Federal judge: Iran shares responsibility for 9/11 terror attacks

(hmmmmm...no agenda here...--jef)

By Kenneth Timmerman - the Daily Caller
December 27, 2011

NEW YORK — In an historic hearing in the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels said he planned to issue a ruling in the coming days declaring that Iran shares in the responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks.

“The extensive record submitted to this court, including fact witnesses and expert testimony, is satisfactory to this court,” Judge Daniels said. The court “accepts as true” the various allegations of the plaintiffs and their experts, he declared, and “will issue an order” in the coming days that Iran bears legal responsibility for providing “material support” to the 9/11 plotters and hijackers.

Family members of 9/11 victims who attended the open-court hearing broke into tears. They had nervously sat through a four-hour presentation by attorneys Thomas E. Mellon, Jr., and Timothy B. Fleming, consisting of evidence backing up their claims that Iran had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and actively assisted the hijackers in planning, preparing, and executing their plan.

“My husband’s name is on that lawsuit,” said Fiona Havlish, the lead plaintiff in the case against Iran. Her spouse, Donald G. Havlish, Jr, perished on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. “This is about my husband, all our husbands, our loved ones, our sons, our daughters.”

Ellen Saracini, whose husband, Victor Saracini, took off that morning at the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, called it “a historic day” because a U.S. court found that Iran was responsible for the attacks. “When I heard the verdict, I just smiled up to Victor and said, ‘we’re still thinking about you up there.’”

In presenting evidence gathered by the attorneys and their outside investigator, Timothy Fleming revealed tantalizing details of still-sealed videotaped depositions provided by three defectors from Iranian intelligence organizations.

One of those defectors was “physically present” when al-Qaida’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to Iran in January 2001 for four days of intense closed-door meetings with the top leadership in Iran to discuss the impending attacks.

Another took part in writing up the debriefing reports of Iran’s al-Qaida liaison, Imad Mugniyeh, once he returned to Iran from Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

The most dramatic moment of the hearing came when Fleming unveiled the identity of a third defector and described in detail the information he had provided.

The defector, Abdolghassem Mesbahi, had been a confidant of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder, and headed up European operations for the new regime’s fledging intelligence service in the early 1980s.

Then, Mesbahi actively took part in developing a set of terrorist contingency plans, called “Shaitan der atash” — meaning “Satan in the Flames,” or “Satan on Fire” — to be used against the United States.

“This contingency plan for unconventional or asymmetrical warfare against the United States was the origin of subsequent terror attacks against the United States, up to and including the terrorist attacks of 9/11.” Fleming said. “Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda joined the Iranian operational planning in the early to mid-1990s.”

Those earlier “unconventional” attacks included the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

In 1996, Mesbahi learned hard-liners within the regime intended to kill him. He fled Iran for Europe, where he was granted political refugee status.

Mesbahi soon became a witness in German court proceedings stemming from the assassination of Kurdish dissidents in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, and went to ground in a witness protection program. Known only as “Witness C,” his testimony led the German court to name the top leadership of Iran as personally responsible for ordering the assassinations, and caused the European Union to withdraw their ambassadors from Iran for 18 months.

Ever since then, Mesbahi has been a marked man, hunted by the regime’s intelligence services.

Fleming described Mesbahi’s desperate attempts in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks to contact German and U.S. intelligence agencies, after he received a series of coded messages from one of his former intelligence colleagues in Iran.

The first message, which he received on July 23, 2001, told him that the “Shaitan der atash” contingency plan against the United States had been activated.

Mesbahi knew at that point that something awful was about to occur, but he didn’t know which of the many variants of the plan had been selected, Fleming said. In one version of the plan, Iranian-backed terrorists were supposed to attack gas stations around the United States, causing their underground fuel tanks to explode. In another, they were to attack oil refineries.

The second message, which he received on Aug. 13, 2001, told him which plan had been selected. “This was the plan to crash civilian jetliners into major U.S. cities, including New York and Washington,” Fleming said.

The third message, which Mesbahi received on Aug. 27, told him that “Germany was involved” in some way in the plans. As Fleming pointed out, several of the 9/11 hijackers, including the lead pilot, Mohammad Atta, were working out of Hamburg, Germany.

The 9/11 Commission report referred obliquely to Mesbahi and others who had “some fragmentary knowledge” of the impending attacks in its narrative of the events of the summer of 2001. The “system was blinking red” and U.S. intelligence agencies were receiving “frequent fragmentary reports from around the world,” Mellon, one of the 9/11 families’ attorneys, told the court.

Both Mellon and Fleming saluted the bravery of the three defectors who “risked their lives” to help bring out the truth of Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 plot.

In addition to the defectors, Mellon recruited three senior staff members from the 9/11 Commission to describe the importance of Iran’s efforts to facilitate the travel of the 9/11 hijackers to and from Afghanistan.

Janice Kephart, who authored a separate monograph on the terrorists’ travel for the Commission, told the court that travel facilitation was not just a coincidence. It was “like a military operation” and was “crucial military support” for the 9/11 plot, she said.

Fleming and Mellon explained that Iran sent its top terrorist operative, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh, to Saudi Arabia and Lebanon on several trips to accompany eight to ten of the “muscle” hijackers back to Iran.

This was critical, they said, because the hijackers needed to reach al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan for briefings on the 9/11 operation. But because they were traveling on new Saudi passports and either already had or intended to get U.S. visas, the U.S. might refuse them entry if they had Iranian or Afghan entry stamps.

So without Iran’s decision to allow the future hijackers invisible passage to and from Afghanistan — without stamping their passports — the 9/11 attacks might never have occurred.

As a result, Kephart testified, the U.S. State Department approved 22 of the 23 visa applications submitted by the future hijackers and their associates.

“Today, I feel a great sense of relief,” Mellon said after the judge declared his intention to rule in favor of the 9/11 families. “The families have waited a very long time for this day, so I was greatly relieved for the families. Ten years ago, one of the family members asked me, who was responsible?” for the 9/11 attacks.

“Well, today we have found — the judge has found — that the responsible party was Iran,” he added.

Judge Daniels said he expected to issue a final opinion in the case early next week, finding Iran responsible for the worst terror attacks ever perpetrated on U.S. soil.

Daniels is a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Monsanto the devil's GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals

Huffington Post--Katherine Goldstein/Gazelle Emami 

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto the devil's GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats. 

According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, "Three varieties of Monsanto the devil's GM corn - Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup herbicide-absorbing NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities."

Monsanto the devil gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

"Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity....These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown."

Monsanto the devil has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is "based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products."

The IJBS study's author Gilles-Eric Séralini responded to the Monsanto the devil statement on the blog, Food Freedom, "Our study contradicts Monsanto the devil conclusions because Monsanto the devil systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto the devil crude statistical data."

How the Feds Fueled the Militarization of Police

Billions in post-9/11 taxpayer dollars have paid for combat-style gear on display in the Occupy crackdowns. 

