Gringa Perdida no Brasil

Gota d'Agua, assine por favor!

2011-12-01T18:15:00.001-02:00

GOTA D'AGUA http://www.movimentogotadagua.com.br/assinatura

Vossa Excelência Sra Presidente Dilma Rousseff

Exmo. Sr. Presidente da Câmara dos Deputados Marco Maia PT/RS

Nós do Movimento Gota D’Água pedimos o vosso empenho e ação para evitar mais umdesastre ambiental de proporções gigantescas:

• pedimos vossa atenção para ouvir os argumentos da população do Xingu, dos ambientalistas, técnicos e cientistas verdadeiramente empenhados em achar soluções para o desenvolvimento sustentável do Brasil.
• pedimos o fim dos discursos ambientalistas de palanque e o avanço na direção de umadiscussão verdadeira em prol de políticas alternativas de geração de energia sustentável - capazes de gerar a energia necessária ao desenvolvimento do país, sem arruinar um ecossistema dessa magnitude
• pedimos a interrupção imediata das obras de Belo Monte e a abertura de um amplo debate, que convoque os brasileiros a refletir e a opinar sobre qual modelo de progresso estão dispostos a perseguir, cientes das conseqüências de suas escolhas.

(Os Signatários)

English

To Ms President Dilma Rousseff

To the National Congress of Brazil - Mr. Deputy Marco Maia PT / RS

The petition of “Movimento Gota D’água”,

A nonpartisan organization, committed to stop the imminent building of Belo Monte and to increase the awareness of the Brazilian population over the subject of sustainable development,

Declares that

The building of a gigantic hydroelectric power plant in the Amazon Forest will destroy the natural habitat of thousands of species and brutally dislodge entire local communities. What amount of electric energy would justify such an act of violence and destruction?

The petitioners therefore request that the President and Brazilian Congressmen bring their commitment and action to prevent another environmental disaster of gigantic proportions and request:

• That the arguments of the people from Xingu are heard, as well as the alternative solutions for energy generation presented by environmentalists and scientists;
• That campaing speeches on enviromental issues are replaced by a true discussion of alternative policies to promote and develop technologies, which are able to generate the energy needed to develop the country, without ruining an ecosystem of this magnitude and value;
• That the construction of Belo Monte be stopped immediatly.
• The opening of a national debate to increase the awareness of the Brazilian people to reflect and opine on what model of progress we are willing to pursue, aware of the consequences of our choices.

And the petitioner(s) remain(s), etc.

ASSINE AQUI!

Another victory for our plutocrat overlords: IRS ceases audits of large donors to 501(c)4 organizations (faux think tanks, etc.) -- many of these tax-exempt organizations are in fact nothing more than lobbyists for the ultra-right wing

2011-07-08T09:06:00.000-03:00

I.R.S. Drops Audits of Political Donors

by STEPHANIE STROM, The New York Times, July 7, 2011

The Internal Revenue Service on Thursday abandoned its effort to force five big-ticket donors to pay gift taxes on contributions they made to nonprofit advocacy groups that are playing an increasing role in American politics.

“Until further notice, examination resources should not be expended on this issue,” Steven T. Miller, deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, wrote in a memo posted on the I.R.S. Web site.

“This is a difficult area,” Mr. Miller wrote, “with significant legal, administrative and policy implications with respect to which we have little enforcement history.”

The memo was a sharp reversal for the tax agency, which had invoked a rarely used, 30-year-old ruling to warn the five donors in February that they might owe gift taxes on their donations. Organizations heavily financed by conservative donors like David Koch, or in the case of Crossroads GPS, tied to top Republican strategists like Karl Rove, would have come under such newly enforced rules, were they to be imposed across the board.

News of those audits broke in May, after lawyers representing the donors complained about them in an American Bar Association meeting. Neither the donors nor the organizations to which they made the gifts that prompted the I.R.S. audits have been disclosed publicly.

The issue electrified the political world, where such advocacy groups, known as 501(c)4 organizations for the section of the tax code under which they are established, have become powerful players in recent years.

Mr. Rove’s group and Priorities USA, a new liberal advocacy group set up by two former Obama administration officials, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, are attracting ever larger war chests in support of campaigns and causes because they can offer their donors anonymity, unlike political action committees and 527 organizations.

The I.R.S. audits became public just as such groups were ramping up for the 2012 election cycle, and a group of six senators led by Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, wrote to the I.R.S. commissioner Douglas H. Shulman raising concerns that its effort to impose gift taxes on donations to these groups was politically motivated and in violation the First Amendment.

“This decision today ensures that the I.R.S. remains free from even the hint of undue political influence,” Mr. Hatch said in a statement on Thursday. “It cannot be turned into an arm of political retribution or payback.”

Similarly, David Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, questioned the process the I.R.S had used to challenge the five donors and whether the Obama administration, which has been critical of the increasing power of advocacy groups, was involved.

On Thursday, Mr. Camp issued a statement saying that while he welcomed Mr. Miller’s decision, he remained concerned that the I.R.S. had not ruled out future gift taxes on or audits of such donations. “I remain troubled that the I.R.S. has failed to explain what prompted these audits in the first place,” he said.

The I.R.S. has said that the White House had nothing to do with its audits, and its original statement said they were begun by lower-level employees and that administration officials were not notified. Frank Keith, an I.R.S. spokesman, said Thursday that the estate and gift tax unit had in fact suspended those audits in March, although the agency’s initial confirmation of the audits did not mention any such action.

“All decisions to open, suspend and close the audits were made by career civil servants and were not the result of any outside influence,” Mr. Keith said.

Mr. Miller’s memo today indicated that no new inquiries would be made of donors to such groups until these issues had been studied and a broader policy developed, on a timetable he left open-ended. Greg Colvin, a lawyer for one of the five donors under audit by the I.R.S., called the memo issued Thursday “at least a temporary victory.”

“They might sometime in the future decide to apply the tax,” Mr. Colvin added. “But in my experience, they can go for a very, very long time if they’ve got a tough issue where there is difficult public policy, contradictions, constitutional questions, debate over what Congress intended. They could keep this on ice for decades.”

Mr. Colvin and other lawyers said the I.R.S. turnaround might lead to a spate of refund requests from donors who made contributions to advocacy groups and paid gift taxes. “It makes sense to file a protective claim to avoid losing out by virtue of the statute of limitations expiring,” said Marcus Owens, a lawyer who formerly headed the I.R.S. division that oversees nonprofit groups.

Mr. Keith, the I.R.S. spokesman, said taxpayers had the right to file for a refund of any tax they had paid. “However, I’m not saying how the I.R.S. would treat such a claim, whether it would be honored or denied, and the field directive” — Mr. Miller’s memo — “doesn’t speak to that, either,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 8, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: I.R.S. Drops Audits Of Political Donors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/business/irs-drops-audits-of-donors-to-political-groups.html

Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama bin Laden’s Death

2011-06-29T19:23:00.001-03:00

Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama bin Laden’s Death

Truthdigs, May 1, 2011: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chris_hedges_speaks_on_osama_bin_ladens_death_20110502

Chris Hedges, speaking at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death.

I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob [Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer] wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told ... me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naive about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11—and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha—is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.

And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida—that’s clear—he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren [Beatty] about [Ian] Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned. [Chris turned out to be wrong about this, or at least, that is what our government told us.]

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.

And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate [them], isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe.

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawi, the head of al-Azhar—who died recently—who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.

Thank you.

Listen to Chris’ speech below:

Kenneth Raposa, Forbes: LulzSec attacks Petrobras and Brazilian Receita Federal (internal revenue service), news sites, and that main site of the President of the Republic

2011-06-23T11:41:00.000-03:00

LulzSec attack Brazilian Gov, Petrobras

by Kenneth Raposa, BRIC Breaker, Forbes blogs, June 22, 2011

LulzSec: the logo. The Brazilian arm of the global computer hacker community slammed Brazilian government websites on Wednesday; their biggest attack ever on Brazil. And the third this year. What's next?

Global hacker group LulzSec successfully hacked four government websites, shutting them down and spray painting at least one ofthem with a little keyboard graphiti. LulzSecBrazil, the Brazilian version of the group, took down the website of Brazilian oil company Petrobras on Wednesday. In its place was a message, written in Portuguese for Brazilians to “wake up” and stop paying R$2.98 per liter for gasoline (around $7.5 per gallon) while Petrobras exports it for less. Petrobras was unavailable for immediate comment on its overseas gasoline market.

LulzSec’s Brazilian hacker group has infiltrated government websites three times this year, but Wednesday’s attack was its largest yet. Between midnight and 03:00 local time, three government websites were down, including news sites, Brazil’s internal revenue service, and the main site of the President of the Republic. The SQL injection attacks made the network hosting the sites read over 2 billion unique user access attempts at the same time, slowing the site down, or shutting it down completely, according to a statement from the Office of the President.

The attacking servers were based in Italy, but could have originated elsewhere, Folha de São Paulo reported on Wednesday.

Both LulzSecBrazil and LulzSec announced the attack on their Twitter accounts as they took place.

Petrobras said in a statement that no data appears to have been stolen from the attack. “The momentary congestion of our servers did not cause any alteration to the site’s content or compromised data,” the company said.

LulzSec has been on a tear lately. It’s become the geek squad version of Al Qaeda, joyously claiming responsibility for successful attacks whenever they can. They hacked into the site of the US Senate on June 13, and shut down the Central Intelligence Agency’s website a few days later. They claimed responsibility for both. The group has asked its followers to hack government sites to “steal and leak any classified information, including emails and exchanges of documents. The main targets are banks and other high level establishments.”

LulzSec’s new campaign to steal sensitive government data — and its back to back attacks on the US and Brazil — may signal that it is getting bolder. LulzSec is like a Wikileaks cybersquad of hitmen, but so far has not uncovered any damaging information.

Reuters reporters from Boston and Johannesburg wrote this week that LulzSec recently turned down a potential reward from a security firm, Berg & Berg, that had offered $10,000 to anyone who could change a picture on its website. LulzSec did it, and left a message to say the task was easy. “Keep your money; we do it for the lulz.”

LOL!!!

See: LulzSec Ambitions Grow

http://blogs.forbes.com/kenrapoza/2011/06/22/lulzsec-attacks-brazil-gov-petrobras/

NYT: China’s Interest in Farmland Makes Brazil Uneasy [as well it should!]

2011-05-28T17:39:00.002-03:00

China’s Interest in Farmland Makes Brazil Uneasy

Photo: Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times. A farmer working in his soybean field in Uruaçu, Brazil. Demand for soybeans in China has brought Chinese investors here.

by Alexie Barrionuevo, The New York Times, May 26, 2011

URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.

Photo: Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times. A new railroad line in Uruaçu, Brazil, will carry soybeans to a port for shipping to China. Brazil's economic links with China have helped it prosper, but Brazil is selling mostly raw materials.

Photo: Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times. A farmer harvested soy in Uruaçu, Brazil.

Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China.

“They need the soy more than anyone,” said Edimilson Santana, a farmer in the small town of Uruaçu. “This could be a new beginning for farmers here.”

The $7 billion agreement signed last month — to produce six million tons of soybeans a year — is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.

Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas.

“They are moving in,” said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries. “They are looking for land, looking for reliable partners. But what they would like to do is run the show alone.”

While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them — and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy.

“One thing the world can be sure of: there is no going back,” Mr. da Silva said while visiting Beijing in 2009.

China has become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, buying ever increasing volumes of soybeans and iron ore, while investing billions in Brazil’s energy sector. The demand has helped fuel an economic boom here that has lifted more than 20 million Brazilians from extreme poverty and brought economic stability to a country accustomed to periodic crises.

Yet some experts say the partnership has devolved into a classic neo-colonial relationship in which China has the upper hand. Nearly 84% of Brazil’s exports to China last year were raw materials, up from 68% in 2000. But about 98% of China’s exports to Brazil are manufactured products — including the latest, low-priced cars for Brazil’s emerging middle class — that are beating down Brazil’s industrial sector.

“The relationship has been very unbalanced,” said Rubens Ricupero, a former Brazilian diplomat and finance minister. “There has been a clear lack of strategy on the Brazilian side.”

While visiting China last month, Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, emphasized the need to sell higher-value products to China, and she has edged closer to the United States. “It is not by accident that there is a sort of effort to revalue the relationship with the United States,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “China exposes Brazil’s vulnerabilities more than any other country in the world.”

China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.

Mr. Adams said his decision was not a direct result of land-buying by China, but he noted that huge “land grabs” in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including China’s attempt to lease about three million acres in the Philippines, had alarmed Brazilian officials.

“Nothing is preventing investment from happening, but it will be regulated,” Mr. Adams said.

A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases.

Foreigners own an estimated 11% of productive land in Argentina, according to the Argentine Agriculture Federation. In Brazil, one government study estimated that foreigners owned land equivalent to about 20% of São Paulo State.

International investors have criticized the restrictions. At least $15 billion in farming and forestry projects in Brazil have been suspended since the government’s limits, according to Agroconsult, a Brazilian agricultural consultancy.

