wide stance" in public lavatories.
At some level Craig obviously wanted to get caught, just as compulsive gamblers at some level want to lose.
Republicans, barely recovered from the Foley scandal a year ago, wanted Craig out. Then they try to change the subject to Monica Lewinsky and say that it's all the fault of Democrats who have corrupted America's moral fiber for so long that even honorable men like Craig are unable to resist the beckoning finger of Temptation.
Craig's been touted as a closet case for years, hence targeted by militant gays as a public figure who should be outed because of his support for laws penalizing homosexuals. A well-known senator from the south-east is now being battered by rumors that he too will be outed soon. This would bring the Republican casualty list of fallen gays in the US Senate to three in a year, an amazing rate of attrition in an institution where the advantages of incumbency are almost insuperable.
http://www.counterpunch.org/Friday, August 31, 2007
Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
08.29.07 The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.
DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.
Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.
The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)
DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.
A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.
What DCSNet Can Do
Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.
FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf.
The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.
The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.
FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches.
Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them.
The numerical scope of DCSNet surveillance is still guarded. But we do know that as telecoms have become more wiretap-friendly, the number of criminal wiretaps alone has climbed from 1,150 in 1996 to 1,839 in 2006. That's a 60 percent jump. And in 2005, 92 percent of those criminal wiretaps targeted cell phones, according to a report published last year.
These figures include both state and federal wiretaps, and do not include antiterrorism wiretaps, which dramatically expanded after 9/11. They also don't count the DCS-3000's collection of incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed. Far more common than full-blown wiretaps, this level of surveillance requires only that investigators certify that the phone numbers are relevant to an investigation.
The Justice Department reports the number of pen registers to Congress annually, but those numbers aren't public. According to the last figures leaked to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, judges signed 4,886 pen register orders in 1998, along with 4,621 time extensions.
CALEA Switches Rules on Switches
The law that makes the FBI's surveillance network possible had its genesis in the Clinton administration. In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.
CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system.
With new CALEA-compliant digital switches, the FBI now logs directly into the telecom's network. Once a court order has been sent to a carrier and the carrier turns on the wiretap, the communications data on a surveillance target streams into the FBI's computers in real time.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation requested documents on the system under the Freedom of Information Act, and successfully sued the Justice Department in October 2006.
In May, a federal judge ordered the FBI to provide relevant documents to the EFF every month until it has satisfied the FOIA request.
"So little has been known up until now about how DCS works," says EFF attorney Marcia Hofmann. "This is why it's so important for FOIA requesters to file lawsuits for information they really want."
Special Agent Anthony DiClemente, chief of the Data Acquisition and Intercept Section of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, said the DCS was originally intended in 1997 to be a temporary solution, but has grown into a full-featured CALEA-collection software suite.
"CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information," DiClemente told Wired News. "Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell."
Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn't stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law's reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.
New Technologies
Meanwhile, the FBI's efforts to keep up with the current communications explosion is never-ending, according to DiClemente.
The released documents suggest that the FBI's wiretapping engineers are struggling with peer-to-peer telephony provider Skype, which offers no central location to wiretap, and with innovations like caller-ID spoofing and phone-number portability.
But DCSNet seems to have kept pace with at least some new technologies, such as cell-phone push-to-talk features and most VOIP internet telephony.
"It is fair to say we can do push-to-talk," DiClemente says. "All of the carriers are living up to their responsibilities under CALEA."
Matt Blaze, a security researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who helped assess the FBI's now-retired Carnivore internet-wiretapping application in 2000, was surprised to see that DCSNet seems equipped to handle such modern communications tools. The FBI has been complaining for years that it couldn't tap these services.
The redacted documentation left Blaze with many questions, however. In particular, he said it's unclear what role the carriers have in opening up a tap, and how that process is secured.
"The real question is the switch architecture on cell networks," said Blaze. "What's the carrier side look like?"
Randy Cadenhead, the privacy counsel for Cox Communications, which offers VOIP phone service and internet access, says the FBI has no independent access to his company's switches.
"Nothing ever gets connected or disconnected until I say so, based upon a court order in our hands," Cadenhead says. "We run the interception process off of my desk, and we track them coming in. We give instructions to relevant field people who allow for interconnection and to make verbal connections with technical representatives at the FBI."
The nation's largest cell-phone providers -- whose customers are targeted in the majority of wiretaps -- were less forthcoming. AT&T politely declined to comment, while Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon simply ignored requests for comment.
Agent DiClemente, however, seconded Cadenhead's description.
"The carriers have complete control. That's consistent with CALEA," DiClemente said. "The carriers have legal teams to read the order, and they have procedures in place to review the court orders, and they also verify the information and that the target is one of their subscribers."