By Justin Elliott, Salon
Posted on December 26, 2011

The militarization of America’s metropolitan police forces was on full display in recent months as police from Los Angeles to New York cracked down on Occupy protests, decked out in full SWAT gear and occasionally using strange pieces of military hardware.

Less well known is that police forces in small towns and far-flung cities have also been stocking up on heavy equipment in the years since Sept. 11, 2001.

In spite of strained city and state budgets in local years, the trend has continued thanks to generous federal grants. According to a new story by the Center for Investigative Reporting, $34 billion in federal grant money has financed the past decade’s shopping spree.

To learn more about the trend, I spoke with G.W. Schultz, who co-authored the story with Andrew Becker. (Also worth a look is the slide show accompanying the story.)

You start your piece with Fargo, N.D., where the police have a “$256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret,” kevlar helmets and assault rifles in their squad cars. What did they say when you asked why they need this kind of heavy equipment?
Their view is that they need to be as prepared as a city like New York. We’ve been studying the grant programs for a while. You see this in city after city. Everyone has got an explanation for why they need more and not less grant money. I grew up in Tulsa; there’s still a lot of sensitivity around the Oklahoma City bombing. So the attitude is, “Look, we could have a similar attack and we need to be ready for it.” Now I live in Austin. The attitude here is, we could have an incident like the one in which a guy smashed his plane into the IRS building a few years ago, or the one in which a guy started shooting people from a tower at the Uniersity of Texas a few decades ago. Every city has an answer like that. The approach to security spending is based on speculation about what could happen, however remote. That attitude enables you to buy everything without limit because you can never attain 100 percent security.

What is the federal grant program that is handing out all this money?
What we learned over time is that it’s not just one grant program, it’s grantprograms. There is a dizzying array of grants that local communities are eligible for from the Department of Homeland Security and sometimes the Justice Department. A few grants existed prior to 9/11. After DHS was created, Congress kept creating new programs to meet perceived needs around security. For example, “We need a bulletproof vehicle to send in our SWAT unit if a Mumbai-style attack occurs.” That led to a spree of spending on bulletproof vehicles. Each round of purchases is fueled by a what-if scenario.

You write in your piece that there’s a lot of information still lacking about this spending. What don’t we know? 
We’ve been working on this Homeland Security research for a few years. The feds have never had a listing of everything the local police and other local government agencies bought with the grant money. You literally can’t go to Washington and find a listing of how the $34 billion was spent; you have to go state by state. We set out to do that; after a period of many months, we still only have records from 41 states, and they are wildly inconsistent. We wanted to build a nationwide database of how the money was spent, but there turned out to be just no way to do it because of the lack of information. But we spent so much time with grant records, we were able to identify trends; we knew many communities were buying SWAT-style trucks, combat-style protective gear, and so on.

Has most of this equipment — assault rifles and armored vehicles and so on — just not been used? 
It’s hard to tell. We can say from available audits that a lot of the equipment purchased with grant funds is not used. As the years pass by, you see more people in government concede that particularly during the early years after 9/11, a lot of the stuff that was bought was never used, and a lot of money was wasted. I was recently at a small public safety summit in Austin and the chief of police here rhetorically asked the audience, “All the protective attire that you bought after 9/11 for a chemical attack, have you used any of that?” And the room kind of giggled a little bit. In the end there’s still an attitude in law enforcement and the government that it could be used and we need to be prepared.

Who is making money off of all this?
Well, defense contractors are not manufacturing F-35s or big ships for local cops. But these companies and Wall Street in general think in terms of diversity. They want small profit margins and large profit margins. Companies like Northrop Grumman have sold a lot of bomb-dismantling robots to local police. Some traditional defense contractors like Raytheon have also gotten into the intelligence side, selling things like information-sharing tools and radio equipment. I went to a conference a few weeks ago where Raytheon had a big presence, offering expensive communications equipment for dispatchers and so on.

It’s important to point out you can’t buy guns with Homeland Security grants — but it’s about the only thing you can’t buy. That’s a restriction the feds decided to place early on. But if a local police department can take care of some of the capabilities they believe they need to have with grants, that leaves money to buy things like AR-15s. In the 10 years since 9/11, they’ve done both — both combat-style SWAT attire and assault rifles. That’s partly why you see images now of SWAT police looking very much like combat troops in Baghdad or Kabul.

Are there any dissenting voices within the police community about all this militarization? 
There are even folks in the SWAT community — some of the older folks who have observed the evolution of SWAT — who are concerned about this. They’re concerned about whether or not the training is going to meet all the equipment that’s being bought. Part of the reason for that is the training is not as sexy as the equipment. The image and romance of battling bad guys with lots of tough-looking equipment and guns maybe isn’t as exciting as investing in training. There’s also concern among some police about deploying tactical units too often — for low-risk warrant executions and things like that. But, the counter-voice in law enforcement is, “Look, this enhances safety for officers.” They look back at a couple of really bad shootings and say, “We’re never going to let that happen again. We’re going to get whatever equipment or training we need.” But that comes at a cost.

Does it make police look more intimidating to be wielding AR-15s with all kinds of devices attached to them? Especially in a country that’s been working for years to implement community policing strategies. In a place like Los Angeles, there were years of work done to soften the image of law enforcement and improve the department’s relationship with minority communities. Is that threatened by the wider adoption of combat stye equipment and training?

Nastiest Scams, Rip-Offs and Tricks From Wall Street Crooks

How many high-level Wall Street players have been put in jail for the crimes that led to the financial crisis? Not. Even. One. 

By Dave Johnson, AlterNet
Posted on December 26, 201

How many high-level Wall Street players have been put in jail for the crimes that led to the financial crisis?  Not. Even. One.   

Last week several executives from the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, known as “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,”were sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for civil fraud. They were charged with misleading investors about the quality of the loans they were buying.  But this is a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution, so they face no possibility of jail time.  And the SEC is notoriously ready to settle these cases, accepting fines without admission of guilt. 

Meanwhile, last month Bloomberg News revealed that the Federal Reserve secretly loaned  $1.2 trillion to banks on Dec. 5, 2008, their neediest day, even as some of their CEOs were assuring investors their banks were healthy.  Are these CEOs facing prosecution or even civil fraud suits for doing the very same thing?  Not so much. 

These stories barely even reveal the tip of the iceberg of financial malfeasance.  We have been hearing for years now about the scams, frauds, rackets, schemes, tricks and various other ways that people on Wall Street made gazillions while crashing the economy.  The one thing we haven’t heard anything about is anyone at the top being held criminally accountable … for anything! 

Given these recent developments, the end of a bad year seems like a good time to take a look back at just a few examples of what was, and in too many cases, still is going on. So here is a little holiday-season nudge to all the attorneys general who may be hesitant to take them on -- if not with jail time, then at least  The banksters still have faced no accountability. 

They got bailed out … will We, the People continue to get sold out?

1. Fraudclosure/Robosigning

After the housing bubble collapsed, and the “innovative” mortgage “products” that were created by the financial industry began to blow up, with people’s payments rising into the stratosphere just as housing prices dropped and people were losing their jobs, the banks were faced with literally millions of foreclosures to process.  But, being Wall Street outfits, they didn’t want to be responsible for doing any actual work themselves.  Best to outsource the work to someone … cheap.  And that is what they did – and are still doing. 