“The tightening of land purchases by foreigners is really a step backwards into a Jurassic mentality of counterproductive nationalism,” said Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce, saying that American farmers had bought sizable plots in Brazil in recent years, with little uproar.

Responding to the criticism, Brazil’s agriculture minister said this month that Brazil might start leasing farmland to foreigners, given the barriers to ownership.

China itself does not allow private ownership of farmland, and it cautioned local governments against granting large-scale or long-term leases to companies in a 2001 directive. China also bans foreign companies from buying mines and oil fields.

But as more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50% by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.

In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements.

“We are never going to sell the land,” said Juan Manuel Accatino, the minister of production in Río Negro.

Brian Willott, an American farmer who came to Brazil in 2003, said Chinese interest in buying farms had not abated. “Everywhere you go to look at a farm they say, ‘We are considering selling to the Chinese,’ ” he said.

In Goiás State, nearly 70% of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades.

“For them, the faster the better,” said Antônio de Lima, Goiás’ agriculture minister.

Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.

But Tan Lin, a manager at the Chinese company involved in Goiás, said he doubted Chinese companies were ready to replace them.

“I don’t see that the Chinese companies working here have that expertise yet,” Mr. Tan said. But “if you can do that, it is good, of course.”

Reporting was contributed by Myrna Domit from São Paulo, Brazil, Charles Newbery from Buenos Aires, David Barboza from Shanghai and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/world/americas/27brazil.html?src=recg&pagewanted=all

Wise words from one of the most alive persons on the planet: William Shatner

2011-04-09T04:12:00.000-03:00

Bob Herbert: Losing Our Way

2011-03-28T14:11:00.002-03:00

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 25, 2011

REPRINTS

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Bob Herbert

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Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

•

This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 26, 2011, o

Nicholas Kristof: Militants, Women and Tahrir Square -- We Are All Egyptians

2011-02-06T16:28:00.000-03:00

Militants, Women and Tahrir Sq.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 5, 2011

REPRINTS

CAIRO

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

On the Ground

Nicholas Kristof is posting from Cairo on his blog whenever he has Internet access. You can also follow his updates on Facebookand Twitter.

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Times Topic: Egypt News — The Protests

When Westerners watched television images of the popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, they winced at the government’s thuggery toward protesters. But some also flinched at the idea of a popular democracy that might give greater voice to Islamic fundamentalism.

In 1979, a grass-roots uprising in Iran led to an undemocratic regime that oppresses women and minorities and destabilizes the region. In 1989, uprisings in Eastern Europe led to the rise of stable democracies. So if Egyptian protesters overcome the government, would this be 1979 or 1989?

No one can predict with certainty. But let me try to offer a dose of reassurance.

After spending last week here on Tahrir Square, talking to protesters — even as President Mubarak’s thugs attacked our perimeter with bricks, Molotov cocktails, machetes and occasional gunfire — I emerge struck by the moderation and tolerance of most protesters.

Maybe my judgment is skewed because pro-Mubarak thugs tried to hunt down journalists, leading some of us to be stabbed, beaten and arrested — and forcing me to abandon hotel rooms and sneak with heart racing around mobs carrying clubs with nails embedded in them. The place I felt safest was Tahrir Square — “free Egypt,” in the protesters’ lexicon — where I could pull out a camera and notebook and ask anybody any question.

I constantly asked women and Coptic Christians whether a democratic Egypt might end up a more oppressive country. They invariably said no — and looked so reproachfully at me for doubting democracy that I sometimes retreated in embarrassment.

“If there is a democracy, we will not allow our rights to be taken away from us,” Sherine, a university professor, told me (I’m not using full names to protect the protesters). Like many, she said that Americans were too obsessed with the possibility of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in elections.

“We do not worry about the Muslim Brotherhood,” Sherine said. “They might win 25 percent of the votes, but if they do not perform then they will not get votes the next time.”

Sherine has a point. Partly because of Western anxieties, fundamentalist Muslims have rarely run anything — so instead they lead the way in denouncing the corruption, incompetence and brutality of pro-Western autocrats like Mr. Mubarak. The upshot is that they win respect from many ordinary citizens, but my hunch is that they would lose support if they actually tried to administer anything.

For example, in 1990s Yemen, an Islamic party named Islah became part of a coalition government after doing well in elections. As a result, Islah was put in charge of the Education Ministry. Secular Yemenis and outsiders were aghast that fundamentalists might brainwash children, but the Islamists mostly proved that they were incompetent at governing. In the next election, their support tumbled.

It’s true that one of the most common protester slogans described Mr. Mubarak as a stooge of America, and many Egyptians chafe at what they see as a supine foreign policy. I saw one caricature of Mr. Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead and, separately, a sign declaring: “Tell him in Hebrew, and then he might get the message!” Yet most people sounded pragmatic, favoring continued peace with Israel while also more outspoken support for Palestinians, especially those suffering in Gaza.

I asked an old friend here in Cairo, a woman with Western tastes that include an occasional glass of whiskey, whether the Muslim Brotherhood might be bad for peace. She thought for a moment and said: “Yes, possibly. But, from my point of view, in America the Republican Party is bad for peace as well.”

If democracy gains in the Middle East, there will be some demagogues, nationalists and jingoists, just as there are in America and Israel, and they may make diplomacy more complicated. But remember that it’s Mr. Mubarak’s repression, imprisonment and torture that nurtured angry extremists like Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda, the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden. It would be tragic if we let our anxieties impede our embrace of freedom and democracy in the world’s most populous Arab nation.

I’m so deeply moved by the grit that Egyptians have shown in struggling against the regime — and by the help that some provided me, at great personal risk, in protecting me from thugs dispatched by America’s ally. Let’s show some faith in the democratic ideals for which these Egyptians are risking their lives.

I think of Hamdi, a businessman who looked pained when I asked whether Egyptian democracy might lead to oppression or to upheavals with Israel or the price of oil. “The Middle East is not only for oil,” he reminded me. “We are human beings, exactly like you people.”

“We don’t hate the American people,” he added. “They are pioneers. We want to be like them. Is that a crime?”

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground, where I am posting from Cairo whenever I have Internet access. You can also follow my updates on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06kristof.html

Embraer Legacy 600 Jet Involved in Brazil Midair Finally on U.S. Soil

2011-02-01T00:14:00.000-03:00

Jet Involved in Brazil Midair Finally on U.S. Soil

By: Matt Thurber

November 19, 2010
Accidents, Business Aviation, Maintenance and Modifications

The Embraer Legacy 600 involved in the midair with a Gol Transportes Aéreos Boeing 737 on Sept. 29, 2006, will arrive today at Cleveland (Ohio) Hopkins International Airport after a ferry flight from Eduardo Gomes International Airport in Manaus, Brazil. (See current FlightAware flight track.) The Legacy 600–now registered as N965LL–was recovered by a mobile repair team from Cleveland-based Constant Aviation, which was hired by the new owners of the Legacy to recover and repair the jet. Before arriving in Cleveland today, the Legacy flew from Manaus to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., yesterday, landing on U.S. soil at 7:23 p.m. Last month, it was flown from the military airbase in Cachimbo, where the twinjet made an emergency landing after the midair, to Manaus in northern Brazil.

The business jet had originally been purchased by charter/management firm ExcelAire of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., and was on its delivery flight from the Embraer factory in São José dos Campos when the collision occurred. According to Constant Aviation president Stephen Maiden, the insurance company declared the Legacy as a write-off and sold the jet as-is to the new owner, whom Constant would not identify. FAA records list the new owner as Cloudscape of Wilmington, Del.

In early 2007, a team from Constant Aviation visited Brazil to examine the Legacy on behalf of the insurance provider, along with personnel from Embraer, and they conducted an initial analysis of the airplane. Later, another visit was made to conduct alignment checks of the airframe and determine whether it could fly again, Maiden said. The Legacy had a damaged left elevator and the left wing was missing its winglet. “Some structural repairs had to be done to get it in a position to where we could fly it,” Maiden said, “even on a ferry permit.” This included replacing the horizontal stabilizer before the Legacy left the airbase.

The humid jungle environment in Brazil was not kind to the airplane, which sat outside for a year-and-a-half after the accident, and all of its Honeywell avionics displays had to be replaced, he said. The fuel tanks were clean and the Rolls-Royce AE3007 engines had been preserved–although they hadn't been run, they were in good shape. “We did extensive boroscoping and testing to verify the validity of the engines,” he said. The airframe wasalso free of corrosion. “We had a team of 10 people,” he said, “and we spent three weeks doing testing and analyzing all the systems to make sure it was a safe airplane to put back in the air.”

After arriving in Cleveland later this morning, the Legacy will get a new wing and a heavy (48-month) inspection. The owner will have to decide whether to buy a new wing or a used serviceable wing, Maiden said. The engines will be sent to a Rolls-Royce-authorized service center for evaluation and any necessary repairs. “We'll inspect and repair all the systems,” he said, “and do a full evaluation of the interior. The airplane is relatively new, with only 20 flight hours. [We may] refurbish the interior.”

For Constant Aviation, which recovers airplanes from all over the world, the Legacy job was one of the company's most difficult, Maiden said. “With an airplane that was this notable, it created a lot of other issues legally, which [caused] a timing issue and restrictions on how we were going to work to get the airplane out of Brazil. It's one of the most challenging we've done.”

Maiden expects the Constant Aviation team to finish the repairs and refurbishment of the Legacy in about 90 days. “We do this type of work all the time,” he said. “Airplanes are damaged and repaired. The owner is buying a brand-new Legacy for a portion of the cost, as long as it is successfully recovered and repaired. The intent is to have an airworthy airplane in like-new status.”

As a Legacy service center, Constant Aviation does about 70 percent of Legacy scheduled maintenance in the U.S., according to Maiden, and 99 percent of 48-month inspections for U.S.-registered Legacys. “We are the resident expert in that field,” he said. “We're the only MRO ever to replace a nose and wing on a Legacy or Embraer 135. That drove the insurance company to reach out to us. We jumped at the opportunity to evaluate it and work to bring this airplane back to the U.S.”

http://www.ainonline.com/news/single-news-page/article/jet-involved-in-brazil-midair-finally-on-us-soil-27619/

Sandy Pope speaks out on mud-slinging by the Hoffa campaign for Teamster general president and what it will take to organize the nonunion competition

2011-01-24T20:20:00.000-03:00

Taking on the Nonunion Competition

Interview with Sandy Pope.

Sandy Pope speaks out on mud-slinging by the Hoffa Campaign and what it will take to organize the nonunion competition.

Question: The Hoffa Campaign says Local 805 is losing money and that you can’t be trusted with our union’s finances.

Local 805 has a strong financial foundation. We’ve put our reserves to work taking on the nonunion competition.

The Hoffa Campaign has made a big deal of attacking Local 805 because we have less money in the bank. I will never apologize for putting members’ dues money to work protecting their jobs and their contracts.

Q: How does one local take on the nonunion competition?

It’s tough. The lack of leadership and support from the IBT on organizing is a big reason I’m running for General President. Most local unions don’t have the resources or the reach to succeed on their own.

At Local 805, we’ve still made organizing a priority. I cut my salary. I make $40,000 less than the Local 805 President did more than ten years ago. We hired full-time organizing staff and launched campaigns to take on the nonunion competition.

We’ve organized around a dozen companies—and taken on major targets like FreshDirect, a grocery warehouse that employs more than a 1,000 nonunion workers in the heart of New York City.

When nonunion companies have threatened to take our work, we’ve leafleted customers and protected Teamster jobs.

We even took on Mayor Bloomberg when he tried to kill union jobs by shutting down the Brooklyn Piers. We teamed up with community groups—and took to the streets.

People told me I was crazy. They said you can’t beat City Hall. We proved them wrong.

Not many unions have even dared to take on Mayor Bloomberg. We did and we won. Teamsters are working on those piers today because we took on that fight.

Q: The Hoffa Campaign says your local has lost membership….

A few. Since I’ve been President, the local’s membership has been steady at around 1,200 members. I have never had a company decertify. But we have lost members when electronics companies and tobacco distributors have closed.

Under Hoffa, our International Union has lost a quarter of a million members—and added 140,000 through mergers.

I’m not interested in finger-pointing. We need less of that—and more organizing. The biggest threat to our union’s membership is the nonunion competition.

Q: What can the International Union do differently to boost Teamster organizing?

First, we’ve got to make it a priority. The International Union needs long-term, nationally coordinated campaigns to target the nonunion competition in our core industries—including freight and FedEx.

The concessions we’re seeing, especially in freight but in other industries too, they are the direct result of a decade of failure to make organizing in our core industries a priority.

As an International Union representative, I negotiated a neutrality agreement with the biggest nonunion grocery company in the Northeast, C&S.

We protected thousands of grocery workers under good contracts and good Teamster benefits. Hoffa let that agreement expire. Now C&S is eliminating Teamster warehouse distribution jobs up and down the East Coast.

If we’re going to protect our contracts, our jobs and our benefits, we’ve got to get serious about organizing.

Q: What about organizing at the local union level?

The International has got to do more to help. Hoffa doubled the International Union’s income when he raised members’ dues. He found the money to raise his own pay to more than $350,000. But he can’t find the money to help local unions organize.