Cost
Despite its ease of use, the new technology is proving more expensive than a traditional wiretap. Telecoms charge the government an average of $2,200 for a 30-day CALEA wiretap, while a traditional intercept costs only $250, according to the Justice Department inspector general. A federal wiretap order in 2006 cost taxpayers $67,000 on average, according to the most recent U.S. Court wiretap report.
What's more, under CALEA, the government had to pay to make pre-1995 phone switches wiretap-friendly. The FBI has spent almost $500 million on that effort, but many traditional wire-line switches still aren't compliant.
Processing all the phone calls sucked in by DCSNet is also costly. At the backend of the data collection, the conversations and phone numbers are transferred to the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Data Management System, an Oracle SQL database that's seen a 62 percent growth in wiretap volume over the last three years -- and more than 3,000 percent growth in digital files like e-mail. Through 2007, the FBI has spent $39 million on the system, which indexes and analyzes data for agents, translators and intelligence analysts.
Security Flaws
To security experts, though, the biggest concern over DCSNet isn't the cost: It's the possibility that push-button wiretapping opens new security holes in the telecommunications network.
More than 100 government officials in Greece learned in 2005 that their cell phones had been bugged, after an unknown hacker exploited CALEA-like functionality in wireless-carrier Vodafone's network. The infiltrator used the switches' wiretap-management software to send copies of officials' phone calls and text messages to other phones, while simultaneously hiding the taps from auditing software.
The FBI's DiClemente says DCSNet has never suffered a similar breach, so far as he knows.
"I know of no issue of compromise, internal or external," DiClemente says. He says the system's security is more than adequate, in part because the wiretaps still "require the assistance of a provider." The FBI also uses physical-security measures to control access to DCSNet end points, and has erected firewalls and other measures to render them "sufficiently isolated," according to DiClemente.
But the documents show that an internal 2003 audit uncovered numerous security vulnerabilities in DCSNet -- many of which mirror problems unearthed in the bureau's Carnivore application years earlier.
In particular, the DCS-3000 machines lacked adequate logging, had insufficient password management, were missing antivirus software, allowed unlimited numbers of incorrect passwords without locking the machine, and used shared logins rather than individual accounts.
The system also required that DCS-3000's user accounts have administrative privileges in Windows, which would allow a hacker who got into the machine to gain complete control.
Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.
"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."
Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.
"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"
Big Brother Democracy: How Free Speech and Surveillance Are Now Intertwined
By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on August 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60877/
Recently, as protesters gathered outside the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello, Quebec, to confront US President George W. Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Associated Press reported this surreal detail: "Leaders were not able to see the protesters in person, but they could watch the protesters on TV monitors inside the hotel ... Cameramen hired to ensure that demonstrators would be able to pass along their messages to the three leaders sat idly in a tent full of audio and video equipment ... A sign on the outside of the tent said, 'Our cameras are here today providing your right to be seen and heard. Please let us help you get your message out. Thank You.'"
Yes, it's true: Like contestants on a reality TV show, protesters at the SPP were invited to vent into video cameras, their rants to be beamed to protest-trons inside the summit enclave. It was security state as infotainment -- Big Brother meets, well, Big Brother.
The spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper explained that although protesters were herded into empty fields, the video-link meant that their right to political speech was protected. "Under the law, they need to be seen and heard, and they will be."
It is an argument with sweeping implications. If videotaping activists meets the legal requirement that dissenting citizens have the right to be seen and heard, what else might fit the bill?
How about all the other security cameras that patrolled the summit -- the ones filming demonstrators as they got on and off buses and peacefully walked down the street? What about the cellphone calls that were intercepted, the meetings that were infiltrated, the e-mails that were read? According to the new rules set out in Montebello, all of these actions may soon be recast not as infringements on civil liberties but the opposite: proof of our leaders' commitment to direct, unmediated consultation.
Elections are a crude tool for taking the public temperature -- these methods allow constant, exact monitoring of our beliefs. Think of surveillance as the new participatory democracy; of wiretapping as the political equivalent of Total Request Live.
Protesters in Montebello complained that while they were locked out, CEOs from about thirty of the largest corporations in North America -- from Wal-Mart to Chevron -- were part of the official summit.
But perhaps they had it backward: The CEOs had only an hour and fifteen minutes of face time with the leaders. The activists were being "seen and heard" around the clock. So perhaps instead of shouting about police state tactics, they should have said, "Thank you for listening." (And reading, and watching, and photographing, and data-mining.)