The banks hired “robosigning” outfits to process the foreclosures, which resulted in accusations of documentation fraud, where the outfits file affidavits claiming to have documents they do not have.  The original mortgages often did not include proper paperwork to clearly prove who signed the loans or who had title, etc.  These firms would forge signatures, sign affidavits saying they had proper paperwork when they did not, and a number of other ruses to speed foreclosures.  And courts set up what were called “rocket dockets” to assist the process.  David Dayen at Firedoglake (Sept 2010): Foreclosure Fraud as Cover-Up for Mortgage Fraud, 

Banks never had the proper documentation for these loans, after handing them out to anyone with a pulse, and slicing and dicing them through securitization. The fraud allows banks and the state and local governments explicitly facilitating this by setting up special, speedy foreclosure courts the ability to paper over these objections. If the lenders had to obey the law and use a deliberative process to affirm the title ownership, practically nobody would get evicted. If enough of those struggling can be forced out of their homes, and the fraudulent mortgages thrown in the dumper, the banks can save their balance sheets.

This fraudulent process caught up with the banks, and once again the government offered “settlements” that, instead of prosecuting the fraud, offered immunity from prosecution before the states even had a chance to fully investigate charges. California’s Attorney General Kamela Harris backed away from this deal. Several other state Attorneys General, including New York’s Eric Schneiderman and Delaware’s Beau Biden are independently investigating foreclosure fraud, along with those in Nevada, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Kentucky.

We’ll see if the “settlement”  comes through, blocking a more comprehensive investigation and possible prosecutions. Recently Massachusetts filed the first foreclosure-fraud lawsuit, followed by Nevada.

2. Pushing Subprime Loans

The initial wave of mortgages to go bad were the “subprime” mortgages that were given to people barely able or even unable to make their payments.  Why were there so many of these mortgages in the system?  These mortgages were pushed on people by “predatory lenders” who would make a quick buck on upfront fees and commissions and then sell the loans to Wall Street to be repackaged into “CDOs” – the “toxic assets” that took down much of the financial system. 

You may have come across the recent story in the news about the Sheriff and movers refusing to evict a 103-year-old woman and her 83-year-old daughter from the home they have lived in for 53 years.  So here is a question: Why does a 103-year-old woman who has been in her house for 53 years even have a mortgage? Because many banks were pushing minority borrowers into expensive subprime loans, even if they qualified for standard mortgages.

According to Think Progress, “Wells Fargo had perhaps the most horrifying practices in this department, calling the subprime loans that they pushed in poor, black neighborhoods “ghetto loans.”


Predatory lending isn’t just about steering borrowers into very expensive loans, it is also about hard-selling people into borrowing money in the first place.  According to The Leadership Conference, “Predatory lending occurs when a lender uses unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent practices when selling a loan to a consumer. Borrowers are steered toward unaffordable loans, or charged higher fees or interest rates than those they qualify for. “

Predatory and subprime lending has died down, thanks to some degree of a restoration of sanity and new lending standards. But no one stepped in and stopped it when the practice was at its … prime. 

Meanwhile yet another “settlement” with no criminal charges is occurring. On Wednesday the government announced a $335 million settlement with Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial unit for overcharging minorities and pushing them into subprime loans.

3. Betting Against Designed-to-Fail Bonds

Even in collapsing markets there is money to be made by placing bets against assets that are overvalued, and then when their price drops the bets pay off.  And if you know where the toxic assets are, in advance, you can make a ton of money. The best way to know where toxic assets are is if you put them there, on purpose, in order for them to collapse. A ProPublica story, Did Citi Get a Sweet Deal? Bank Claims SEC Settlement on One CDO Clears It on All Others, says CitiBank created toxic assets on purpose in order to make bets that they would fail, 

In the run-up to the global financial collapse, Citigroup’s bankers worked feverishly to create complex securities. In just one year, 2007, Citi marketed more than $20 billion worth of deals backed by home mortgages to investors around the world, most of which failed spectacularly. Subsequent lawsuits and investigations turned up evidence that the bank knew that some of the products were low quality and, in some instances, had even bet they would fail.

Citibank made a lot of money from these bets because they knew where the toxic assets were, because they put them there, on purpose, in order to bet against them. CitiBank created these CDO toxic assets in a way that was designed to fail, and sold them to customers as solid investments, and then made bets that these assets were worthless. When the designed-to-fail assets failed, CitiBank made money, the customers were wiped out. 

The Securities and Exchange Comission (SEC) offered to “settle” this case with CitiBank, accepting a cash fine in exchange for dropping any prosecution or even making CitiBank admit wrongdoing.  But promsingly this was rejected by the judge.  DailyKos: Judge Rakoff stands up to SEC and Citigroup, 

Today, Judge Rakoff added to his legacy of independence by rejecting the SEC's efforts to settle with Citigroup for $285M over mortgage-backed securities fraud allegations.

… Under the law, Judge Rakoff was obligated to determine whether this settlement was "fair, reasonable, and in the public interest"; the SEC argued that no, the public interest didn't actually matter—and, if it did, the SEC itself could assess what the public needed. No no no, said the Judge.

Goldman Sachs also received a earlier settlement-without-prosecution for operating a similar scheme.  Washington Post: Goldman Sachs to pay record settlement in fraud suit, change business practices, 

Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay $550 million to settle a fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused the storied Wall Street bank of selling a subprime-mortgage investment that was secretly designed to fail.

The crux of the case alleges that Paulson & Co., a hedge fund, was looking for a way to bet on a drop in the housing market and that it asked Goldman to help create a financial product that would allow such a wager. Paulson, led by hedge fund manager John Paulson, essentially bought insurance against the investment -- much like taking out an insurance policy on a person who secretly has a potentially deadly disease. …

The investment ultimately lost virtually all its value, costing investors $1 billion.

Word is these schemes were not uncommon.  Ney getting that an investment is going to blow up if you’re the one who put the bomb in it and set the timer in the first place.

4. An “Epidemic” Of Mortgage Fraud

For years regulators were warned about “an epidemic” of mortgage fraud, but looked the other way. For example, a CNN news story is from 2004, years before the financial collapse, FBI warns of mortgage fraud 'epidemic', warned,

Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis."

… The FBI has dispatched undercover teams across the country in an urgent investigation into dealings by suspect mortgage brokers, appraisers, short-term investors, and loan officers, Swecker, flanked by FBI executives and Justice Department prosecutors, revealed.

The Bush administration’s reaction was to pull FBI agents off of white collar crime like mortgage fraud, reducing the numer of agents looking at banking fraud from 1,000 during the S&L Crisis investigation down to around 100. 

5. Ratings Agencies Gave AAA to CDOs

Subprime and just fraudulent mortgages were getting bundled up into complex bonds and sold by the big Wall Street banks to investors looking for higher yields than they could get from other investments.  (They didn’t even bother to make sure they had proper documentation proving who had signed the loans, and who should receive the payments. More on this later.)