As General President, I will expand funding to local unions to help finance strategic campaigns to organize the nonunion competition at the local union level.

That goes for any local. We’ve got to take the politics out of this. If you’ve got a plan to organize the nonunion competition, you’ll get resources to help you do it.

We’ve got to get smarter and more aggressive—and we’ve got to work together. I want to bring local unions together who operate in the same market to organize the nonunion competitors that are undercutting us.

Local unions in the Northeast have started to coordinate on our own to take on nonunion warehouse distribution employers. But locals unions can’t be abandoned to do this by ourselves. We need backing and resources from the International Union.

Link: http://sandypope2011.org/story/taking-nonunion-competition

Sarah Palin shows her true colors -- yellow -- and takes no blame at all for her gunsight map -- refuses to dial down rhetoric in aftermath of shooting tragedy in Tucson, Arizona

2011-01-13T09:55:00.000-03:00

Palin: Blaming me for Tucson shootings is 'blood libel'

Right-wing firebrand goes on offensive as Obama leads national mourning for victims

by David Usborne in Tucson, Arizona, The Independent (UK), January 13, 2011

On a day set aside for healing and prayer in the wake of last weekend's mass shooting in Tucson, all vestiges of a political armistice were shattered when Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, issued a video message accusing her critics of committing "blood libel" against her.

In a nearly eight-minute video posted on Facebook that veered between defiant and defensive, the Tea Party figurehead broke her days-long silence to answer allegations that her own rhetoric and the passions stirred by the Tea Party had somehow propelled the man accused of Saturday's carnage that left six dead and critically wounded congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Her video was posted just hours before President Barack Obama, in the role of healer-in-chief was to address a memorial event at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and John Boehner, the new House Speaker, opened a day of debate and reflection on the floor of the House of Representatives as Ms Palin's video played.

Ms Palin, [once] seen as a likely Republican candidate for president in 2012, had been under pressure to respond publicly to the criticisms piled on her since the Tucson shooting, notably linked to a map posted by her political action committee last year that used cross-hair symbols to identify districts with vulnerable Democrat incumbents before last year's midterm elections. One was Ms Gifford's.

Her statement may have had a greater impact than she expected because of her citing "blood libel," a phrase associated with the centuries-old slander of Jews that they used the blood of Christian children in their rituals and one used as a pretext for anti-Semitic persecution. Some Jewish leaders objected to her using the phrase. Ms Giffords, still in intensive care, is Jewish.

In her video, shot before a stone fireplace and an American flag, Ms Palin rejected the case for drawing a link between the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords and the heated rhetoric of political debate in last year's campaigns. She had listened to commentary on the killings, she said, "at first puzzled, then with concern and now with sadness to the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event... Within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

"There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal," Ms Palin went on. "And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those 'calm days' when political figures literally settled their differences with duelling pistols?" [nice of her to compare the 1800s with the 21st century]

Violent acts, she went on, should be blamed on the perpetrators only. "They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of the state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle [huh, oh, I think she just said it was ok to put gun sights on maps], not with law-abiding citizens who respectably exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies."

While the fairness of pointing a finger at Ms Palin will be fiercely debated, her standing may already have suffered serious damage, possibly not helped by a statement that seemed more focused on her than on the dead and 14 wounded victims of the assault. "Instead of dialling down the rhetoric at this difficult moment, Sarah Palin chose to accuse others trying to sort out the meaning of this tragedy of somehow engaging in a 'blood libel' against her and others," David Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Association said of the governor's video. "This is, of course, a particularly heinous term for American Jews."

Mr Obama was expected last night to say nothing in his speech that could be interpreted as partisan. His challenge was to make a speech that will be remembered as uplifting and inspiring at a time of tragedy. The address is inevitably going to be compared to the widely praised words of Bill Clinton in 1995 after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma that claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under six, and injured more than 680 people.

Mr Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, faced a similar challenge in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when he stood in the rubble of New York's World Trade Center, speaking through a bullhorn.

Daily Show Jon Stewart Destroys Bill Kristol on Health Care

2011-01-07T11:30:00.000-03:00

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa69puS7J0Q

Nature editorial: Give up the ghosts

2010-12-09T01:26:00.000-03:00

Give up the ghosts

Nature; 468,; 732; (09 December 2010; doi: 10.1038/468732a; p
ublished online: 8 December 2010

Editorial

The spectral fingerprints of a big drug company have once again been found all over academic publications. Documents released last week by a watchdog group based in Washington, DC, raise concerns about the role of writers paid by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in works attributed to psychiatric researchers at a number of US institutions. They add to the drumbeat of allegations in recent years indicating that such ghostwriting — in which articles contain substantial portions written by someone who is not listed as an author — is endemic in the biomedical literature.

The documents were made available as a result of litigation over GSK's antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine) and were pounced on by the Project on Government Oversight, which raised concerns about authorship of a research article, journal editorial and textbook.

The researchers did acknowledge the alleged ghostwriters of the textbook and the editorial in notes, but only for “editorial support.” For the journal article, which appeared in a supplement to Psychopharmacology Bulletin, GSK is thanked for an “unrestricted educational grant.” But the original front page of the manuscript — which the academic author is instructed to remove before submission to the journal — declares that it was prepared by writers from Scientific Therapeutics Information, a company based in Springfield, New Jersey, hired by GSK. The article and textbook discuss the uses of Paxil. The editorial, in Biological Psychiatry, gives an overview of depression as a major and growing public-health problem — which certainly does no harm to a company aggressively marketing an antidepressant.

The academic authors and the American Psychiatric Association, which published the textbook, have strongly denied that the pharmaceutical giant influenced its content. So, too, have the authors of the editorial and the journal article. GSK shareholders, then, may wonder what the company got for its money. The issue here is not that industry-financed experts cannot write useful and unbiased reports, but that their role must be declared in full. It is for readers, not authors, to conclude that there is no conflict of interest.

All the academic authors involved in this case have been recipients of US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding; all but one still are. The NIH may argue, rightly, that the ghostwritten publications did not use its money. It will also note, correctly, that this in an issue that demands far broader action. Both are beside the point. Money is fungible, and rarely do the studies and intellectual output of senior researchers divide neatly into industry-funded and taxpayer-funded work. If its grantees are not playing by the rules, the NIH is tarred and public trust is damaged. So, how clear are the rules on ghostwriting? A study last year found that just 10 out of 50 top US academic medical centres had explicit, web-accessible policies that prohibit the practice. Another three banned ghostwriting in practice without naming it as such (J. R. Lacasse and J. LeoPLoS Med. 7, e1000230; 2010).

Discussing the issue of ghostwriting a year ago, Francis Collins, the NIH director, said publicly that he was “shocked” that “people would allow their names to be used on articles they did not write, that were written for them, particularly by companies that have something to gain by the way the data is presented.” Many will share that shock, but, unlike Collins, few are in a position to do something about it. The agency is “considering how best to address and ensure” greater transparency and accountability as its grantees develop and author articles, Sally Rockey, NIH chief of extramural research, told Nature in an e-mail last week.

A good start would be for the NIH to require all institutions that take its funds to articulate, publicize and vigorously enforce a clear ban on ghostwriting. Other funders should follow suit. Without such a clear signal, and the willingness to give a ban teeth, this troubling ghost will linger at the feast.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7325/full/468732a.html

Even mark-to-fantasy accounting can't cover up cash flow problems forever! Hitler foreclosure fraud parody

2010-11-22T20:41:00.000-03:00

What In The World Is Going On Inside Bank Of America?

2010-11-16T11:50:00.000-03:00

What In The World Is Going On Inside Bank Of America?

by Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post, November 8, 2010

WASHINGTON -- You could do a lot worse things with your time than read every word of what William K. Black and L. Randall Wray have written for the Huffington Post in the last two weeks -- even though it would take a while.

Black and Wray both teach economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Black, himself a regulator during the S&L scandal of the 1980s, has emerged as one of the most blistering critics of the Obama administration's limp response to the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. For an introduction, read my article on Black and his list of nine stories the press is underreporting - most of them involving fraud, fraud and more fraud.

In their first piece, back on Oct. 22, Black and Wray described how the ongoing foreclosure fraud epidemic is the work of precisely the same unrepentant bank officers whose fraudulent mortgage schemes crashed the financial system in the first place. They called on the FDIC to put some of the nation's biggest banks into receivership, in order to clean house. "Foreclose on the foreclosure fraudsters," they wrote -- and start with the worst: Bank of America.

I wrote a news story about their piece, I thought it was so important.

In part two, they called for a foreclosure moratorium, and explained why the guilt gets greater the higher you go in the mortgage fraud food chain - not the other way around.

Black, writing alone, also corrected President Obama's assertion during his interview with Jon Stewart, that chief economic adviser Larry Summers had done a "heckuva job." Summers did not resolve the financial crisis, Black wrote, he just papered over the problem. In another solo effort, Black warned that papering over the problem will actually increase the total cost of the crisis in the long run, and he concluded that "the administration's banking policies have attained the terrible trifecta: terrible economics, terrible ethics, and terrible politics."

After Bank of America executive Rebecca Mairone posted a largely nonresponsive rejoinder to Black and Wray's call for her bank's dissolution, the professors took to their keyboards again and wrote about how "[t]he bank's response primarily criticizes its borrowers as deadbeats, yet the data it provides support points we have made in our prior posts."

In her defense of BofA, Mairone noted that most of the bank's problem loans were made by Countrywide Financial, which Bank of America acquired in January 2008 -- well after the toxicity of its mortgage holdings had made the company and its practices notorious. Mairone casts the action as a heroic one, staving off a failure that "would have been devastating to the economy, the markets, and millions of homeowners." But Black and Wray argue that putting Countrywide into receivership would have been a much better option: "A receiver would have fired Countrywide's fraudulent senior leaders. Bank of America, by contrast, put them in leadership roles in major operations, including foreclosures, where they could commit continuing frauds." And Bank of America bragged at the time of having had more than 60 people doing "due diligence" on Countrywide before the acquisition. So they knew what they were getting into; or at least they should have known.

In the second part of their response to Mairone, Black and Wray called on Bank of America to come clean. And in that post, they raise some fascinating questions that all of us should be asking. Among them:

How did you determine the losses in Countrywide's assets?
How large were the market value losses at that time?
How large are the market value losses now?
Which members of the due diligence team were assigned to determine the incidence of fraud in various loan categories? What did they find?
How large a sample of subprime and liar's loans did BofA's due diligence team review?
What likely mortgage fraud incidence did BofA's due diligence team discover?
What did they report to BofA with regard to fraud incidence?
What changes in lending and personnel did BofA implement in response to these findings?
What actions did BofA take in response to finding the incidence of mortgage and accounting/securities fraud?

Ambac Assurance sued Bank of America in September, saying Countrywide had fraudulently induced Ambac to insure bonds backed by loans that they knew had been improperly made. This came after Ambac's review of the underlying loans. Black and Wray ask:

Ambac reviewed Bank of America's assets and reported a 97 percent rate of false reps and warranties. Has Bank of America done such a review?
If so, who conducted the review, and what rate of false reps and warranties did they find?
Does Bank of America agree that liar's loans have extremely high fraud rates?
Does Bank of America agree that an honest secured lender would never seek to inflate an appraisal?
Does Bank of America agree that a competent, honest secured lender would prevent others from frequently inflating appraised values?
Does Bank of America agree that appropriate home mortgage underwriting can minimize adverse selection and produce a positive expected value to home lending?
How many fraudulent mortgage loans made by Countrywide has Bank of America identified?
What is Bank of America's procedure when it finds suspicious evidence of a fraudulent loan?
How many fraudulent mortgage loans, by year, since 2000, have Countrywide and Bank of America identified.
Has Bank of America reviewed Countrywide's nonprime loans for fraud incidence, fraud losses, and the incidence of lender fraud and fraud by the lender's agents? Please provide the results.
What has Bank of America done to remedy the injuries that borrowers suffered through loan or foreclosure fraud by them or Countrywide?
Does Bank of America agree that Countrywide's nonprime lending was often conducted in a manner that was unsafe and unsound?
Does Bank of America agree that Countrywide's record keeping was not adequate and required substantial improvement?
At current market value of its assets, just how insolvent is Bank of America?
How much can the bank sell its toxic assets for in today's market?
What is the value of mortgages and mortgage backed securities held by Bank of America for which it has no clear title?
How many mortgage-backed securities has the bank sold to investors for which it does not hold the notes that are required?
What is the bank's current estimate of losses it will suffer in court due to lawsuits by investors?
The top four banks are holding $434 billion in second liens (good only if the first lien -- the mortgage -- is paid), and carrying these on their books at 90% of face value. What are Bank of America's reasonably expected losses on second liens against properties that are delinquent, in foreclosure, or likely to go into foreclosure?

As for the ongoing foreclosure crisis, in which it has become apparent that banks are forcing people out of their homes despite the absence of original, "wet ink" documentation, Mairone blamed the foreclosures on deadbeat borrowers, many of them unemployed, a third of whom no longer occupied their homes. Black and Wray asked:

Does Bank of America hold the "wet ink" notes on any of these homes, as required by 45 states?