The Montebello "seen and heard" rule also casts the target of the protests in a new light. The SPP is described in the leaders' final statement as an "ambitious" plan to "keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade." In other words, a merger of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the homeland security complex -- NAFTA with spy planes.
The model dates back to September 11, when the US Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, pronounced that in the new era, "security will trump trade." But there was an out clause: The trade on which Canada's and Mexico's economies depend could continue uninterrupted, as long as those governments were willing to welcome the tentacles of the US "war on terror." Canadian and Mexican business leaders leapt to surrender, aggressively pushing their governments to give in to US demands for "integrated" security in order to keep the goods and tourists flowing.
Almost six years later, the business leaders at Montebello -- under the banner of the North American Competitiveness Council, an official wing of the SPP -- were still holding up "thickening borders" as the bogeyman. The fix? According to the SPP website, "technological solutions, improved information-sharing, and, potentially, the use of biometric identifiers."
From experience we know what this means: continent-wide no-fly lists, searchable and integrated databases, as well as the $2.5 billion contract to Boeing to build a "virtual fence" on the northern and southern borders of the United States, equipped with unmanned drones.
In short, under the SPP vision of the continent, "thick" borders will soon be replaced with a nearly invisible web of continental surveillance -- almost all of it run for profit. Two members of the SPP advisory group -- Lockheed Martin and General Electric -- have already received multibillion-dollar contracts from the US government to build this web. In the Bush era, security doesn't trump big business; it may be the biggest business of all.
In the run-up to the SPP summit, a spate of surveillance scandals helped paint a fuller picture. First, Congress not only failed to curtail the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping but opened the door to snooping into bank records, phone call patterns and even physical searches -- all without any onus to prove the subject is a threat.
Next, the Boston Globe reported on plans to link thousands of CCTV cameras on streets, subways, apartment buildings and businesses into networks capable of tracking suspects in real time. And on August 15, confirmation came that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency -- the arm of the US military that runs spy planes and satellites over enemy territory -- would be fully integrated into the infrastructure of domestic intelligence gathering and local policing, becoming what the agency calls the "eyes" to the NSA's "ears."
Add a few more high-tech tools -- biometric IDs, facial-recognition software, networked databases of "suspects," GPS bundled into ever more electronic devices -- and you have something like the world of total surveillance most recently portrayed in The Bourne Ultimatum.
Which brings us back to the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Who needs clumsy old border checks when the authorities are making sure we are seen and heard at all times -- in high definition, online and off-, on land and from the sky? Security is the new prosperity. Surveillance is the new democracy.
This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com). and please include
Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" and "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate." You can read more at NaomiKlein.org.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60877/
Will Anyone Stop Bush and Cheney's Planned War With Iran?
By Scarecrow
Posted on August 31, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/scarecrow/61293/
This post, written by Scarecrow, originally appeared on FireDogLake
I think Glenn Greenwald is right that the Bush/Cheney regime is about to start an aggressive war against Iran. And I agree that the Democrats have foolishly paved the way for this to happen.
We can't say we weren't warned. They've been telling us for years they want regime change in Iran. They've told us that Iran poses a nuclear threat in the Middle East. They've told us over and over that it is not acceptable to allow Iran's government to have its own nuclear program. They have put out one provocative and often exaggerated story after another about Iran's nuclear intentions or its capabilities, while ignoring or stepping all over stories from the International Atomic Energy Agency that countered their propaganda or described Iran's efforts to be cooperative. They've told us that they would not rule out military strikes against Iran while they've dragged their feet when pursuing any of the half-hearted efforts at a diplomatic/negotiated alternative to war. And they've told us it is not acceptable to leave this decision to the next Administration.
In the last few weeks, they've ratcheted up the inflammatory rhetoric against Iran. Dick Cheney was recently quoted as saying that military strikes against Iran are warranted. Bush has been telling our military in Iraq to pursue Iranians inside Iraq, so our military leaders have been dutifully rounding up Iranians, even diplomatic guests invited by the Iraqi government. This week they arrested Iranian energy officials who had been invited to help restore Iraq's electricity system. One provocation after another.
Now Bush has described the Iranian regime as posing the threat of a "nuclear holocaust." Not just a "mushroom cloud." This time, it's a nuclear holocaust -- terms reserved for the most heinous of crimes and the most despicable of enemies. No sane government engages in such inflammatory rhetoric. But where is the dissent? Where is the outcry?