But investors wanted to buy bonds that were safe. So they turned to the ratings agencies.  These are the companies responsible for determining the safety of investments. The ratings agencies had conflicts of interest, being paid in various ways by Wall Street to help mislead investors and tell them that the “toxic assets” bonds that Wall Street was selling had the highest safety rating of AAA.  Then the investors lost, the economy was tanked and the taxpayers are now and into the future paying the bill. 

William Black was a regulator during the S&L crisis.  He explains at the Huffington Post, writing in, The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the Crisis, 

The first document everyone should read is by S&P, the largest of the rating agencies. The context of the document is that a professional credit rater has told his superiors that he needs to examine the mortgage loan files to evaluate the risk of a complex financial derivative whose risk and market value depend on the credit quality of the nonprime mortgages "underlying" the derivative. A senior manager sends a blistering reply with this forceful punctuation:

Any request for loan level tapes is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!! Most investors don't have it and can't provide it. [W]e MUST produce a credit estimate. It is your responsibility to provide those credit estimates and your responsibility to devise some method for doing so.

The rating agencies never reviewed samples of loan files before giving AAA ratings to nonprime mortgage financial derivatives. … 

…Worse, the S&P document demonstrates that the … banks … engaged in the same willful blindness. They did not review samples of loan files because doing so would have exposed the toxic nature of the assets they were buying and selling. The entire business was premised on a massive lie -- that fraudulent, toxic nonprime mortgage loans were virtually risk-free. The lie was so blatant that the banks even pooled loans that were known in the trade as "liar's loans" and obtained AAA ratings despite FBI warnings that mortgage fraud was "epidemic."

In other words, superiors at the ratings agencies told their underlings to just make up fraudulent credit ratings.  

Today the people who were at the top of the ratings agencies and the Wall Street firms have millions and live in big houses.  How many of the rest of us now or will have to live in cars and cardboard boxes because of what they did? 

6. Banksters Who Made Out Like … Bandits

Many financial-company executives made millions (hundreds of millions, actually) while they were doing questionable things that ended up crashing their companies and the economy.  But they got to keep the money.  For example, when you hear that Wall Street firm “Lehman Brothers” went bankrupt, you might think, “serves them right.” But what actually happened was that a lot of regular people ended up losing their jobs while a few people at the top got really, really rich.  CEO Richard Fuld, for example, ended up with almost half a billion. 

(Really, really rich.)  Business Week: How Much Did Lehman CEO Dick Fuld Really Make? 

"Mr. Fuld will do fine," Waxman said. "He can walk away from Lehman a wealthy man who earned over $500 million. But taxpayers are left with a $700 billion bill to rescue Wall Street and an economy in crisis."

So, no, “they” didn’t get what they deserved – and neither did top executives like Fuld. 

 

7. Insiders Profiting From Being … Insiders

Stephen Friedman was a member of the Board of Goldman Sachs at the same time as he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has to resign from the NY Federal Reserve, keeping his position with Goldman Sachs, after it was revealed that he had purchased $3 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock while the Federal Reserve was regulating the company after it became a bank holding company in September 2008. This was around the time that the NY Fed negotiated for Goldman Sachs to receive payments from AIG, that would be paid at 100 cents on the dollar, even though AIG was in default. 

According to an Oct. 27, 2009 Bloomberg report, New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers,

The deal contributed to the more than $14 billion that over 18 months was handed to Goldman Sachs, whose former chairman, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of directors of the New York Fed when the decision was made. Friedman, 71, resigned in May, days after it was disclosed by the Wall Street Journal that he had bought more than 50,000 shares of Goldman Sachs stock following the takeover of AIG. He declined to comment for this article.

Congress finally, finally voted to audit the Federal Reserve.  It was a one-time, limited audit, but that is a lot more than We, the People were allowed to know about the Fed before the audit.  What did we learn?  Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi, in The Real Housewives of Wall Street, tells us.

The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

For just one example of what has been going on with the Fed, one company, named Waterfall TALF Opportunity, received nine loans totaling around $220 million.  Among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.  Tiabbi explains why you care, writing,

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

Insiders getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the Fed, in secret. That is just one example of the shenanigans discovered when the Fed was audited.  Is there any investigation of this underway?  Not that the public has been told, and not likely ever. 

More recently there was another example of insiders potentially profiting from being on the inside track was in the news recently.   President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may have tipped off a group of hedge fund managers with specific information about what the government would be doing. 

Again, no one is being prosecuted. 

Impunity? 
There are so, so many other outrages.  And these are only the things that have hit the news.  Are some or all of these not just outrages, but actual crimes?  After the “S&L Crisis” there were 1,100 prosecutions and more than 800 bank officials went to jail.  This time – even with the appearance of widespread criminality in the financial industry – not so much.  In fact, not any.   

Were crimes committed by people high up in the financial industry?  It looks that way, but we really have no way of knowing if our government again and again offers “settlements” that block the comprehensive investigations that come with prosecutions.  

Why won't our legal system prosecute anyone on Wall Street for anything?  We see outrage after outrage, and they put poor people in jail for life for stealing a hot dog when they are hungry.  Meanwhile Wall Street is funding an effort to blame government for the financial collapse, to block regulation and defund the regulatory agencies.  This is an effort to subvert government and turn people against democracy so that plutocracy – government of by and for the 1% – can reign. 

We should all be demanding that the legal system do its job to sort this out instead of actively blocking prosecutions by approving “settlements.” People lose faith in government when it looks like the 1% can get away with any outrage. And now we know that when We, the People gather to demand something be done about this we are met with pepper spray and batons.

Satellite Imagery Shows Shell Nigerian Spill Worse Than Reported

Monday, December 26, 2011 by TalkingPointsMemo

by Emily Gertz 

 

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth.

 
ESA Envisat radar satellite image showing a major oil spill in the waters off the coast of Nigeria, via SkyTruth. If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

“That could mean anything from 1 gallon to 1.7 million gallons,” John Amos, founder and president of satellite-imaging nonprofit SkyTruth told TPM.

Oil must be at least 1 micron (1/1000th of a millimeter) thick to be seen from a satellite, according to Amos. The visible rainbow sheen, he says, means that the oil could be anywhere from .3 to 10 microns thick, depending on two different sets of guidelines.

Amos used an image from a European Space Agency radar satellite (the ASAR instrument) to determine that as of mid-week, the spill covered an area of 923 square kilometers (356 square miles).

So if the spill is 5 microns thick—the estimate where the two sets of guidelines intersect—the oil would add up to around 1.2 million gallons, Amos said.

Shell has stated that the spill’s thickness is mostly less than 1/100th of a millimeter, or 10 microns, a statement which leaves a big data gap as well.

“If the whole slick is, on average, 10 microns thick, that’s 2.4 million gallons,” Amos said.

Reached for comment, Shell did not acknowledge SkyTruth’s estimate, and and would only reiterate the 40,000 barrel figure.