How many of the mortgages were fraudulent from the very beginning: low docs, no docs, liar loans, NINJA's (all specialties of Countrywide)?

How many homes are now vacant because the homeowners were illegally removed from them?

How many of these homeowners were unemployed or otherwise financially distressed when the loans were originally made?

Jim Swilley, courageous Georgia megachurch (Church of The Now) pastor, comes out to congregation after gay teen suicides

2010-11-16T11:36:00.000-03:00

Jim Swilley, Georgia Megachurch Pastor, Comes Out To Congregation After Gay Teen Suicides

Huffington Post, November 14, 2010

Jim Swilley, the pastor of a Georgia megachurch (Church of The Now), recently revealed to his congregation that he is gay. The 52-year-old father of four said that his wife, to whom he was married for more than 20 years, encouraged him to come out years ago, but at the time, he told her: "These words will never come out of my mouth."

However, the recent spate of teen suicides, particularly that of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, prompted him to change his mind. "For some reason his situation was kind of the tipping point with me," Swilley told CNN's Don Lemon this weekend.

"There comes a point in your life where you say 'How much time do we have left in our lives? Are we going to be authentic or not?'"

Frank Rich: "Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?"

2010-11-14T08:53:00.000-03:00

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Barry Blitt

by Frank Rich, The New York Times, November 13, 2010

In the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, whosacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune — not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper — to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.”

To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.

“How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax rate than do their secretaries?” ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics.” If you want to cry real tears about the American dream — as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner — read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amounts to a devastating indictment of both parties.

Their ample empirical evidence, some of which I’m citing here, proves that America’s ever-widening income inequality was not an inevitable by-product of the modern megacorporation, or of globalization, or of the advent of the new tech-driven economy, or of a growing education gap. (Yes, the very rich often have fancy degrees, but so do those in many income levels below them.) Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election.

The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom. Hacker and Pierson date the dawn of the collusion between the political system and the superrich not to the Reagan revolution, but to the preceding Carter presidency and its Democratic Congress. They also write that contrary to the popular perception, America’s superhigh earners are not mostly “superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports” or the stars of law, medicine and real estate. They are instead corporate executives and managers — increasingly (and less surprisingly) financial company executives and managers, including those who escaped with outrageous fortunes as their companies imploded during the housing bubble.

The G.O.P.’s arguments for extending the Bush tax cuts to this crowd, usually wrapped in laughably hypocritical whining about “class warfare,” are easily batted down. The most constant refrain is that small-business owners who file in this bracket would be hit so hard they could no longer hire new employees. But the Tax Policy Center found in 2008, when checking out similar campaign claims by “Joe the Plumber,” that only 2 percentof all Americans reporting small-business income, regardless of tax bracket, would see tax increases if Obama fulfilled his pledge to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the top earners. The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation? American companies seem intent on sitting on trillions in cash until the economy reboots. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks the extension of any Bush tax cuts, let alone those to the wealthiest Americans, as the least effective of 11 possible policy options for increasing employment.

Nor are the superrich helping to further the traditional American business culture that inspires and encourages those with big ideas and drive to believe they can climb to the top. Robert Frank, the writer who chronicled the superrich in the book “Richistan,” recently analyzed the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for The Wall Street Journal and found a “hardening of the plutocracy” and scant mobility. Only 16 of the 400 were newcomers — as opposed to an average of 40 to 50 in recent years — and they tended to be in industries like coal, natural gas, chemicals and casinos rather than forward-looking businesses involving the Green Economy, tech or biotechnology. This is “not exactly the formula for America’s vaunted entrepreneurial wealth machine,” Frank wrote.

As “Winner-Take-All Politics” documents, America has been busy “building a bridge to the 19th century” — that is, to a new Gilded Age. To dislodge the country from this stagnant rut will require all kinds of effort from Americans in and out of politics. That includes some patriotic selflessness from those at the very top who still might emulate Warren Buffett and the few others in the Forbes 400 who dare say publicly that it’s not in America’s best interests to stack the tax and regulatory decks in their favor.

Many of the countless tasks that need to be addressed to start rebuilding an equitable America are formidable, but surely few, if any, are easier than eliminating a tax break that was destined to expire anyway and that most Americans want to see expire. Two years ago, Obama campaigned on this issue far more strenuously than he did on, say, reforming health care. Now he and what remains of his Congressional caucus are poised to retreat from even this clear-cut battle. You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html

Vote na Dilma por Arnaldo Jabor

2010-09-20T19:25:00.000-03:00

VOTE NA DILMA

por Arnaldo Jabor

VOTE NA DILMA !

As promoções da época!

Vote na Dilma e ganhe, inteiramente gratis, um José Sarney de presente agregado ao Michel Temmer.

Mas não é só isso, votando na Dilma você também leva, inteiramente grátis (GRÁTIS???) um Fernando Collor de presente.

Não pense que a promoção termina aqui.

Votando na Dilma você também ganha, inteiramente grátis, um Renan Calheiros e um Jader Barbalho.

Mas atenção: se você votar na Dilma, também ganhará uma Roseana Sarney no Maranhão, uma Ideli Salvati em Santa Catarina e uma Martha Suplício em S. Paulo.

Ligue já para a Dirceu-Shop, e ganhe este maravilhoso pacote de presente: Dilma, Collor, Sarney pai, Sarney filho, Roseana Sarney, Renan Calheiros, Jáder Barbalho, José Dirceu, Delúbio Soares, José Genoíno, e muito, muito mais, com um único voto.

E tem mais, você também leva inteiramente grátis, bonequinhos do Chavez, do Evo Morales, do Fidel Castro ao lado do Raul Castro, do Ahmadinejad, do Hammas e uma foto autografada das FARC´s da Colombia.

Isso sem falar no poster inteiramente grátis dos líderes dos bandidos "Sem Terra", Pedro Stedile e José Rainha, além do Minc com uniforme de guerrilheiro e sequestrador.

Ganhe, ainda, sem concurso, uma leva de deputados especialistas em mensalinhos e mensalões. E mais: ganhe curso intensivo de como esconder dinheiro na cueca, na meia, na bolsa ..., ministrado por Marcos Valério e José Adalberto Vieira da Silva e José Nobre Guimarães.

Tudo isto e muito mais!

TSE retira comentário do Arnaldo Jabor do Site da CBN

Leia o comentário de Dora Kramer, Estadão de Domingo:

'A decisão do TSE que determinou a retirada do comentário de Arnaldo Jabor do site da CBN, a pedido do presidente 'Lula' até pode ter amparo na legislação eleitoral, mas fere o preceito constitucional da liberdade de imprensa.

Não deixe de repassar é o mínimo que podemos fazer diante de tanta corrupção!

U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Tx), who singlehandedly changed the course of Afghan history, dead at 76

2010-02-10T23:30:00.002-03:00

Charlie Wilson, lawmaker of movie fame, dies at 76

by Chris Baltimore – Reuters, February 10, 2010

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Former U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson, the swashbuckling Texan chronicled in film for helping secure billions of dollars to fund covert U.S. operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, died on Wednesday of cardiac arrest. He was 76.

Wilson, a Democrat, served 12 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, and was known as the "Liberal from Lufkin," the town in mostly conservative east Texas where he lived.

He had complained of chest pains on Wednesday and was pronounced dead when he arrived at Memorial Health System of East Texas in Lufkin, the hospital said in a statement.

In the 2007 movie "Charlie Wilson's War," actor Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson as a boozy womanizer who found his life's cause in helping mujahideen in Afghanistan fight and eventually repel occupying Soviet forces.

As a long-time member of the House Appropriations Committee, Wilson quietly helped steer billions of dollars to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which distributed the funds to buy Afghan fighters high-tech weapons like Stinger missiles used to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships.

"I just saw the opportunity to grab the sons o'bitches by the throat," the fiercely anti-communist Wilson told The Dallas Morning News in a 2007 interview.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was at the CIA during the covert campaign, said Wilson's life showed how "one brave and determined person can alter the course of history."

"His efforts and exploits helped repel an invader, liberate a people, and bring the Cold War to a close," Gates said.

After the Soviet withdrawal, Wilson expressed reservations about U.S. lawmakers' decisions to cut funds to Afghanistan, blamed for creating a void that led to the rising influence of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the Islamic militant group accused of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"Charlie kept fighting for the Afghan people and warned against abandoning that traumatized country to its fate -- a warning we should have heeded then, and should remember today," Gates said.

On a less flattering side, the movie opens with Wilson in a hot tub in a Las Vegas hotel, flanked by two strippers who are high on cocaine. The U.S. Justice Department in 1980 investigated Wilson for possible drug use, but the probe came up empty.

"The feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I inhale or exhale, and I ain't telling," Wilson told author George Crile, who included the material in his book, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History.

Wilson was known for hiring attractive young women to staff his congressional office in Washington, where they were known as "Charlie's Angels" after the then-popular TV show.

While known as a defense hawk, Wilson had a liberal voting record on social issues, despite his district's conservative leanings.

Wilson was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1933, attended the U.S. Naval Academy, and served in the U.S. Navy.

He was elected to the Texas legislature and went on to serve in the U.S. House from 1973 to 1997. He is survived by his wife Barbara and sister Sharon Allison.

(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Washington, editing by Vicki Allen)

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100211/people_nm/us_wilson

From Dan Rather in Haiti:

"It is the rare congressman who by dint of personality, persistence and country smarts did something that literally altered history on the global stage. What Charlie Wilson did in Afghanistan changed the course of world events.

Charlie Wilson was all Texan and all American. He dreamed big, lived large. He was a member of the pantheon of Texas heroes from Sam Houston to Jim Bowie."

Author of Charlie Wilson's War, George Crile once said, "Invariably, when reporters wrote features about Joanne Herring they invoked Scarlett O'Hara...But to appreciate her full impact, it helps to add Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dolly Parton and even a bit of Arianna Huffington."

When I sent word to Ms. Herring I wanted to interview her, she sent me this simple message:

Ok honey call me now I am to do dr debakeys eulogy and am terrified

A woman of grace and candor, Joanne Herring is a reporter's dream.

Texan on the Potomac: Joanne King Herring

Age: 80

Past life: She did extensive lobbying work with her husband (she's had three) in Washington and became the "it" girl for party planning. She hosted KHOU "News at Noon with Joanne King" and hosted the "Joanne King Show." The first Houston female to receive national recognition as a successful TV personality, her show ranked sixth in national daytime programming.

Politically, Herring was known for her staunch opposition to communism and her close ties to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

After her first husband died, she hooked up with Texas congressman Charlie Wilson (literally) and together they waged a covert war on Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, sending weapons and other aid to Afghan rebels. Wilson proposed and Herring declined. Herring told me "we were more in love with the war than with each other...you know what I mean, honey." Yes, I know. But did Charlie?

According to The Daily News last year, Ms. Herring and Congressman Wilson--and a band of high-powered attorneys--quashed any suggestion in the movie that their little war was somehow responsible for 9/11. Ms. Herring's response? "The important thing for people to realize: Who did we go to fight? Russia. Did we beat them? Yes. You cannot predict future wars; if you could, we wouldn't have them."

Ms. Herring is a woman who gets what she wants. Not only did she help convince Mr. Wilson to give weapons to Afghans to fight the Soviets, she got through to Hollywood and they edited every four-letter word that came out of Julia Roberts' mouth.

Her take on Charlie Wilson's War: Herring hired a top Texas lawyer, Dick DeGuerin of Houston, to prevail upon the film's director, Mike Nichols, to make Julia Roberts more wholesome. "He agreed to cut out all the swearing from me as long as I went along with the rest of it...They wanted hanky-panky and so that's what they got. Anyone who knows me will realize that I don't behave like that."

The film was "pretty accurate but I never got up in the middle of a party and jumped in a bathtub with someone," she clarifies. What's more, "Republicans were more involved than what they were given credit for...And I did more than Julia was given credit for."

Her parties: The parties she threw in Washington were so big she was asked to extend her skills to Houston, entertaining heads of state when they visited the U.S. She explained to me, saying "Houston was the middle city," but we know that she was asked to do them not because of Houston's geographic location, but because Herring was the hostess with the mostest. She once built the 29-year-old King of Sweden a disco.

She thought, "I have four boys. We will use it over and over." So Herring kicked one of her sons out of his bedroom and built a disco room in her Houston mansion. (The house was later bought by Ken Lay of ENRON, who got rid of the disco. Party pooper.) And Ms. Herring used the disco room to throw parties for the Shah of Iran, the King of Morocco and her sons' fraternity parties. What a cool mom.

For King Hussein of Jordan, she put together a special gust list. "He brought all men, so I invited the most beautiful women I knew." She insists she "did it in a fun way" and they all came because of King Hussein's entourage. Of course. And when talk arose that Herring was playing matchmaker at the party, she called it a "scream" and laughed at the thought of these "princesses" (name-drop: a Vanderbilt) going home with King Hussein or his men.

Why she left public life: She never really has...