Throughout this inexorable march to war, the Democratic Congress has done worse than nothing. They've voted for resolutions condemning Iran without having the factual basis for knowing what Iran is doing or intends, relying only on neocon and Administration propaganda. They'd listened to dishonest and crazed warmongers like Joe Lieberman, for heaven's sake. They've voted for resolutions that would support regime change, but they've refused to pass resolutions or amendments that would require the Administration to seek new authorization to start a war with Iran. Most of our Democratic Presidential candidates -- Kucinich and Gravel excepted -- have pretended to be "serious" people by refusing to rule out military strikes against Iran, even nuclear strikes. These are not serious positions; they are seriously irresponsible.
But of course, this Administration does not need authorization. It it now operating completely outside the law, outside the Constitution, outside any checks by Congress or influence of those who might counsel against war. By Presidential fiat, it has declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist group, effectively making them an enemy of the US without any Congressional declaration of war. We have a lawless, reckless and belligerent Administration, and it is about to start another unlawful war, even as it tries to convince the American people that it is a good thing that the regime has 160,000 US troops bogged down in another quagmire, vulnerable to an enlarged regional war. Who will tell this crazed regime to stop? To whom would it even listen?
The Administration has repeatedly told us Iran is responsible for many of the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq. They trot out their propagandists in Iraq to shows us the weapons and their markings, suggesting that their use in Iraq is a delberate policy of the Iranian government. Their neocon supporters are already spreading the theme that Iran has effectively declared war on the US by arming and training those who are killing our soldiers in Iraq.
The only thing the Bush/Cheney regime needs is the money to wage its aggressive war against Iran, but how they'll get it is patently obvious. That money is embedded in the authorizations for supporting US troops and their activities in Iraq. Congress no longer asks what the money if for: it's assumed to be for "supporting the troops." Now the regime is asking for another supplemental authorization -- another $50 billion-- and while Democrats are promising a fight, some are already announcing they will "support the troops" by giving the Administration all the money it requests.
Wake up Democrats: you are being asked to fund an aggressive war against Iran. This war will be on your heads. Stop.
Scarecrow is a regular blogger for FireDogLake
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/scarecrow/61293/
On the Right, Public Healthcare for Children is a Socialist Plot
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Posted on August 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60817/
Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.
They'd have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren't available, many families would pay for private schools instead.
So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be -- a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.
O.K., in case you're wondering, I haven't lost my mind, I'm drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled "The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door," is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will "displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage."
And Rudy Giuliani's call for "free-market solutions, not socialist models" was about health care, not education.
But thinking about how we'd react if they said the same things about education helps dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children's health.
The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It's just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children's medical bills "welfare," with all the negative connotations that go with that term.
And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.
Here's what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be "to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly."
But a child who doesn't receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn't receive an adequate education, doesn't have the same shot - he or she doesn't have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.
And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem - "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room" - but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don't have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don't have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost.
Now, the public understands the importance of health insurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn't. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a "serious" or a "very serious" problem.
So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they're trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of "middle-class welfare."
Proponents of an expansion of children's health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.
But the more fundamental response should be, so what?
We offer free education, and don't worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don't need, because that's the only way to ensure that every child gets an education - and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.
AlterNet is making this material available in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60817/
Spitzer to Sue Bush for Gutting Children's Health Care
By Matt Stoller
Posted on August 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//61173/
This post, written by Matt Stoller, originally appeared on Open Left
Eliot Spitzer, after weathering a rather nast right-wing smear attempt over the past month, is now threatening to sue the Bush administration if Bush goes ahead with his SCHIP strategy and cuts health care to kids in New York state. Spitzer is doing an event tomorrow with Hillary Clinton, which will be webcast today at 10:30am.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, and I will say that Spitzer actually knows how to fight.
But the new rules include what Mr. Spitzer called "poison pill" requirements that he said would effectively kill New York's and others states' plans.
"If they come back to us and refuse to budge from the positions they've taken, then we will sue," he said.
Suing the Bush administration to protect the health coverage of poor children? Now that's the Eliot Spitzer we all know and love.
Matt Stoller is a political activist/blogger in DC, and was an editor at MyDD from November 2005 until June 2007. He also consults for the Sunlight Foundation, FreePress.net, and Working Assets as well as proactively networking other progressive bloggers/internet activists and progressive professionals.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers//61173/
The Right to Organize is Key to Democracy
Posted on August 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60852/
For the last quarter century, corporate America has been at war against the labor movement. After a long period in which unions were an accepted part of the economic and political landscape, most corporations adopted a much more hostile attitude toward unions. Where unions already were present, employers sought to weaken or break them. In workplaces without unions, employers were prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent workers from organizing.
This anti-union drive has largely enjoyed the support of the government. For example, it is now a standard practice for employers to fire workers engaged in an organizing drive. A study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found one in five organizers will be fired during an average organizing drive. Such firings are illegal, but enforcement is sufficiently slow, and the penalties sufficiently small, that most employees eagerly embrace this effective anti-union tactic.