On Saturday, Shell released an updated, upbeat statement assuring observers that the spill had been contained and was shrinking thanks to the use of dispersals. As the company’s statement reads: “Current estimates based on over flights indicate less than 10,000 barrels of oil remain on the surface of the water.”

The Bonga spill took place Tuesday, December 20, when oil was being transferred between storage ships. The ordinary production capacity of the field was 200,000 barrels a day, and 10 percent of Nigeria’s overall monthly oil production, according to Reuters.

Presumably, Shell would know how much oil it started with on the day of the spill compared to how much remains, according to Amos.

“We have a lot more to hear from Shell about what actually happened at this site,” Amos told TPM.

Shell has been using floating production and storage offloading, or FPSO technology at the Bonga oilfield, “in which crude oil is piped to floating, mobile tanks, usually converted supertankers, rather than fixed platforms. Shuttle tankers collect oil from the FPSO and carry it to market,” as Wired reported earlier this week.

FPSO is a much cheaper way for an oil company to drill offshore, compared to setting up a drilling platform.

In addition, Shell has reported several oil spills off the coast of Nigeria since it began operating there in 2002, which it blames on sabotage and theft.

Amos believes Shell has a big incentive to be more transparent about the Bonga spill: the company recently received the Obama adminstration’s conditional approval to drill in the Arctic.

“If they weren’t honest [about the Bonga oil spill] and it was discovered they weren’t, I think that would make our government less likely to ease up on drilling restrictions in the Arctic,” he says.

Another recent Shell update states that “survelliance and aerial photos” show the spill breaking up, and that it has not reached the Nigerian coast. SkyTruth hasn’t been able to confirm or debunk this statement so far.

Amos believes Shell has caught on that groups like SkyTruth are using remote sensing to monitor its operations and vet its public statements.

For proof he points to a statement on Shell’s web site, posted after Amos blogged about the size of the Bonga oil slick, stating that while the spill’s extent, “as seen on satellite images, is very large, it’s also very thin.”

Says Amos, “The days when this stuff was so expensive and techie that only oil companies had access to it are over.”

It's Time that We Valued People Over Profits, Poll Results Show

Saturday, December 24, 2011 by the Independent/UK
by Andrew Grice

The British public want business to put "people before profits" and to see politicians close the gap between rich and poor, according to a new survey.

The findings suggest growing support for "responsible capitalism" in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and bankers' excessive bonuses – and public sympathy with the anti-globalization protests such as the Occupy London camp outside St Paul'sCathedral.

YouGov, which polled 1,723 people for the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and the TUC, found that 80 per cent believe the private sector should forgo some profits to meet a wider responsibility to their employees, customers and communities and invest more for the long-term. Only 12 per cent think that maximizing profits for shareholders is a company's top priority.

Seven out of 10 people believe the gap between those at the top and everyone else is too wide and bad for ordinary people, while 20 per cent think we should not worry about the gap too much or reduce rewards for successful people.

The figures suggest politicians have been right to try to appeal to a changing public mood in recent months. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, sparked a debate over capitalism in September by saying the Government should punish "predators" and reward "producers."

However, YouGov found that people remain wary about too much state intervention. Some 44 per cent believe that past government intervention has usually ended in tears and that the state should keep out of the way.

About one in three people (31 per cent) thinks the economy would benefit if the Government intervened more.

The poll uncovered markedly different attitudes among supporters of the two Coalition parties. Liberal Democrat voters are significantly more progressive than the average person –and on some issues are more progressive than Labour voters.


Conservative supporters are almost evenly split on whether the rich-poor gap is bad for ordinary people, while 78 per cent of Lib Dem voters believe it is bad and only 14 per cent do not.

The Coalition parties' supporters are also divided over workplace rights. Almost half of Tory voters say employee rights lead to fewer jobs and a weaker economy but only 19 per cent of Liberal Democrat supporters agree. While 46 per cent of Tory supporters think businesses would be more successful if they involved their workforce, that view is held by 74 per cent of Lib Dem voters.

According to YouGov, Britons are pessimistic about the economic outlook. Only 18 per cent expect people to be better off in 10 years' time and only 11 per cent believe future generations will have better living standards than today.

Andrew Harrop, the Fabian Society's general secretary, said: "The Westminster village is misjudging the British public's views on economic issues.

"Our polling shows overwhelming support for what are regarded as left-leaning views among not only Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters but also from millions of Conservative voters. On economics, the Conservative leadership is totally out of touch with the mainstream."

Corporate Education Reform Has Turned Kids into Commodities

Monday, December 26, 2011 by Miami Herald

by Fred Grimm 

 

Compared to modern school kids, I was a downright worthless student.

I don’t mean worthless as a pejorative. (My father would have used a more colorful term to characterize my scholarly pursuits.) But worthless as a commodity. Us kids at Montrose Elementary School weren’t making anyone rich. Not like today’s pupils, particularly those in Florida, who’ve become valuable cogs in a burgeoning industry.

Such precious little dummies, these wayward students. Their benighted ways in the classroom have given rise to a recession-proof enterprise. To a no-lose sort of capitalism.

Educational entrepreneurs (some backed by Wall Street hedge funds who know a sure thing when they see it) have figured out how to make millions without the usual risks of the marketplace, drilling for profits in the ever lucrative field of school reform.

No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s 2001 education reform package, since embraced by President Obama, may have forced needed attention onto failing schools, but the law also created an extraordinary new industry funded exclusively with public money.

The NCLB mandate for standardized tests requires the nation’s public schools to administer some 50 million tests annually, costing some $700 million a year, most of that money going to corporations that create and publish the tests, score the results and provide “interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports.” Since I was a school boy, testing costs have risen by 3,000 percent. And so too has the opportunity to make a buck.

Requirements to provide free tutors for faltering students set off another frenzy among education entrepreneurs, wanting a chunk of the $900 million a year the federal government provides for extra help. This sort of business opportunity led to an interesting lead paragraph in a New York Times story: “Tutoring companies, rushing to tap into money available under the federal No Child Left Behind law, offered New York City principals thousands of dollars for school projects, doled out gift certificates to students and hired several workers with criminal backgrounds.”

The school system’s chief investigator, Richard Condon “described a climate of intense competition for the federal money as companies wooed both principals, who control access to space within their buildings for the after-school tutoring sessions, and prospective students, whose participation is directly linked to the companies’ gains.”

Perhaps, the tutoring companies were just caught up in an altruistic fervor for school reform.

The charter school movement set off another entrepreneurial frenzy, particularly in Florida, which now has 519 charters, 200 of them in Broward and Miami-Dade. Maybe charters and parental choice make for better overall education. I don’t know. There’s conflicting data.

Certainly, many do a passable job with their students, though it’s tough to tell whether they offer a superior brand of education compared to traditional public schools.

Maybe charter operators are just savvy marketers, who know how to avoid difficult students who could bring down the overall test scores and damage the school brand. The Herald’s series on the charter movement last week revealed some discomfiting statistics indicating some of the more successful charters in Miami-Dade indulge in clever cherry picking.