Best known for: A film about her exploits, Charlie Wilson's War, her character portrayed by Julia Roberts. Raising big money, being an expert of Middle Eastern affairs and for her reputation as a fabulous Houston socialite and fashionista--with substance.

Where she is now: Still fighting for Afghanistan and raising money all around the country. "I am working with Ms. Caroline Firestone and Ms. Laura Bush to start a college for Afghan women." Last month she spoke at a $1,000-a-head dinner at Bobo in New York City hosted by the Rebuilding Afghanistan Foundation. Herring also funds a group of 100 single mothers in five counties in Texas. When we spoke she was penning the late Dr. Michael DeBakey's eulogy. DeBakey was a dear friend of Herring's. (She invited him to many of her parties throughout the years.) Herring said she was "astonished to find out he had chosen me to do his eulogy--out of all these distinguished people." When I suggested it was probably her humor that reminded DeBakey of Herring, she replied, "You have to laugh. Because you might cry...a lot."

Fun facts and quotes: Oscar de la Renta is one of her favorite designers and she likes to shop at Neiman Marcus. She drives a red Jaguar convertible and her two black poodles wear bandanas. "I was driving in traffic and someone gave me the finger. I smiled and blew him a kiss." "People think it's Joanne, the social queen. That's not me at all. I get bored to death when people talk about nothing."

Click here for a Chron article about Herring at Charlie Wilson's L.A. premiere.

Posted by Mackenzie Warren at July 16, 2008

Link: http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2008/07/where_are_they_now_1.html

Naked Capitalism blog: Quelle Surprise! Health Insurers Pretended to Play Nice, Lobbied Against Reform

2010-01-13T12:02:00.000-03:00

Quelle Surprise! Health Insurers Pretended to Play Nice, Lobbied Against Reform

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, January 13, 2009

The headline above would normally be seen as “dog bites man” save for the fact that during the health reform debate, the insurers went to considerable lengths to profess they really, really had changed their ways and were now going to be good corporate citizens.

But it was pretty clear that this change of heart was just a charade. After all, if Obama was going to give the industry the store, they had to look like nice guys. You don’t give massive subsidies to people who are obviously predatory, unless they are from the financial services industry and thus can credibly threaten to destroy the economy. And from the insurance industry’s standpoint, what’s not to like about the new program? Tens of millions of formerly uninsured people will be required to buy policies from them, plus the percent of premiums they are mandated to pay out in benefits is considerably less than what they spend now (meaning the legislation in no way threatens their margins; in fact, it legitimates them and would even permit them to enlarge them). And as we will discuss soon, some of the advantages claimed for the bill are hollow.

We were very leery of the industry’s charm offensive. As we wrote last August:

My bullshit meter went into high alert earlier this week with this New York Times story, “For Health Insurers’ Lobbyist, Good Will Is Tested,” which was clearly a PR plant. It featured Karen Ignagni, a $1.6 million-a-year earning lobbyist to the health insurance industry as a heroine (I started getting nauseaous as soon as I saw the deliberately low-key picture of her in her office). And why should we see a representative of one of the biggest forces undermining democracy in America, the usually-successful efforts of well-funded industry groups to steam-roll legislative process, as a good guy, or in this case, gal? Because she supposedly talked a mean and obstructionist industry into playing nice.

This NYT article thus manages to be a two for one, trying to re-image both the health insurance industry and lobbyists. Consulting my Divine Comedy, I find lobbyists are relegated to the eight circle of hell no matter how you cut and slice it, as either flatterers (second bolgia) or false advisors (bolgia eight) or falsifiers (bolgia ten, along with alchemists and perjurers). This puts them on the same general level as corrupt politicians (bolgia 5), although one could make a case they belong in the ninth circle, traitors.

To the Times’ puff piece:

For the insurance industry, long an opponent of health care reform, it was a striking change: with a new administration coming to Washington, insurers agreed to abandon some of their most controversial practices, like denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing medical conditions.
The truly offensive bit of the piece was the Grey Lady running full bore with the line that they were being unfairly castigated, they really had turned a new leaf, and those people who were Calling Them Bad Names were risking breaking up Ms. $1.6 million woman’s fragile coalition:

For a while, it seemed to be working — until recently, when the insurance industry re-emerged as Washington’s favorite target. “Villains,” Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, called health insurers. And Mr. Obama derided the industry for pocketing “windfall profits.”

Taken aback, Ms. Ignagni, the 55-year-old chief executive of the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, wondered on Tuesday why insurers were being singled out when, in her view, they had accepted that change was necessary.

“Attacking our community will not help get anyone covered,” she said.
The last statement was very revealing. It’s tantamount to “We still hold the whip hand.” And it appears they do.

Back to today’s update. Notice that the big concession that the industry supposedly made was its stand on pre-existing conditions. But the bill has a giant loophole: insurers can continue to cancel policies in the case of “fraud or intentional misrepresentation” as they do now. Readers have no doubt hear of or read about how low the permitted bar is now for insurers to rescind policies. And when are insurers most likely to look to find grounds not to pay for treatment? When you most need it, of course, when you have a serious, expensive ailment.

National Nurses United, a 150,000 member organization, opposes the bill. Some of its reasons:

As Jean Ross, NNU co-president noted, “the bill seems more likely to be eroded, not improved, in future years due to the unchecked influence of the healthcare industry lobbyists and the lessons of this year in which all the compromises have been made to the right.”….

Individual mandate was the top priority of the insurance industry, which also succeeded in fending off meaningful restraints of its predatory pricing practices. The likely outcome is that far too many people will still face healthcare insecurity or medical bankruptcy due to ever rising out-of-pocket costs, or continue to skip needed medical care because of the high prices.

Indeed, discouraging provision of care as the preferred way to control costs, rather than rein in the pricing practices of the insurance and drug giants, is a central tenet of the insurance industry and conservative policy wonks.

So the story thus far is that Team Obama was handing the insurance industry everything it wanted on a silver platter (recall the shameful incident in which the public option was dropped despite Congressional support; it was a mere trading chip, not something Obama was ever serious about). The industry was supposed to play nice.

Well it didn’t even hold up that part of the bargain. Admittedly, Congress started calling the insurers bad names. Please. The dealings with Team Obama had been so cozy that a little roughing up would have good PR value for both sides. It would create the appearance that the powers that be had not caved in to the insurers.

And a general rule: in a good negotiation, both sides come out feeling a little bruised and unhappy. No one gets everything they want. But the insurers weren’t about to adhere to the new posture they had pretended to adopt to win over the public. As soon as they started encountering opposition, they cranked up the attack ads. But rather than fund them directly, they channeled money through the Chamber of Commerce. From the National Journal:

Just as dealings with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats soured last summer, six of the nation’s biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress…

The fundraising started last September and continued through December using AHIP as a conduit to avoid a repeat of the political flak that hit the insurance industry after it famously ran its multimillion-dollar “Harry and Louise” ads to help kill health care reforms during the Clinton administration…

Publicly, the group has stressed repeatedly that it supports health care reform legislation…
Since last summer, the chamber has poured tens of millions of dollars into advertising by the two business coalitions that it helped assemble: the Campaign for Responsible Health Reform and Employers for a Healthy Economy.

In late October, the chamber helped cobble together a larger coalition, Employers for a Healthy Economy, which became the key advertising vehicle for attacking provisions in the House and Senate bills being developed…The ads sharply criticized the high costs of the separate bills, especially the House version. The commercials warned the legislation would raise taxes for Americans and hurt the economy as it tries to recover from the recession. And some chamber-financed commercials attacked setting up a government run plan to compete with private insurers — a special sore point for the insurance industry — which is part of the House measure.

The U.S. Chamber has spent approximately $70 million to $100 million on the advertising effort….Sources say that the chamber-backed ads will likely continue as the two bills are combined in coming weeks.

Yet if any bill passes, the industry will show greater earnings, which will allow them to spend even more on lobbying and advertising, which will enable them to secure even more favorable legislation.

Link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/quelle-surprise-health-insurers-pretended-to-play-nice-lobbied-against-reform.html

Speech of the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during the informal Plenary Session on 18 December 2009 at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen

2009-12-18T21:46:00.003-03:00

Speech of the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during the informal Plenary Session on 18 December at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-15) in Copenhagen.

"Mister President, Mister General-Secretary, Ladies and Gentlemen Heads of State, Ladies and Gentlemen Heads of Government, and friends.

I confess to all of you that I am a bit frustrated. Because we have been discussing the issue of climate for a long time and we came to the conclusion that the problem is more serious than we can imagine. Thinking about it´s contribution to the discussion in this conference, Brazil had a very ambitious position. We presented our targets until 2020.

We assumed a commitment and approved through the National Congress, transforming in law, that Brazil, until 2020, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 36.1% and 38.9%, based on what we consider important: changes in the Brazilian agriculture system; changes in the Brazilian metallurgical system; changes and improvement of our energy balance, already one of the world’s cleanest, and we assumed the commitment to reduce deforestation in the Amazon in 80% until 2020.

And we made this building an economic engineering that will force a developing country, with many economic difficulties, to spend US$ 166 billion until 2020, equivalent to US$ 16 billion a year. This is not an easy task, but it was necessary to define those measures to show the world that, just with words and bargains, we would not reach a solution in this Conference of Copenhagen.

Last night, I had the pleasure to participate, until two-thirty in the morning, in a meeting where, sincerely, I did not expect to participate, because it was a meeting with many Heads of State, some of the most prominent personalities of the political world and, sincerely, to submit Heads of State to certain discussions such as we had yesterday, I did not see for a long time.

Yesterday, I was in the meeting and remembered my time as trade union leader, when we were negotiating with the entrepreneurs. And why did we have all those difficulties? Because we did not care about the responsibility that it was necessary to work with. The issue is not just money. Some people think that money solves the problem. But money did not solve in the past, it will not solve in the present and, even less, it will solve in the future. Money is important and the poor countries need money to ensure their development, to preserve the environment, to take care of their forests. It is true.

But it is important that we, the developing countries and the rich countries, when we think about money, we should not think that we are doing a favor, we should not think that we are distributing alms, because the money that will be put on the table is the payment for greenhouse gas emissions made during two centuries of those who had the privilege of industrializing first.

It is not a bargain of those who have money or those who do not have money. It is a more serious commitment, it is a commitment to know if it is true or not what the scientists are saying, that global warming is irreversible. And, therefore, who has more resources and more possibilities needs to guarantee the contribution to protect the people who need most.

Everybody agreed that we need to ensure the 2% of global warming until 2050. On that, we all agree. Everybody is aware that it is only possible to reach this agreement if the countries assume, with huge responsibilities, their targets. And even the targets, that should be a simple issue, there are many people who want to bargain the targets. All of us could offer a bit more if we had assumed good will during the last months.

All of us know that it is necessary, to ensure the commitment of the targets and the commitment of financing, that we, in any document that will be approved here, that we defend the principles adopted in the Kyoto Protocol and the principles adopted in the Framework Convention. Because it is true that we have common responsibilities, but it is true that they are differentiated.

I will never forget that when I assumed the Presidency, in 2003, my commitment was to try to guarantee that all Brazilians could have breakfast, lunch and dinner. For the developed world, that was something of the past. For Africa, for Latin America and for many Asian countries, it is still something of the future. And it is linked to the discussion that we are having here, because it is not just a discussion on the issue of climate.

It is about discussing development and opportunities for all countries. I talked to important leaders and came to the conclusion that it was possible to build a political base to explain to the world that we, Presidents, Prime Ministers and specialists, are very responsible and would find a solution. I still believe, because I am excessively optimist. But it is necessary that we play a game, not thinking about winning or losing. It is true that the countries that give money have the right to ask for transparency, they even have the right to ask for the implementation of the policy that was financed. But it is true that we need to take care with that kind of intrusion in developing and the poorest countries. The experience that we have, of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank in our countries, should not be repeated in the 21^st century.

What we need... and I will say, publicly, something that I did not even say yet in my country, not even to my party and not even to my Congress: if it is necessary to do one more sacrifice, Brazil is willing to put money also to help the other countries. We are willing to participate in the financing if we reach an agreement on a final proposal, here in this meeting.

Now, something we disagree is that the most important people of planet Earth sign any document, just to say that we signed a document. I would love to leave this place with the most perfect document of the world signed. But if we did not have conditions to do this up to now - I do not know, my dear friend Rasmussen, my friend Ban Ki-moon - if we did not manage to get this document up to now, I do not know if some angel or some wise person will come down to this plenary and put in our heads the intelligence we lacked until now. I do not know.

I believe, as I believe in God, I believe in miracles, it can happen, and I want to be part of it. But, for that miracle to happen, we need to take into account that there were two groups here working on the documents, which we cannot forget. Therefore, the document is very important, of the groups here.

Second, that we can get a political document to serve as umbrella base, this is also possible if we understand three things: first, Kyoto, the Framework Convention, MRV, they shall not threaten the sovereignty of the countries - each country has to keep the competence of auto-inspecting - and, at the same time, that the money is given to the indeed poorest countries.

Brazil did not come here to bargain. Our targets do not need external money. We will do with our resources, but we are willing to do a step more if we success solving the problem that will serve, in the first place, the development of the developing countries. We spent one century without growing, while others grew a lot. Now that we started to grow, it is not fair to make sacrifices again.