Government policies have also supported anti-union practices in other ways. A main purpose of trade agreements like NAFTA was to make it as easy as possible to relocate factories overseas. The high dollar policy Robert Rubin initiated in the Clinton era also put US manufacturing, and its unionized workers, at a huge disadvantage. A 30 percent over-valued dollar effectively imposes a 30 percent tariff on goods exported from the United States, while providing a subsidy of 30 percent on goods imported into the United States.
As a result of these policies, much manufacturing has, in fact, been moved overseas in the last quarter century, giving the country a trade deficit of more than $700 billion annually. And the jobs lost in manufacturing have been disproportionately union jobs. While the unionization rate in manufacturing was more than 40 percent in the sixties, in 2006 it was just 11.6 percent, less than the 12 percent average for all workers, although still somewhat higher than the 7.4 percent average for the private sector as a whole.
The weakening of the labor movement is not just bad news for the workers who lose union jobs. According to polling data, there are tens of millions of workers who would like to be represented by a union at their workplace, but don't currently have the option. The best way to get a guide as to how many workers would be in unions if they could opt to do so, in the absence of employer threats and harassment, is to look at the unionization rate in the public sector.
While public sector managers are not generally friendly to unions, they can't fire union organizers or use the other harsh anti-union tactics that are now standard practice in the private sector. As a result, more than 36 percent of public sector employees are members of unions. Given the freedom to choose, it is likely a comparable share of private sector workers would also be in unions. This would imply an additional 30 million workers in unions.
In addition to directly benefiting the workers they represent, unions also benefit the larger workforce and society as a whole. In an industry with a strong union presence, non-union firms know they must maintain comparable wages and benefits if they are want to keep their workers from joining a union. The decline of unions has undoubtedly been an important factor in the growth of inequality in the last quarter century.
Unions have also been essential to a wide range of political initiatives over the post-war period. Programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start would not have been possible without the strong support of the labor movement. The same is true of the key civil rights legislation of the sixties. More recently, the labor movement was at the center of the effort to prevent President Bush from privatizing Social Security. It will be difficult to make much progress on a wide range of social and economic issues without the support of a strong labor movement.
Congress is currently debating a bill that would take an important step toward re-establishing the right of workers to join a union. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would require a company to recognize a union once a majority of workers have signed a card indicating they want to be represented by a union. This gets around the election process, which gives employers a chance to intimidate workers and fire the leaders of an organizing effort. (Under the EFCA, workers can still request an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.)
The EFCA would restore some meaning to the right to organize. The bill that has been passed by the House by is currently being blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. While the EFCA is not likely to become law under this Congress (President Bush would almost certainly veto the bill even if it did pass), progressives should recognize the importance of legislation. The right to organize is not the concern of just a small special interest group; it is a basic right that should concern us all. In the same vein, all progressives have an interest in seeing a strong labor movement. For this reason, the EFCA and other measures that level the playing field between labor and management should be top items on the progressive agenda.
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60852/
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Repressed Reep Dept
Tearoom Trade Senator
By GARY LEUPPhttp://www.counterpunch.org/leupp08302007.html
The Jeff Gannon Affair drew our attention to the fact that a male prostitute can sleep over at the White House on multiple occasions. The Mark Foley Affair alerted us to the phenomenon of conservative Republican lawmakers' passion for teenage pageboys. The Ted Haggard Scandal showed us that conservative Republican preachers who sermonize against gay rights can smolder with lust for man-to-man action. The arrest of Republican Florida State Rep. Bob Allen at a park in Central Florida, showed us that the coauthor of a recent public lewdness bill can lewdly solicit sex from an undercover male cop. And now, the Larry Craig Scandal draws our attention to the phenomenon of conservative Republican lawmakers firmly opposed to gay rights getting off on impersonal anonymous homo-sex in men's room toilet stalls.
It looks like two more conservative "family values" Republican senators may be "outed" soon, by Mike Rogers, the same blogger who originally fingered Craig. The gay activist claims that South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham is gay. More interestingly, he claims that, "Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's quick expulsion from the Army---for fondling a private's privates---is finally being discussed in Kentucky." He notes that McConnell, discharged after just 10 days in the Army in 1967, "has consistently prevented anyone from seeing his military discharge papers" but a Freedom of Information suit may bring them to light. (After the revelation of Craig's arrest and confession, McConnell cosigned a statement with other top Republican legislators stating, "This is a serious matter" and indicating he is examining "other aspects of the case to determine if additional action is required.")