But the long range effect of luring away high achievers from traditional schools would result in something quite the opposite from the original goals of the Bush school reforms. The kids left behind by No Child Left Behind would be the very children, most of them poor, that the reforms were supposed to rescue.

“When you’ve siphoned away all the successful kids, only poor kids will go to public schools,” warned Diane Ravitch, a longtime voice for reform and a chronicler of failed reforms (which you might have guessed from the title of her most recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education). She said public schools, if the charter system isn’t fixed, will evolve into repositories for the unwanted, where we train poor kids to take the big test. Not to learn.

The Miami Herald’s series, Cashing In On Kids, by Kathleen McGrory and Scott Hiaasen, charted how so much public money going into these nominally non-profit ventures finds its way into the accounts of for-profit management companies. And how the operators of the management companies often double as the charter school’s landlords. Sometimes you’re not sure whether to call these people educators or real estate profiteers.

Ravitch said that even in states that outlaw for-profit management companies, the supposedly non-profit charter school operators hire for-profit subcontractors. “People have figured out that this is a great entrepreneurial opportunity.” She confessed to a “visceral dislike” of for-profit corporations running public-funded schools. “I worry that their first obligation is to the shareholders, not to students.”

But if you’re bothered by the money grubbing ways of the education reform movement, too bad. They’ve got money (thanks to NCLB) to write campaign contributions. They’ve got money to hire lobbyists. They’ve got the political juice. And you don’t.

Online education offers the next big cache of public millions available to the education industry. (We’re already supposed to believe that Florida kids can undergo the rigors of a physical education class through an online course.) So what if online students don’t learn much without a teacher there to keep them from slipping over to Facebook? Stay-at-home kids are the hot, new commodity on the education market. No rent. No heating bills. No janitorial staff. No zoning controversies. No fights in the hallways. Lots of money for software and computer-ready courses and online charter schools with plenty left over to keep the stockholders happy.

The education reform industrial complex regards virtual students, sitting at home in their underwear, as a business opportunities. Call it dollars for dullards.

Springtime for Toxics

Monday, December 26, 2011 by the New York Times

by Paul Krugman

 

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?

Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.

So, naturally, Republicans are furious. But before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what a good thing the E.P.A. just did.

As far as I can tell, even opponents of environmental regulation admit that mercury is nasty stuff. It’s a potent neurotoxicant: the expression “mad as a hatter” emerged in the 19th century because hat makers of the time treated fur with mercury compounds, and often suffered nerve and mental damage as a result.

Hat makers no longer use mercury (and who wears hats these days?), but a lot of mercury gets into the atmosphere from old coal-burning power plants that lack modern pollution controls. From there it gets into the water, where microbes turn it into methylmercury, which builds up in fish. And what happens then? The E.P.A. explains: “Methylmercury exposure is a particular concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies and young children, because studies have linked high levels of methylmercury to damage to the developing nervous system, which can impair children’s ability to think and learn.”

That sort of sounds like something we should regulate, doesn’t it?

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is “quantifiable”: E.P.A.’s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn’t know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it’s a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.’s radical anti-environmental turn hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. But something remarkable has happened on this front. Only a few years ago, it seemed possible to be both a Republican in good standing and a serious environmentalist; during the 2008 campaign John McCain warned of the dangers of global warming and proposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Today, however, the party line is that we must not only avoid any new environmental regulations but roll back the protection we already have.

And I’m not exaggerating: during the fight over the debt ceiling, Republicans tried to attach riders that, as Time magazine put it, would essentially have blocked the E.P.A. and the Interior Department from doing their jobs.

Oh, by the way, you may have heard reports to the effect that Jon Huntsman is different.

And he did indeed once say: “Conservation is conservative. I’m not ashamed to be a conservationist.” Never mind: he, too, has been assimilated by the anti-environmental Borg, denouncing the E.P.A.’s “regulatory reign of terror,” and predicting that the new rules will cause blackouts by next summer, which would be a neat trick considering that the rules won’t even have taken effect yet.

More generally, whenever you hear dire predictions about the effects of pollution regulation, you should know that special interests always make such predictions, and are always wrong. For example, power companies claimed that rules on acid rain would disrupt electricity supply and lead to soaring rates; none of that happened, and the acid rain program has become a shining example of how environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

But again, never mind: mindless opposition to “job killing” regulations is now part of what it means to be a Republican. And I have to admit that this puts something of a damper on my mood: the E.P.A. has just done a very good thing, but if a Republican — any Republican — wins next year’s election, he or she will surely try to undo this good work.

Still, for now at least, those who care about the health of their fellow citizens, and especially of the nation’s children, have something to celebrate.

Fracking Your Water

Drilling Through the Halliburton Loophole

by SHERWOOD ROSS

 

ExxonMobil Chairman/CEO Rex Tillerson sounded very confident when he told a congressional hearing last year that extracting natural gas by the “hydraulically fractured” process has not led to even one “reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated.”

But drinking water supplies in Pavillion, Wyo., and Dimock, Pa., are suspected of contamination from such drilling and a study by Duke University researchers showed that methane can leak into drinking water near active fracking sites.

The oil companies are backing up their story with an effective ad campaign. Example: ExxonMobil’s ad in the Sept. 19th New Yorker claims existing gas buried deep beneath our water supplies could “meet our needs for over 100 years.”

Besides having “thousands of feet of protective rock between the natural gas deposit and any groundwater” drillers’ install “multiple layers of steel and cement” in shale gas wells to keep the gas “safely within the well,” the ad said. The slurry is made up of sand, water, and chemicals—but drillers don’t have to identify the chemicals.

That’s because in the 2005 energy bill, crafted in part by goodfella Vice-President Dick Cheney, “fracking was explicitly exempted from federal review under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert in an incisive article in the December 5th New Yorker.

This exemption, dubbed the “Halliburton Loophole,” does not require drillers to reveal which chemicals they use, which are carcinogens such as “benzene and formaldehyde.” 

Might this be why some irate homeowners say their tap water can be set on fire?

This hasn’t stopped more than 1,000 Pennsylvania and New York property owners from accepting up-front payments (with a pledge of future royalties) to allow drilling, even though “as much as forty per cent of (the water used in extraction) can come back up out of the gas wells, bringing with it corrosive salts, volatile organic compounds and radioactive elements, such as radium, ” Kolbert writes.

Pennsylvania has asked drillers to stop taking this flowback water to municipal treatment plants and New York State has ordered a moratorium on fracking permits. And it is seeking to ban fracking in New York City’s upstate watershed.

Says Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, “Once hydrofracturing begins in the (Delaware River) basin, the proverbial ‘faucet’ cannot be turned off, with any damage to our freshwater supplies likely requiring generations of effort to clean up.”

In a letter earlier this year, Tom Curtis, deputy executive director of the American Water Works Assn., called upon the EPA to evaluate every pathway for drinking water contamination and asserted a new study is needed that will cover fracking’s impact on water supply.

“Impacts on existing water resources can only be ascertained by properly designed monitoring programs,” Curtis wrote. “Protecting drinking water should trump everything.”