In Brazil there are still many poor people. In Brazil there are many poor people, in Africa there are many poor people, in India and in China there are many poor people. And we also understand the role of the richest countries. They cannot be, neither, those who will save us. What we want is, simply, together, the rich and the poor, to establish a common point that allows us to get out of here, proudly, telling to the world that we are worried with the preservation of the future of planet Earth without sacrificing its main species, the men, women and children who live in this world.

Thank you very much."

Amir Taheri, WSJ: Iran's Democratic Moment : Protestors now demand an 'Iranian Republic, not Islamic Republic'

2009-12-10T11:04:00.000-03:00

Iran's Democratic Moment

Protestors now demand an 'Iranian Republic, not Islamic Republic'

by Amir Taheri, Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2009

A month ago, Gen. Muhammad-Ali Aziz Jaafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, vowed to stop further antiregime demonstrations in Iran and break what he termed "this chain of conspiracies." But this week the "chain" appeared to be as strong as ever: Students across the nation defied the general and his political masters by organizing numerous demonstrations on and off campus.

The various opposition groups that constitute the pro-democracy movement have already called for another series of demonstrations on Dec. 27, 2009, a holy day on the Muslim Shiite calendar. Meanwhile, the official calendar of the Islamic Republic includes 22 days during which the regime organizes massive public demonstrations to flex its muscles. Since the controversial presidential election last June, the pro-democracy movement, in a jujitsu-style move, has used the official days to undermine the regime.

Antigovernment demonstrators at Tehran University, Dec. 7, 2009. Getty Images

On Jerusalem Day, Sept. 18, officially intended to express anti-Semitism, the opposition showed that Iranians have no hostility toward Jews or Israel. One popular slogan was "Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah! I give my life for Iran!" Another was "Forget about Palestine! Think about our Iran!"

On Nov. 4, 2009, the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the opposition distanced itself from the regime's anti-American rhetoric. The democrats instead expressed anger against Russia and China, which are perceived as allies of the Islamic Republic. One slogan was "The Russian Embassy is a nest of spies!"

Most significantly, the movement that started as a protest against the alleged rigging of the election that gave a second term to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been evolving. The crowds' initial slogan was "Where Is My Vote?" and the movement's accidental leaders, including former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, tried hard to keep the protest confined to demands such as a recount of the votes and, ultimately, a runoff in accordance with the law.

The slogans of the protestors are no longer about election fraud. Today they include "Death to the Dictator," "Freedom Now," and "Iranian Republic, Not Islamic Republic!" One slogan is a direct message to President Barack Obama: "Obama, Are You With Us or With Them?"

In short, the protestors no longer regard the present regime as the legitimate government of the country.
Both Mr. Mousavi and Ayatollah Mahdi Karroubi, another defeated presidential candidate, tried to prevent attacks on the "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the hope of eventually making a deal with him. As part of such a deal, they promised to defend the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, according to sources close to the opposition. The crowds have rejected that by shouting: "Abandon uranium enrichment! Do something about the poor!"

It is clear the democracy movement is in no mood for deals with Mr. Khamenei, who they castigate for having betrayed his constitutional role of arbiter by siding with Mr. Ahmadinejad even before the official results of the election were declared. The demonstrators now burn his effigies, tear up posters showing his image, and chant violent slogans against him. One popular slogan goes: "Khamenei is a murderer! His guardianship is invalid!"

By cracking down ruthlessly on the protestors, the regime has only radicalized the movement. Even such notorious dealmakers as Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president now opposed to Mr. Ahmadinejad, have made it clear they would not accept any formula that would leave the "landslide winner" in place.

Last week, Mr. Rafsanjani refused to attend a much-publicized "reconciliation event" concocted by Ali Ardeshir Larijani, the speaker of Iran's ersatz parliament. The reason? Mr. Rafsanjani did not wish to be seen under the same roof as Mr. Ahmadinejad. Later, in a speech in Mash'had, Mr. Rafsanjani spoke of the regime's "long, deep and, potentially lethal crisis."

To judge by their most popular slogans, demonstrators across Iran are bent on regime change. Even rumors that the regime is working on scenarios for ditching Mr. Ahmadinejad—ostensibly on "health grounds"—after the Iranian New Year in March, have failed to halt the spread of regime-change sentiments.

Given the nation's mood, Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi have abandoned their earlier talk of "realizing the full potentials of the existing constitution." An adviser to Mr. Mousavi tells me that "They wanted to make an omelet without breaking eggs. They now realize that [the people] have moved faster than imagined." More significantly, perhaps, Mr. Mousavi appears to have put his plans for an ill-defined "green organization" on the backburner. He is beginning to understand that the antiregime movement is too wide to fit into a centrally controlled framework.

Over the past six months, thousands of people have been arrested and hundreds killed in the streets. And yet, despite promises to squash the movement by Gen. Jaafari, it persists. To make matters worse for the regime, the Shiite clergy, often regarded as the backbone of the Islamic Republic, is beginning to distance itself from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad tandem. Some ayatollahs, such as Messrs. Montazeri, Bayat, San'ei, Borujerdi and Zanjani, are especially annoyed at Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim of being in contact with the "Hidden Imam"—a messiah-like figure of Shiism whose second coming is supposed to occur at the end of times.

Mr. Ahmadinejad claims that the "return" is imminent and that he, as one of the "pegs" designated by the Hidden Imam to prepare the ground for the advent, has a mission of chasing the "Infidel" out of Muslim lands and liberating Palestine from "Zionist occupiers." In a speech in Isfahan last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad claimed that the pro-democracy movement was created by the Americans to sabotage his mission and thus prevent the return of the "Hidden Imam."

In response, a mid-ranking cleric in Qom tells me: "The way Ahmadinejad talks, he must be a sick man . . . by backing such a man, Khamenei has doomed the regime."

The Ahmadinejad-Khamenei tandem is also coming under attack for its alleged incompetence. The regime is now plagued by double-digit inflation, a massive flight of capital, and unprecedented levels of unemployment. Divisions within the ruling clique mean that the president has been unable to fill scores of key posts at middle levels of government. Rapidly losing its popular base, the regime is becoming increasingly dependent on its coercive forces, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Revolutionary Guard commanders appear on TV almost every night, presenting themselves as "guardians of the system." Gen. Jaafari himself says he is attracted by the "Turkish model" in which the army acts as a bulwark of the republic.

However, the general may not have all the time in the world to ponder his next move. The pro-democracy movement is deepening and growing. Much work is under way to connect it to independent trade unions and hundreds of formal and informal associations that lead the civil society's fight against the evil of the Islamic Republic.

Iran has entered one of those hinge moments in history. What is certain is that the status quo has become untenable.

Mr. Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution," is published by Encounter Books.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240504574585853987954522.html

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman

2009-10-25T10:29:00.001-03:00

We all know what happened the last time a "let them eat cake" strategy was employed.

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman

Bankers' soaring pay is an investment in the economy, Lord Griffiths tells public meeting on City morality

by Kathryn Hopkins, The Guardian, October 21, 2009

Conservative peer Lord Griffiths said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding staff. Photograph: Rex Features

One of the City's leading figures has suggested that inequality created by bankers' huge salaries is a price worth paying for greater prosperity.

In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff.

Speaking to an audience at St Paul's Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all."

He added that he knew what inequality felt like after spending his childhood in a mining town in Wales. Both his grandfathers were miners who had to retire from work through injury.

With public anger mounting at the forecast of bumper bonuses for bankers only a year after the industry was rescued by the taxpayer, he said bankers' bonuses should be seen as part of a longer-term investment in Britain's economy. "I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good ... We should not, therefore, be ashamed of offering compensation in an internationally competitive market which ensures the bank businesses here and employs British people," he said.

Griffiths said that many banks would relocate abroad if the government cracked down on bonus culture. "If we said we're not going to have as big bonuses or the same bonuses as last year, I think then you'd find that lots of City firms could easily hive off their operations to Switzerland or the far east," he said.

Goldman Sachs is currently on track to pay the biggest ever bonuses to its 31,700 employees after raking in profits at a rate of $35m (£21m) a day.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said today that City bonuses could soar to £6bn this year.

The chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Lord Turner, who was also present at the meeting, called once again for a global tax on financial transactions. He said that such a so-called "Tobin tax" could redistribute bank profits to help fight world poverty and climate change.

"The role of regulation is to bring a concordance between private actions and beneficial results," he said.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/21/executive-pay-bonuses-goldmansachs

New York Times absence of journalistic integrity becomes ever more appalling -- now they shill for the health insurance industry, as well as ExxonMobil

2009-10-13T09:07:00.001-03:00

Dear Readers,

It is getting to the point that the New York Times has become a simple prostitute for corporate interests (i.e., ExxonMobil, other fossil-fuel companies, and the health insurance industry, just for starters).

The NYTimes has so lost its journalistic integrity that it is hard to know which articles are puff pieces and which are not.

If the NYTimes believe they have a long-term future doing this, they are very mistaken.

All that remains is for Fox News to buy them out.

From the Naked Capitalism blog -- the best in describing what is really going on in the financial world. (Bold face emphases are mine.)

Naked Capitalism, Tuesday, October 13, 2009

New York Times: Missing in Action on Health Insurance Lobby Duplicity

In the early days of this blog, I would often wind up comparing coverage of news between the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal because the offender (almost without exception the Journal) had done a job so poor or misleading that it merited comment. Then the credit crisis forced the Journal to up its game, and the FT appeared to slip a bit (I wondered if it was catering, as in pandering, to US readers).

This time, the dubious reporting object lesson is the New York Times, on what is supposedly its most prized beat: Washington, DC, political reporting. The Times ran two articles that verged on sycophantic in its coverage of the health insurance industry as it moved its chess pieces on the health care reform game board. The Times acted as close to a PR outlet. From an early August post:

A similar charade is in motion on the health care front. My bullshit meter went into high alert earlier this week with this New York Times story, “For Health Insurers’ Lobbyist, Good Will Is Tested,” which was clearly a PR plant. It featured Karen Ignagni, a $1.6 million-a-year earning lobbyist to the health insurance industry as a heroine (I started getting nauseaous as soon as I saw the deliberately low-key picture of her in her office). And why should we see a representative of one of the biggest forces undermining democracy in America, the usually-successful efforts of well-funded industry groups to steam-roll legislative process, as a good guy, or in this case, gal? Because she supposedly talked a mean and obstructionist industry into playing nice.

Towards the end of August, in “New York Times Runs Yet Another Fawning Story on Health Insurance Industry,” I noted:

The latest salvo in the health care industry charm offensive is another story humanizing the health insurance industry, this one on the front page of the New York Times website, “Dealing With Being the Health Care ‘Villains’ ”

So what is the story about? The author, Kevin Sack, interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, the fourth-largest insurance company.

Let’s start with the basics. Why is this even a reasonable premise for a story? This is a perverse twist on a type of story the Times runs periodically, of dropping into a particular community, often in the heartland, to get the populace’s view on a pressing political or social issue.

Since when is it legitimate, much the less newsworthy, to get a company’s perception on its embattled status, at least without introducing either some contrary opinion or better yet, facts, to counter the views of people who will inevitably see what they are doing as right? I hate to draw an extreme comparison to make the point, but staff in Nazi concentration camps also thought they were good people. It is well documented that for all save the depressed, people’s assessments of their own behavior is biased in their favor.

Similarly, I don’t recall many examples of industries under attack having prominent members get flattering front page pieces. The now-famous AIG Financial Products “I Quit” letter was an op-ed. I will admit I could have missed it, but I did not see any New York Times front page pieces during the auto bailouts featuring GM or Chrysler execs and workers saying they were misunderstood. and were being maligned.

So what do we have here? You have a bunch of people whose livelihood depends on Humana. Of course they are gong to see the industry as benign.

And nowhere in this fawning piece do you see mention made of the ugly fact that as recently as the early 1990s, 95% of every dollar spent on insurance claims went to medical care. It is now only 80%. That is a simply stunning change, and shows how completely fact free the industry’s defenses are. The insurers are a major culprit in America’s high medical costs. But no, we are supposed to take the mere opinion of employees who are deeply vested in the current system as views worth considering.

Back in the days when I did M&A, one of my clients was a frighteningly good negotiator. He knew part of his reason for success was that he did not look the part: he was short, genial, a bit rotund, and bespectacled. He would (to those who he was certain would not spill the beans on him) describe himself as the Antichrist and say things like: “I rub their bellies and only years later do they realize what I have done to them.” And I have to say, he was masterful in getting people to think his self-serving view of things was the only sensible way to see a situation.

The insurance industry is not so adept, or more accurately, is less concerned about appearances than my old client. The Financial Times reports tonight that the health insurance industry, after its great show of making nice to the Obama administration, backstabbed it on the eve of a key vote. Do we see any coverage of this duplicity in the US media, much less the New York Times?

From “Health insurance lobby attacks reforms” in the Financial Times:

The White House and the health insurance industry on Monday descended into open conflict on the eve of a critical Senate vote that could determine the fortunes of Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans.