Schadenfreude aside, I almost feel badly for the rank and file homophobic Christian rightists who have to read about these scandalous goings-on. Perusing some blogs I encounter a couple of their confused, angry reactions:
(1) it's the Log Cabin Republicans' fault,
(2) the Democrats are to blame for promoting the idea that such behavior is "normal." (I haven't found anyone accusing the cop of a politically-motivated set-up.)
The widespread occurrence of such depravity in their own ranks must produce some frustration among the ultras. These men they trust as sincere homophobes, taking their cue from Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27, turn out to be such hypocrites. Of course if the sinner repents, and seeks treatment for his sickness, the Christian can forgive. But this cascade of scandals has got to produce some doubts about the whole antigay campaign central to the religious right's political program. The rigid un-nuanced minds of these people crave authority figures, and when the latter so suddenly and deeply disappoint, there has to be some wavering of faith. But that's a good thing.
Forgive my failure to express moral outrage about these scandals. I am among other things an historian of sexuality and attempt to address sexual issues dispassionately. I'm not going to dwell on the Idaho senator's two-facedness---everybody else is doing that anyway---or rejoice in his embarrassing situation, which if he weren't such a fraud would strike me as rather tragic. After all, he was just a guy in an airport restroom, signaling the guy in the next stall that he had some urgent needs which a consenting partner might be able to satisfy. For his trouble he got busted by a cop, apparently well versed in gay subculture protocols, sitting there on a toilet with his pants up for God knows how long (and compensated by how many taxpayer dollars) for the express purpose of arresting men for tapping their feet, and intruding those feet or their hands into the neighboring space expecting a positive response. Sgt. Dave Karsnia was there to crack down on this sort of behavior on the grounds that it infringed the typical toilet-user's privacy. That strikes me as reasonable enough, although I'd think a simple, "get your foot out of my stall, dude," would have immediately aborted the overture.
I wonder how many of these police missions are triggered by complaints by men never threatened or meaningfully harassed during their stall-time but merely disgusted by the realization that there are men in this world so sick as to play footsie on the toilet, soliciting gay sex, and inclined to visit the wrath of God on their degenerate selves by doing so. I don't mean to minimize the sense of privacy invasion felt by those experiencing unwanted stall intrusions, but I can see homophobia as a factor fueling appeals for police action.
The point of the police action in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport last June, which resulted in Craig's arrest, was to discourage men with Craig's particular fetish by arresting a bunch of them. Every so often police departments, responding to complaints from public restroom patrons, undertake these clean-up missions. One Canadian study (published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice) indicates that in one day in one restroom around 1990, police charged 17 men. The owner of a facility in another case requested police action, and in one day 30 men were warned. These figures suggest that that the facilities that had come to serve as reliable centers for sexual contact and were visited largely for that purpose. This appears to be a widespread phenomenon.
Yes, I confess I've done some research on this issue over the last 36 hours. As an historian of sexuality, among other things, I tend to approach these issues in a dispassionate, academic fashion. So I checked out Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, written under the direction of Harvard sociologist Lee Rainwater, published in 1970 and recipient of the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. "Tearoom trade" refers to homosexual activity (almost always oral) in public men's rooms, and Humphreys examines it in clinical detail. His most interesting finding was that over half of the men involved in this activity were married (to women) and carefully separated their private and social selves, donning "the breastplate of righteousness" in public as conservative "moral crusaders" (p. 131f). They expressed no anti-police sentiment, but encouraged more vice squad activity, suggesting that "deviant behavior may be plagued by a sort of moral arms race, in which the deviant is caught in the cycle of establishing new strategic defenses to protect himself from the fallout of his own defensive weapons. It is not necessary to adapt a psychoanalytic viewpoint in order to discern the self-hatred behind such a punishment process" (p. 141). This is not to say that their private, men's room self is at war with their social, official self; it can be flushed away and forgotten as they leave their stalls. But the latter self that takes over at that point wants to appear cleaner than the norm and to sneer with particular distain at all moral defilement.
One thinks of Mark Foley coauthoring legislation criminalizing the sharing of obscenity over the internet with minors. Or Bob Allen authoring a statute against public lewdness. There's a specific pathology here. Craig's record on gay rights has been among the most conservative in the Senate. In 2005 the American Conservative Union gave his voting record a score of 96 out of 100. Outwardly a pious Methodist, a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association since 1983, he's the picture of far-right respectability. But there sits, on the tearoom toilet seat, tapping his foot as he solicits gay sex. It's just too amusing. But also sort of sad.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Free Market Madness
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—With Labor Day approaching, it must not go unnoticed that Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial—the company that has helped drive world markets into turmoil with its lending—raked in $42.9 million last year. The Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, chief executive of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was paid $2.5 million.