Indeed. It’s past time for state governments to ban all fracking until additional research finds conclusively it is safe to continue the practice—if it does.

The oil firms are claiming natural gas can satisfy the nation’s energy wants for anywhere from a century to 250 years. No doubt. But wind power, by contrast, is a resource that lasts forever. What’s more, if harnessed,  there’s enough of it blowing in just a couple of Dakota counties to light up the entire USA year-round, and without polluting the water we drink and upon which all life depends.

The Leading Cause of Breast Cancer?

The Danger of CT Scans

by JOHN LaFORGE

Profiteers in the medical CT scan business took a big hit last week from a major new government report on the causes of breast cancer.

Published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the exhaustive analysis found that medical radiation, particularly the large radiation dose delivered by CT scans, is the foremost identifiable cause of breast cancer.[1]

Almost 230,480 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed this year in the United States, and about 40,000 women will die of the disease, roughly one out of every 3,875 women.

The new Institute of Medicine report probably doesn’t sit well with the industry, hospitals and clinics that make so many millions of dollars selling and over-using CT machines. The authors suggest that women avoid “unnecessary” or “inappropriate” medical radiation, a thinly veiled criticism of the industry that will give you a CT scan for a tooth ache if you don’t object to it.

In 1980, there were 3 million CT scans performed in this country. The number rose to 62 million in 2006,[2] to about 70 million by 2007,[3] and, according to NBC, to 72 million this year.[4] It’s a growth industry that doesn’t care if it promotes tumor growth.

The IOM committee made several suggestions for preventive actions that women can take, and the very first one is to “avoid inappropriate medical radiation exposure.” In the “Question & Answer” section of the IOM analysis online, the authors recommend “Avoiding medical radiation and hormone therapy, unless they are medically necessary, is a good idea.”

This suggestion has a vexing corollary since so-called mammography is just a lower dose of X-radiation given directly to breast tissue. Yet the new IOM study’s authors say in a footnote, “While recognizing the risks of ionizing radiation exposure, particularly for certain higher-dose methods (such as CT scans), it is not the committee’s intent to dissuade women from routine mammography screening.” Yet the advisability of mammography has been under attack ever since the British medical journal The Lancet in Oct. 2006 reported on a study by Dr. Peter Gotzsche that found the produced no health benefits. The late Dr. John Gofman argued for his entire career that X-rays caused more breast cancer then they detect, a position defended at length by Dr. Samuel Epstein in his book The Politics of Cancer.

CT Scans may cause 29,000 cancers and 15,000 cancer deaths every year
NBC News said in 2009 that each whole-body CT scan can deliver as much radiation in 10 minutes as 440 chest X-rays.[5]

The IOM’s authoritative warning against CT scans has to be considered in view of a 2009 study led by the National Cancer Institute which showed that CT scans administered in the year 2007 alone may have contributed to 29,000 new cancer cases and nearly 15,000 cancer deaths in the United States. NBC News noted the report in its Dec. 14, 2009 broadcast under the headline, “15,000 will die from CT scans done in 1 year.”[6]

Dr. Rita Redberg, U. of Calif. San Francisco, told NBC, “We’re getting a lot of radiation from CT scans, there’s a lot of variability in the radiation that we’re getting from different types of CT scans, and there are a lot of excess cancers.”[7]

In view of the license to kill that CT scanners seem to have been given, patients considering medical radiation have to ask themselves Dirty Harry’s famous question, “Do I feel lucky?”

The Thirty Percent

The Politics of Self-Deception

by ANDREW LEVINE

 

As long as our elections pass for “free and fair,” there is always a chance that one or another of Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” will make them interesting.  Who, after all, would have predicted Bush v Gore?

But barring what we cannot foresee, it will be grim indeed between now and November.   Polling data indicate that more than two-thirds of the electorate already wishes the election over.  It is surprising that the number isn’t higher. The problem is not apathy; thanks to Occupy Wall Street, there are significant numbers of people in motion for the first time in decades and, by all accounts, the occupations enjoy wide popular support.  But money-driven electoral politics is largely irrelevant to the changes OWS is about.  More importantly, there is a yawning enthusiasm deficit in the offing.  Unlike in 2010, this time it will affect Democratic and Republican voters alike, though for different reasons.

On the Democratic side, the reasons not to enthuse have been obvious since even before Barack Obama took office.  The case has been gone over so often that it scarcely bears repeating.  In brief, apart from his much touted health insurance legislation, which, like the Clintons’ failed efforts two decades ago, will set the cause of genuine reform back a generation, Obama has continued George Bush’s policies on almost all matters of substance — except in the one area where it was reasonable to expect that a Constitutional law professor would do better, and where he has done worse.  That would be in protecting constitutional rights and freedoms, including due process rights, and assuring legal accountability, not just for the ninety-nine percent, but for rich and powerful “persons” (corporate and otherwise) too.

Instead Obama announced at the get go that, in order to move “forward,” he’d not be bringing George Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or any of the lesser war criminals who operated under their authority to justice.  And, from that time on, he has indeed moved forward relentlessly – to the point that today Bradley Manning, by all rights a national hero, after having been subjected to eighteen months of pre-trial punishment amounting to torture and having already been declared guilty by the Commander-in-Chief, is now a prop in a show trial designed to intimidate whistle-blowers and others who might embarrass the empire and its stooges; and to prepare the way for who knows what affront to the rule of law Obama & Company have in mind for Julian Assange, a man who has helped make more crucial information available to the public than all the world’s media combined.

Yes, Republican obduracy has thwarted Obama’s every move.  But only the willfully blind can still doubt that he and his fellow Democrats have been more than willing capitulators. 

And yes, he and they sometimes do say things liberals want to hear.  But, when it comes down to it, they have consistently been on the wrong side of everything – to a degree that cannot plausibly be ascribed to their blundering or pusillanimity, or to the strategic adeptness of the other side.

The only reason the vast majority of Obama’s 2008 supporters haven’t abandoned him entirely is the fear and loathing the other side conjures up.   Obama understands this, even if he is more inclined to blame the economy than himself.  Thus he too has taken to falling back upon the Lesser Evil argument.  In a recent interview on Sixty Minutes, Obama pointed out that he’s not running against the Almighty but against the alternative.  Expect to hear that argument repeatedly in the months to come.

[To his credit, the President acknowledged that this gem of a sound bite was voiced first by the Vice President, a man famously disinclined to cite his sources].

By now, most lesser evilists understand that Obama and the Democrats are not on the side of the ninety-nine percent, and that being coopted into their electoral campaigns is not the way forward.  This was already a fact of political life before the 2010 mid-term elections; it is why many who would have voted Democratic stayed home instead, and why the Democrats got the “shellacking” they deserved.  Predictably, Obama learned all the wrong lessons from the 2010 election.  And so the enthusiasm of the Democratic base has, if anything diminished further.