Supporters of President Obama accused the health insurance industry of attempted “sabotage” after it issued a report by PwC, which estimated that premiums would rise much faster under the proposed reforms than they would have done otherwise.

The 26-page report marked an abrupt end to the unlikely alliance between Mr Obama and America’s Health Insurance Plans – the main industry lobby group, which has spent about $100m on advertising to support the reforms….

A spokesman for Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is to hold a key vote on Tuesday on its $829bn, 10-year, healthcare reform plan, described the report as a “hatchet job, pure and simple.”

The Wall Street Journal did report on the insurer “push back” and indicated that the industry had cooperated earlier, “attracted to the effort, in part, by the prospect of gaining millions of new customers.” So the Journal’s staff recognized this as a mere marriage of convenience from the get-go.

Update 4:30 a.m.: Robert Reich is more optimistic about the implications than I am, see “The Audacity of Greed: How Private Health Insurers Just Blew Their Cover.”

Link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/10/new-york-times-missing-in-action-on-health-insurance-lobby-duplicity.html

Thomas Friedman: Where did "we" go?

2009-10-02T10:20:00.000-03:00

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Where Did ‘We’ Go?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: New York Times, September 29, 2009

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html

Lin

Judge Jed S. Rakoff deserves to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor

2009-09-21T16:33:00.002-03:00

This guy should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor!

Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses

The New York Times, September 14, 2009, 12:33 pm

A Federal District judge on Monday overturned a settlement between the Bank of America and the Securities and Exchange Commission over bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives just before the bank took over Merrill last year.

The $33 million settlement “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality,” wrote Jed S. Rakoff, the judge assigned to the case in federal court in Lower Manhattan, The New York Times’s Louise Story writes. (Read the decision after the jump.)

The ruling forces the commission to go back to the drawing board in its case against the bank, which focused on $3.6 billion bonuses paid out by Merrill Lynch late last year, just before that firm was taken over by Bank of America. Neither company provided details of the bonuses to their shareholders, who voted on Dec. 5 to approve the merger.

The judge focused much of his criticism on the fact that the fine in the case would be paid by the bank’s shareholders, those supposed to have been injured by the lack of disclosure around the bonuses.

“It is quite something else for the very management that is accused of having lied to its shareholders to determine how much of those victims’ money should be used to make the case against the management go away,” the judge wrote.

Bank of America has argued in its filings with the judge that it did nothing wrong in its disclosures.

The case before Judge Rakoff is just one of several investigations into the bank’s deal with Merrill. Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, is also investigating the bank’s disclosures of bonuses and of Merrill’s surprise losses late last year. The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform is also looking into the merger.

Judge’s Rejection of S.E.C.-Bank of America Settlement
Judge's Rejection of S.E.C.-Bank of America Settlement

Reintegração de posse de terreno da Viação Campo Limpo no Capão Redondo

2009-09-11T13:11:00.002-03:00

Link to images of 570 families being forcibly moved off of the land they have occupied illegally since 2007:

http://www.estadao.com.br/interatividade/Multimidia/ShowGaleria.action?idGaleria=2110

Excellent blog on responsible urban renewal -- Blog da Raquel Rolnick

2009-09-11T12:59:00.003-03:00

You know it is really nice to see a Brazilian blog that offers up some concrete solutions to urban problems in Brazil, instead of the usual endless litany of complaints.

Parabéns Raquel!!!

Raquel é urbanista, professora da Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo e relatora especial da Organização das Nações Unidas para o direito à moradia adequada.

We need to focus much more attention on urban renewal in the U.S., as well -- after all, that is where most people live today and will live tomorrow.

Link: http://raquelrolnik.wordpress.com/

Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes

2009-08-30T15:06:00.002-03:00

Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes

Plans to build more than 200 hydroelectric dams bring prospect of cheap electricity but destruction of Amazon habitats

Activists say government plans for up to 16 new hydroelectric plants pose an unprecedented threat to the 14 tribes that live in the park. Photograph: Tom Phillips

by Tom Phillips in Pavuru, Xingu national park, The Guardian, August 23, 2009

Once they were threatened by wildcat gold-miners and a measles epidemic that slashed their population to just 56. But now the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, say a new catastrophe looms over their future: the damming of the rivers they depend upon for food.

Across Brazil alarm bells are ringing over plans to build at least 229 small hydroelectric dams, known as PCHs, which the government hopes will generate electricity and drive economic development.

Opponents say they will damage the environment and destroy the livelihoods of thousands of Brazilian tribespeople.

There are 346 PCHs in Brazil, with another 70 under construction and 159 awaiting licences. If the construction of dams continues, "the fish will run out and the waters will start to go down," warned Komuru Txicao, a local tribesman. "Here in the forest we don't need electricity. We need fish, water and land."

Other hydroelectric projects planned by the government are huge — the $4bn Belo Monte dam further north along the Xingu river from Pavuru would be the third biggest plant of its kind on earth, producing over 11,000 megawatts of electricity. While Belo Monte has been described by the government as a "gift from God," critics say it will destroy lives, homes and traditions.For Komuru and his neighbours, the immediate concern is the construction of a network of PCHs around the Xingu national park in Mato Grosso state. Komuru fears the dams will block the tributaries of the Xingu, itself the largest tributary of the Amazon.

According to the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), four PCHs – the Paranatinga II, Culuene, ARS and Ronuru – operate near the reserve; another, Paranatinga I, is waiting for its licence. Aneel says 13 PCHs are being built in Mato Grosso state, while another 19 projects are awaiting licences. The government says such dams will help power the agricultural revolution that is sweeping Brazil's mid-west and bring electricity to small towns.

Recent years have seen the Ikpeng, a proud tribe of Amazon warriors, embrace many of the comforts and distractions of the outside world.

Three months ago wireless internet was installed here in Pavuru, one of over 30 villages located in the Park — a vast, 2.8 million hectare indigenous reserve home to some 5,000 Indians from 14 different ethnic groups. Today Ikpeng teenagers spend their afternoons downloading tracks by artists such as Enrique Iglesias and the US rapper 50 Cents while many of the tribe's hunters use shot-guns rather than the traditional bow and arrow to hunt spider monkeys and wild-boar in the surrounding forests.

"Things are changing," admitted Karane Txicao, 28, sat behind an HP laptop in the village's concrete internet cafe. "Now people never leave the front of the computer screen."

Several of the traditional huts – or owros – also shelter large television sets, powered by a diesel generation which is switched on at 9 a.m. each day and turned off at 9 p.m.

But unlike the telenovelas and MP3s, government plans for PCHs around the Xingu Park have met with a furious reception.

"It is very worrying," said Kumare, a resident who is the local head of Funai, Brazil's indigenous agency. "This will directly affect us. They are damming all of the rivers." Kumare said the dams would make it impossible for the fish to migrate upstream thus decimating the main source of food for the reserve's Indians.

Last March the conflict escalated when eight staff from the electricity company responsible for one PCH spent five days held "hostage" near Pavuru. They were released only after the president of Brazil's indigenous agency, Funai, personally intervened. "We didn't kill them, we 'arrested' them," recalled Komuru.

Similar battles are raging across the Amazon region, where plans to build roads, hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects have triggered a conflict between those who want to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest and its indigenous tribes and those wishing to drive development and relieve poverty. A dispute over the Belo Monte dam turned violent in May when an engineer from the Brazilian power company Eletrobras was attacked during a presentation about the plant. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to allay fears over the dam, vowing that it "would not be shoved down anyone's throat."

But concerns grew in July when a federal court lifted an embargo on the Belo Monte licensing process, clearing the way for a bidding round later this year.

Having witnessed the Ikpeng's plight in the 1960s, Melobo, an Ikpeng shaman, who says he is around 60 years old and wears 15 shell ear-rings in each ear, fears history may be repeating itself. "The farmers ruin the Indian's things," Melobo said, in heavily accented Portuguese, standing on the banks of the Xingu river. "They ruin the Indian's water. They ruin the Indian's land." "We don't want to negotiate," added Komuru. "We don't want money. We don't want things that are worth nothing. We want our land."

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/aug/23/brazil-amazon-electricity

Câmara Sutra by Cassetta e Planeta!!!

2009-07-28T22:36:00.003-03:00

I can't help it. I had to come here and laugh with the world about Cassetta e Planeta's skit called "Câmara Sutra" -- LOLOLOLOL (sacanagem politica).

If you didn't catch it on Globo TV, tonight, you really missed it!

If this ever comes out on YouTube, I will post it up.

Paul Krugman: Treason Against the Planet

2009-06-29T10:34:00.000-03:00

Betraying the Planet

by PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times, June 28, 2009

Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 °F by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 °F. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html

Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

2009-06-27T09:58:00.002-03:00

Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

Miners in the Marange diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, the year the fields were discovered. The New York Times

by CELIA W. DUGGER, New York Times, June 26, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s military, controlled by President Robert Mugabe’s political party, violently took over diamond fields in Zimbabwe last year and has used the illicit revenues to buy the loyalty of restive soldiers and enrich party leaders, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released Friday.

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press

Human Rights Watch says the military killed more than 200 miners in the Marange fields.

The party, ZANU-PF, has used the money from diamonds — smuggled out of the country or illegally sold through the Reserve Bank — to reinforce its hold over the security forces, which seemed to be slipping last year as the value of soldiers’ pay collapsed with soaring inflation, Human Rights Watch researchers said.

On Friday, Zimbabwe’s government roundly denied the charges in the report, which cited visits by its researcher to the diamond fields in February and interviews with soldiers, miners and other witnesses.

The information minister, Webster Shamu, of ZANU-PF, said in a telephone interview that the report’s aim was to tarnish the country’s image, block the sale of its diamonds internationally and, “in so doing, deny Zimbabwe much needed foreign currency.”

“The whole report is just not true,” he said.

Last year Zimbabwe’s state media depicted the military blitz, code-named Operation No Return, in the Marange district as a push to restore order in the midst of a lawless diamond rush in the area.

But the Human Rights Watch report charged that the military killed more than 200 miners and used the push to seize the Marange fields.

Some miners died when soldiers opened fire from helicopters with automatic rifles mounted on them, the group said. Many of the dead were taken to the morgue at Mutare General Hospital, or buried in mass graves, the report says.

Army brigades are being rotated into the diamond fields, discovered in 2006, so more soldiers can profit from the illegal trade, the report says.

Villagers from the area, some of them children, are being forced to work in mines controlled by military syndicates and have complained of being harassed, beaten and arrested, the report says.

“It’s a big cash cow for the military and the police, especially since Zimbabwe is virtually bankrupt,” Dewa Mavhinga, the Zimbabwean lawyer who was the main researcher for the report, said in an interview.

Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled for 29 years, is now governing with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, who spent the past three weeks in Western capitals seeking assistance for Zimbabwe’s devastated economy.

President Obama and European heads of state have generally declined to aid Zimbabwe’s government directly, in part because of concerns that it continues to flout the rule of law.

The Human Rights Watch report is the latest sign of growing international concern about charges of killings and human rights abuses in the diamond fields southwest of the city of Mutare.

“While Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government, formed in February 2009, now lobbies the world for development aid, millions of dollars in potential government revenue are being siphoned off,” the report said.

The World Federation of Diamond Bourses, an umbrella group of 28 bourses in 20 countries, called on its members in April not to trade diamonds that originate in the Marange deposits in Zimbabwe.

“Somewhere along the line, we have to stand up and be counted,” Michael H. Vaughan, the federation’s executive director, said in an interview on Friday.

On Sunday, representatives of the Kimberley Process, an alliance of industry, civic and government officials set up to stop the flow of so-called blood diamonds, will be traveling to Zimbabwe to explore whether the country is complying with the alliance’s standards.

A coalition of nonprofit groups is lobbying to have Zimbabwe suspended from membership in the Kimberley Process. “There’s rampant smuggling out of the country,” said Annie Dunnebacke of Global Witness, one of the nonprofit groups. “The military is profiting from the trade and is directly involved in the sale of the diamonds.”

At a time when Zimbabwe is struggling to pay civil servants and soldiers a stipend of $100 a month, the extra income from diamond mining for soldiers is serving “to mollify a constituency whose loyalty to ZANU-PF, in the context of ongoing political strife, is essential,” the Human Rights Watch report said.

In December, soldiers rioted in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, to protest pay that had become virtually worthless as inflation increased to astronomical levels. Analysts and Western diplomats said at the time that Mr. Mugabe might lose his grip on power if he were unable to sustain the patronage he had deployed for decades.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/world/africa/27zimbabwe.html

Charles M. Blow: Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

2009-06-20T01:08:00.002-03:00

Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

Charles M. Blow . Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Graphic

by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, June 12, 2009

We were warned.

An April assessment by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis said pointedly: “Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

Slowly, but steadily, these bigots are slithering from beneath their rocks, armed and deadly.

The most recent was an octogenarian-hater named James von Brunn, who, officials said, opened fire this week in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, killing a security guard.

Just as disturbing as the incidents themselves are the lineups of family, friends and neighbors who emerge to talk about the vitriol they heard and the warning signs they saw. I always want the interviewer to stop and ask them this simple question: “And when he said or did that, how did you respond?”