Roughly speaking, here is what their relative compensation means: We now value the contributions of someone who has left homeowners frantic about whether they will be able to keep a roof over their heads about 18 times as much as we do those of a brilliant scientist whose groundbreaking research on the genetic basis for cancer could save millions of lives.
Yet what new mother, dreamily rocking her infant, wishes that her child one day will grow up to invent a convoluted mortgage instrument?
We’ve known for years that executive pay is obscenely out of whack with the earnings of today’s workers. The current ratio, according to public data analyzed by the Institute for Policy Studies, is that CEO pay among the chieftains of Fortune 500 companies is about 364 times the pay of an average worker. The data, drawn from an Associated Press survey of executive pay, do not reflect the latest Census Bureau finding that earnings of men and women who work full time dropped by about 1 percent last year. It’s the third consecutive year that earnings have dropped, the government says.
Here is another way to measure the madness: If you count only the value of “perks”—private jets used for personal travel, reimbursement of country club fees and commuting expenses, even company payment of taxes owed on bonus income—a minimum-wage earner would have to work for 36 years to earn the equivalent of what corporate chiefs averaged just in perks last year, according to the IPS, a liberal-leaning economic research group.
Whatever populist urge arises from these juxtapositions is lost, oddly, in what sometimes seems to be boredom with the truth. The level of inequality in our society is at a high point in contemporary American history, a new “Gilded Age” is upon us and, according to conventional thought, there just isn’t much to be done about it. The legislative fixes that from time to time arise—limiting egregious tax loopholes for hedge-fund managers, capping the amount that can be put away in increasingly robust, tax-deferred retirement accounts for top executives—are nip-and-tuck tactics. They won’t change the overall contour of a business culture run amok.
It is not only that American business executives are doing far, far better now than before when compared with their own workers. They’re doing far, far better than business leaders in Europe—the very executives against whom American CEOs say they must compete in the global economic market. In 2006, according to the IPS, the 20 highest-paid European managers made a combined average of $12.5 million. That’s about a third as much as the top 20 American managers.
And American business leaders are doing far, far better than American leaders in other professions. Scientists and doctors, university presidents and others who run large enterprises don’t come close to their compensation. Nor do U.S. military leaders now running two complex wars—they earn a tiny fraction of what the heads of major U.S. defense contractors take in.
“How do we deal with the bigger drift here?” asks Chuck Collins, senior scholar for the IPS. “We tilted the rules so that asset owners became winners over wage earners. We lifted up capital and betrayed work.”
There’s been a cultural shift of historic proportion. In the decades that followed the Great Depression and World War II, public policy was shaped to support creation of a mass middle class. Now, contemporary politics concentrates power in the hands of campaign donors. The public is fascinated with individual riches—even if they’re displayed in the debauchery of a Paris Hilton.
Yet it seems we have reached this unacceptable extreme less by design than by dereliction of some communal duty. Politics has played a role, beginning with the Reagan-era delusion of trickle-down economics. But so, too, has a failure of heart.
Even after the spectacular collapse of Enron, no fundamental change came about to prevent future corporate manipulations. Now we are in the midst of a mortgage meltdown.
Rebalancing portfolios is the recommended short-term palliative. Rebalancing our culture is the only long-term hope.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.
© 2007, Washington Post Writers Group
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Predicted Financial Storm Has Arrived
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/29kolko.cfm
By Gabriel Kolko
Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus exists between those who endorse it and those who argue the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, we are on the verge of a serious crisis-if not now, then in the near future.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements, the British Financial Services Authority, the Financial Times, and innumerable mainstream commentators were increasingly worried and publicly warned against many of the financial innovations that have now imploded. Warren Buffett, whom Forbes ranks the second richest man in the world, last year called credit derivatives-only one of the many new banking inventions-"financial weapons of mass destruction." Very conservative institutions and people predicted the upheaval in global finances we are today experiencing.
The IMF has taken the lead in criticizing the new international financial structure, and over the past three years it has published numerous detailed reasons why it has become so dangerous to the world's economic stability. Events have confirmed its prognostication that complexity and lack of transparency, the obscurity of risks and universal uncertainty, especially regarding collateralized debt and loan obligations, will cause a flight to security that will dry up much of the liquidity of banking. "…Financial innovation itself," as a Financial Times columnist put it, "is the problem". The ultra-creative system is seizing up because no one understands where risks are located or how it works. It began to do so this summer and fixing it is not very likely.
It is impossible to measure the extent of the losses. The final results of this deluge have yet to be calculated. Even many of the players who have stakes in the countless arcane investment instruments are utterly ignorant. The sums are enormous.
Only a few of the many measures give us a rough estimate:
The present crisis began-it has scarcely ended there--with subprime mortgage loans in the U.S., which were valued at over $1.3 trillion at the beginning of 2007 but are, for practical purposes, worth far, far less today. We can ignore the impact of this crisis on U.S. housing prices, but some projections are of a 10 percent decline-another trillion or so. Indirectly, of course, the mortgage crisis has also brought many millions of people into the larger financial world and they will get badly hurt.
What the subprime market did was unleash a far greater maelstrom involving banks in Germany, France, Asia, and throughout the world, calling into question much of the world financial system as it has developed over the past decade.
Investment banks hold about $300 billion in private equity debts they planned to place-mainly in leveraged buy-outs. They will be forced to sell them at discounts or keep them on their balance sheets-either way they will lose.
The near-failure of the German Sachsen LB bank, which had to be saved from bankruptcy with 17.3 billion euros in credit, revealed that European banks hold over half-trillion dollars in so-called asset backed commercial paper, much of it in the U. S. and subprime mortgages. A failure in America caused Europe too to face a crisis. The problem is scarcely isolated.
The leading victim of this upheaval are the hedge funds. What are hedge funds? There are about 10,000 and, all told, they do everything. Some hedge funds, however, provided companies with capital and successfully competed with commercial banks because they took much greater risks. A substantial proportion is simple gamblers; some even bet on the weather--hunches. Many look to their computers and mathematics for models to guide their investments, and these have lost the most money, but funds based on other strategies also lost during August. The spectacular Long-term Capital Management 1998 failure was also due to its reliance on ingenious mathematical propositions, yet no one learned any lessons from it, proving that appeals to reason as well as experience fall on deaf ears if there is money to be made.
Some gained during the August crisis but more lost, and in the aggregate the hedge funds lost a great deal-their allure of rapid riches gone. There have been some spectacular bankruptcies and bailouts, including some of the biggest investment firms. Investors who got cold feet found that withdrawing money from hedge funds was nigh on impossible. The real worth of their holdings is hotly contested, and valuations vary wildly. In reality, there is no way to appraise them realistically-they all depend largely on what people want to believe and will take, or the market.
We are at an end of an era, living through the worst financial panic in many decades. Now begins global financial instability. It is impossible to speculate how long today's turmoil will last-but there now exists an uncertainty and lack of confidence that has been unparalleled since the 1930s-and this ignorance and fear is itself a crucial factor. The moment of reckoning for bankers and bosses has arrived. What is very clear is that losses are massive and the entire developed world is now experiencing the worst economic crisis since 1945, one in which troubles in one nation compound those in others.
All central banks are wracked by dilemmas. They have neither the resources nor the knowledge, including legal powers, to remedy the present maelstrom. Although there is clamor from financiers and assorted operators to bail them out, the Federal Reserve must also weigh the consequences of its moves, above all for inflation. Then there is the question of "moral hazards." Is the Federal Reserve's responsibility to save financial adventurers from their own follies? Throughout August the American and European central banks plunged about a half-trillion dollars into the banking system in an attempt to unfreeze blocked credit and loans that followed the subprime crisis-an event which triggered a "flight to safety" which greatly reduced banks' willingness to loan. In effect, the Federal Reserve relied on banks to restore confidence in the financial system, subsidizing their efforts.
Central banks' efforts succeeded only very partially but, in the aggregate, they failed: banks and investors now seek security rather than risk, and they will sit on their money. The Federal Reserve privately acknowledges its inability to cope with an inordinately complex financial structure. European central bankers are in exactly the same dilemma: they simply don't know what to do.
But this scarcely touches the real problem, which is structural and impinges wholly on the way the world financial structure has evolved over the past two decades. As in the past, there is a critical split in the banking and finance world and each has political leverage along with clashing interests. More important, central banks were not designed to cope with today's realities and have neither the legal powers nor knowledge to control them.
In this context, central banks will have increasing problems and the solutions they propose, as in the past, will be utterly inadequate, not because their intentions are wrong but because it is impossible to regulate such a vast, complex economy-even less today than in the past because there is no international mechanism to do so. Internationalization of finance has meant less regulation than ever, and regulation was scarcely very effective even at the national level.
Not only leftists are naïve but so too are those conservatives who think they can speak truth to power and change the course of events. Greed's only bounds are what makes money. Existing international institutions-of which the IMF is the most important--or well-intentioned advice will not change this reality.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Pocket Paradigms
And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless.
The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a nature that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."
America used to make things people wanted, said things that needed to be said, and fixed things, including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in the blue, riding only on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished." - Sam Smith