I would ask: What did you say or do as the shooters retreated into their xenophobic silo and consumed the bile slouching about the Internet? What did you say or do as the darkness in their hearts obscured the light of their reasoning, and the vacuum of hate consumed them?

My suspicion is that far too many do far too little.

While many might say that they would be quick to condemn and excoriate such hatred, they can often passively condone and fail to expostulate the hater when they see it firsthand.

That’s the gist of a January study that was written about in ScienceDaily. It was led by Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, and it found that although people predicted “that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action,” their actual reactions were “much more muted.” Why? Because people are “much less willing to pay the emotional cost” of the confrontation than they thought they would be.

The authorities won’t be able to stop every “lone wolf” with a gun and a gripe. But we, as a society, can do a much better job of creating an environment where hateful beliefs are never ignored and suspicious behavior never goes unreported.

In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in a letter from a Birmingham jail, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” That’s still true.

Hateful people are loud — to disguise their cowardice and shame. But good, decent people are by far the majority, and we dare not be silent. There can be no family too close and no friend too dear for hatred to go unchecked. Allowing it to do so diminishes the better, more noble parts of ourselves.

These confrontations won’t be easy, but doing the right thing rarely is. There is someone reading this column who knows someone who could be the next shooter. What will that reader do?

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/opinion/13blow.html

Peru: death toll reaches 60 -- Asháninka indigenous Indians fighting to prevent confiscation of their lands for logging, Brazil's hydroelectric dams

2009-06-08T12:13:00.003-03:00

From Lou Gold's blog: Vision Share

Monday, June 08, 2009

AMAZON ALERT: PERU

Indigenous protesters fighting logging and drilling blocked a road in northern Peru on Friday as police tear gas hung in the air. Photo: Associated Press

[Update 1: Reuters reports that the death toll has risen to more than 60 and that thousands of Indians are still blocking roads. Here's an activist's report about the actions likely this week.]

[Update 2: Simon Romero, reporting for the NY Times, points out that the issue is not only over oil and timber leases. For instance, leaders from the Asháninka indigenous group are trying to derail a plan by Eletrobrás, a company controlled by Brazil’s government, to spend more than $10 billion to build five hydroelectric plants in Peru.]

This morning (Jun 6) I received an email from our dear friend Anjo who is in Peru. She says: "heading into the jungle in a few days. mad stress to get all done. 35 people dead this morning. hundreds wounded. many I know. a curfew. feels like back in Palestine."

Anjo is not exaggerating. Here is some video from May 22, 2009.

According to AMAZON WATCH 25 civilians and 9 police have been killed in the current clashes. Peru's Amazon Indigenous Peoples need you to TAKE ACTION now.

Since April 9th communities throughout the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting new laws that usher in an unprecedented wave of extractive industries into the Amazon Rainforest. President Alan Garcia's government passed these laws under "fast track" authority he had received from the Peruvian congress to make laws to facilitate the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and to make Peru more economically "competitive".

Over 30,000 indigenous people have taken to blockading roads, rivers, and railways to demand the repeal of these new laws that allow oil, mining and logging companies to enter indigenous territories without seeking prior consultation or consent. The protests have led to disruptions of transport as well as the interruption of oil production.

In the early morning of June 5, Peruvian military police staged a violent raid on a group of indigenous people at a peaceful blockade on a road outside of Bagua, in a remote area of northern Peruvian Amazon. Several thousand indigenous peoples were forcibly dispersed by tear gas and real bullets. Initial reports of fatalities include at least eleven indigenous people, along with nine police officers.

We need you to immediately TAKE ACTION adding your voice in solidarity with thousands of indigenous people. Send a letter today to the Garcia Administration demanding and end to the violent repression and respect for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of indigenous peoples.

As one of the Earth's largest tropical rainforests, the Amazon plays a critical role in safeguarding the global climate. Its destruction releases massive amounts of global warming gases into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Indigenous peoples are the guardians of the Amazon rainforest. They need your support.

There's more from AmazonWatch and an excellent roundup at DailyKos that covers how US Free Trade agreements have been contributing to the problem.

Link to Lou Gold's blog: http://lougold.blogspot.com/2009/06/amazon-alert-peru-indigenous-protesters_6404.html

Japanese & American donate to Caritas International for the flood victims in northern and northeastern Brazil -- Learn how!

2009-05-29T17:07:00.003-03:00

From Laurie Dougherty in Massachusetts:

An advantage of Caritas International is that you can donate online with any credit card -you don't have to fool with bank wire transfers. And as Suya pointed out there is now an option on the online donation form to earmark the donation for the Brazil flood (this option was not yet there last evening when I became aware of Caritas involvement).

From the press release on Brazil at this link, click the black box "Support our work in Brazil" (or go to to Donate Now, select Emergency Response Fund, check "emergencies," open the drop down list and select Brazil Flood).

http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/PressRelease28_05_09.html

I will also donate 100 EUR which at the moment is US$138.78. (A donation of US$100 would be 72.06 EUR.) This currency converter may not be the exact "official" exchange rate, but we use this at work to get a good approximation.

http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

I will also spread the word among contacts at work -- we have a large Latin American program and several Brazilians on staff.

Laurie

Caritas - the charitable arm of the Catholic Church - is appealing for contributions to provide assistance to flooded areas in northeastern Brazil

2009-05-28T22:32:00.004-03:00

Caritas - the charitable arm of the Catholic Church - is appealing for contributions to provide assistance to flooded areas in the northeast of Brazil

Caritas Brazil issued an appeal a couple of weeks ago requesting contributions that can be made through several bank accounts in Brazil (contributions from out of the country would need to be wired to the banks, most likely): http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/BrazilFlood.html

Caritas International, based in the Vatican, issued an appeal today to raise US$1.1 million for Brazil flood victims. Contributions can be made online with any credit card (as well as by check or wire transfer). The press release describes the kind of relief intended.
http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/PressRelease28_05_09.html

The Caritas website says donations can be earmarked for a specific emergency, but the Brazil floods are not on the list of choices on the online donation form.

Contact: Michelle Hough Tel. 39-06-69879721, 39-334-2344136 or hough@caritas.va

Currency converter (Euros to other currencies): http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ilY_qkKl2-BGIiWlR2wcN2DCykcAD98FF8V82

http://internationalrivers.org/en/blog/glenn-switkes/fatalities-northeast-brazilian-dam-bursts

Many thanks to Laurie Dougherty, in Massachusetts, for the information in this post.

Cruz Vermelha do Brasil: Como fazer doações p/ os atingidos das enchentes do Norte e Nordeste

2009-05-25T11:09:00.004-03:00

Veja como fazer doações para o Nordeste

Cruz Vermelha (para todos o atingidos do Nordeste)

Unibanco
Agência 0472
Conta 235.000-8

Defesa Civil do Piauí

Banco do Brasil
Agência 3791-5
Conta 2004-4

Ceará / Campanha Força Solidária

Caixa Econômica Federal
Agência 3281
Operação 003
Conta 300-1

Banco do Brasil
Agência 3515-7
Conta corrente 11024-8

Banco do Nordeste do Brasil
Agência 016
Conta corrente 29393-8

SOS Maranhão

Caixa Econômica Federal
Agência 0027
Conta corrente 1000-2
Operação 006

Banco do Brasil
Agência 2954-8
Conta corrente 2222-5.

Fonte: Folha Online

Link: http://www.gp1.com.br/noticias/mais-de-350-mil-pessoas-deixam-suas-casas-por-causa-das-chuvas-no-brasil-confira-79983.asp

Many thanks to Suya Yamazaki, in Japan, for getting me headed down this road to information for donations.

Maureen Dowd: Rogue Diva of Doom (Dick Cheney, in case you were wondering)

2009-05-13T11:07:00.004-03:00

Rogue Diva of Doom

Maureen Dowd. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.

Read All Comments (89) »

by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 12, 2009

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

Charles Krauthammer called Gore’s speech “a disgrace.” Michael Kelly, his fellow Washington Post columnist, called it “vile” and “contemptible.” Newt Gingrich said that the former vice president asserting that W. was making America less safe was “well outside the mark of an appropriate debate.”

“I think the president should be doing what he thinks is best as commander in chief,” Gingrich said flatly. Now, however, Gingrich backs Dick Cheney when he asserts that President Obama has made America less safe.

Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

Cheney unleashed, egged on by the combative Lynne and Liz, is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty, and he thinks he was the president.

W. admired Cheney’s brass (he used another word) but grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself, and the more he got pulled into a diplomatic mode by Condi in the second term. There were even reports of W. doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Poppy, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

Link to column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/opinion/13dowd.html

Gringa Perdida no Brasil

Gota d'Agua, assine por favor!

ASSINE AQUI!

PRIVACIDADE DO ENDEREÇO DE E-MAIL:

Another victory for our plutocrat overlords: IRS ceases audits of large donors to 501(c)4 organizations (faux think tanks, etc.) -- many of these tax-exempt organizations are in fact nothing more than lobbyists for the ultra-right wing

I.R.S. Drops Audits of Political Donors

by STEPHANIE STROM, The New York Times, July 7, 2011

A version of this article appeared in print on July 8, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: I.R.S. Drops Audits Of Political Donors.

Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama bin Laden’s Death

Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama bin Laden’s Death

Kenneth Raposa, Forbes: LulzSec attacks Petrobras and Brazilian Receita Federal (internal revenue service), news sites, and that main site of the President of the Republic

LulzSec Attacks Brazil Gov, Petrobras

NYT: China’s Interest in Farmland Makes Brazil Uneasy [as well it should!]

China’s Interest in Farmland Makes Brazil Uneasy

by Alexie Barrionuevo, The New York Times, May 26, 2011

Photo: Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times. A new railroad line in Uruaçu, Brazil, will carry soybeans to a port for shipping to China. Brazil's economic links with China have helped it prosper, but Brazil is selling mostly raw materials.

Photo: Daniel Kfouri for The New York Times. A farmer harvested soy in Uruaçu, Brazil.

Wise words from one of the most alive persons on the planet: William Shatner

Bob Herbert: Losing Our Way

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 25, 2011

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Readers' Comments

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 26, 2011, o

Nicholas Kristof: Militants, Women and Tahrir Square -- We Are All Egyptians

Militants, Women and Tahrir Sq.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 5, 2011

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Related

Times Topic: Egypt News — The Protests

Embraer Legacy 600 Jet Involved in Brazil Midair Finally on U.S. Soil

Jet Involved in Brazil Midair Finally on U.S. Soil

Sandy Pope speaks out on mud-slinging by the Hoffa campaign for Teamster general president and what it will take to organize the nonunion competition

Taking on the Nonunion Competition

Sarah Palin shows her true colors -- yellow -- and takes no blame at all for her gunsight map -- refuses to dial down rhetoric in aftermath of shooting tragedy in Tucson, Arizona

Palin: Blaming me for Tucson shootings is 'blood libel'

Daily Show Jon Stewart Destroys Bill Kristol on Health Care

Nature editorial: Give up the ghosts

Give up the ghosts

Even mark-to-fantasy accounting can't cover up cash flow problems forever! Hitler foreclosure fraud parody

What In The World Is Going On Inside Bank Of America?

Jim Swilley, courageous Georgia megachurch (Church of The Now) pastor, comes out to congregation after gay teen suicides

Frank Rich: "Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?"

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Vote na Dilma por Arnaldo Jabor

U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Tx), who singlehandedly changed the course of Afghan history, dead at 76

Charlie Wilson, lawmaker of movie fame, dies at 76

Naked Capitalism blog: Quelle Surprise! Health Insurers Pretended to Play Nice, Lobbied Against Reform

Speech of the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, during the informal Plenary Session on 18 December 2009 at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen

Amir Taheri, WSJ: Iran's Democratic Moment : Protestors now demand an 'Iranian Republic, not Islamic Republic'

Iran's Democratic Moment

Protestors now demand an 'Iranian Republic, not Islamic Republic'

by Amir Taheri, Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2009

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman

New York Times absence of journalistic integrity becomes ever more appalling -- now they shill for the health insurance industry, as well as ExxonMobil

Naked Capitalism, Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Thomas Friedman: Where did "we" go?

Where Did ‘We’ Go?

Readers' Comments

Judge Jed S. Rakoff deserves to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor

Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses

Reintegração de posse de terreno da Viação Campo Limpo no Capão Redondo

Excellent blog on responsible urban renewal -- Blog da Raquel Rolnick

Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes

Blocked rivers threaten livelihood of Brazilian tribes

Câmara Sutra by Cassetta e Planeta!!!

Paul Krugman: Treason Against the Planet

Betraying the Planet

Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

Charles M. Blow: Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

Peru: death toll reaches 60 -- Asháninka indigenous Indians fighting to prevent confiscation of their lands for logging, Brazil's hydroelectric dams

From Lou Gold's blog: Vision Share

Monday, June 08, 2009

Japanese & American donate to Caritas International for the flood victims in northern and northeastern Brazil -- Learn how!

Caritas - the charitable arm of the Catholic Church - is appealing for contributions to provide assistance to flooded areas in northeastern Brazil