But since most voters can still claim to have the sense they were born with, there is much less willingness now to give the other side a tumble.  This is why Obama will probably win in 2012, even if the economy goes south again and even if, as is very likely, Iraq and Libya come back to bite him in the ass.  He will win because he is running against the alternative.  The alternative is so God awful that, confounding the conventional wisdom of just a few months ago, Obama may even carry enough Democrats with him to hold on to the Senate and take back the House.

But, if that happens, it won’t be because very many voters like the prospect; it will be to ward off the most wretched collection of bought and paid for low lives and charlatans ever to present themselves as potential rulers of a land teetering on the edge of economic disaster and overflowing with weapons of mass destruction.

A similar fear and loathing moves sane Republicans too.  But sane Republican voters are few and far between outside the ranks of the one percent, where greed concentrates the mind.

And so all the enthusiasm nowadays resides with Tea Partiers and values voters, some thirty percent of the total electorate.  In their ranks, passionate intensity abounds – so much that most of them cannot alight for long on any single candidate.  They love them all, in series, for a few weeks at a time.

But even they understand at some level that, barring the outbreak of a pandemic psychosis, none of their love objects are electable, and so they face the prospect of having to vote for the only plausible Republican candidate running – Mitt Romney.  Since it has been clear for months that between seventy and eighty percent of the thirty percent hate his guts, this is a recipe for an enthusiasm deficit likely to dwarf the one afflicting Obama’s disaffected supporters.

Democratic voters have by now mostly resigned themselves to the idea that Obama is useless except for keeping a Greater Evil at bay.  Because Republicans hardly bother even to pretend that they champion the interests (as opposed to the “values”) of the thirty percent upon whom they count for votes, their problem is different.  Instead of having to depend on fear, they have a yawning cultural contradiction to contend with — between the plutocrats who recruited the thirty percent and who still own the party, and their benighted accomplices who nowadays run the show.   If there is a candidate acceptable to both camps – a very unlikely prospect – he or she has yet to come forward, and it’s getting to be too late to expect that one will.  And so when it comes to working up enthusiasm for their candidate this time around, Republicans are likely to find themselves at a loss.  Both parties face an enthusiasm deficit, but this time the enthusiasm gap will fall on the Republican side.

* * *

What gives with that thirty per cent?  Their educational level is said to be “above average,” though that statistic, if true, says more about American education than anything else.  But most of them are at least able to negotiate their way through life with some success.   How then can they contemplate, much less enthuse over, a Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry presidency?  How can they take Donald Trump or Herman Cain or Rick Santorum seriously?  And, to go from the merely ridiculous to the utterly contemptible, how could they let Newt Gingrich skip to the head of the class?

[Ron Paul is the outlier.  Although he is more principled and consistent than the others, particularly on matters of individuals’ rights and liberties, most of his views – on matters of war and peace and foreign policy, he, not Obama or any of the other Republicans, is the lesser evil.  Though hardly an anti-imperialist, he is the one anti-interventionist in the race; and also the only one in favor of holding back the blank check the United States gives Israel, though for reasons that have more to do with his understanding of Biblical prophecy than with justice or solidarity with an oppressed people. 

Because many of his positions are unacceptable in the Home of the Brave, the media treat Paul in much the way that they treated Jesse Jackson two decades ago – they ignore him as much as they can.  Even so, if the one percent can’t win the thirty percent over to Romney’s side and if all the other anti-Romney candidates self-destruct, he could become someone to reckon with.   But, whatever happens, Paul’s candidacy has little to do with the enthusiasms so far evident in the ranks of the thirty per cent, and so, following the lead of those who would marginalize him, I will say nothing more about him here.]

Familiar explanations for the insanity on the Republican side don’t quite cut it.  One view, voiced by Obama himself in 2008 at a fund-raiser in Northern California, is that it has to do with identity — that at a time of social dislocation, there are desperate people who cling to their religion and their guns because that is what they take their heritage to be.  He regretted saying this, but he was not wrong: a perverse kind of identity politics does draw people into the thirty percent.  But that wouldn’t account for the enthusiasm so many thirty per centers evince for preposterous candidates who, like the kids on the old Art Linkletter program, say the darndest things.

Some fifty years ago, Richard Hofstadter drew attention to a “paranoid style” in American politics which surfaces from time to time.  Aversion to reason and indifference to evidence is not new on our shores either, and neither is anti-intellectualism.  It is telling, though, that Newt Gingrich is, by his own lights and in the view of many thirty per centers, a deep thinker and an important historian.  So much for anti-intellectualism; even a blowhard, as risible as they come, still counts as an intellectual heavy weight to those who don’t know better.

These explanations are helpful, but they don’t quite make sense of the tolerance for, indeed enthusiasm over, the absurdity on the Republican side.   To account for that, we need to acknowledge the presence in our intellectual – and political — culture of ressentiment, a phenomenon identified and discussed by some insightful nineteenth century German and Scandinavian philosophers — Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and Max Scheler, among others.

The idea is not quite what the ordinary word “resentment” suggests.  Ressentiment involves anger, but on the part of persons unaware of, though in the grip of, a sense of their own inferiority.  The phenomenon therefore  involves self-deception, and is always inauthentic – it is not what it seems or purports to be.  Ressentiment is a product of frustration brought on by a felt inability directly to express anger towards those who challenge one’s dignity.  It is indirect and distorted, and therefore inherently pathological.

As cultural contradictions in the Republican fold become increasingly irrepressible, a politics of resentment has taken hold among the thirty percent.  However it is directed not against those who truly do victimize the thirty percent, along with the rest of the ninety-nine, but against those they perceive to comprise America’s intellectual and cultural elites.  What better way to flip the bird at “effete, intellectual snobs,” as Spiro Agnew put it, than to endorse the positions and candidates who have won the hearts and minds of the thirty percent!

If anyone doubts this, reflect on the Gingrich phenomenon.  The man was deemed unethical even by Congressional standards; he was even forced to resign the speakership.  Since then, he has been an overpaid lobbyist who has run up astronomical tabs on cruise lines and at Tiffany’s and other purveyors of baubles to “high net worth” individuals.  He is a philanderer and not a nice one at that.  He is a narcissist.  And he is a servant of the Anti-Christ, having forsaken the old time (Baptist) religion for the Church of Rome.  You’d think all this and more would make him a non-starter in Tea Party and values voter circles.  But No.  He pisses off cultural elites, along with everyone else whose head is screwed on more or less the right way, and that’s good enough for them.

* * *

But the thirty percent are part of the ninety-nine percent, just as are the objects of their (repressed) fury.  Why can’t they all get along?

In principle, they can and they should.  But our politics has been dominated by divisive culture wars for so long that it will take more than just a dawning awareness of growing inequality to overcome the divisions that afflict the ninety-nine percent.  Convictions protected by impenetrable layers of in-your-face stupidity are particularly difficult to dislodge, especially when they serve a pathological function.

OWS consciousness is a step in the right direction, but only a step, and the goal is a long way away.  And so, for now and the foreseeable future there is no choice but to be resigned to a political landscape in which thirty percent of the population drags our politics to retrograde extremes.  Lets not bother about those hapless souls now.   One of William Blake’s proverbs of Hell has it that “if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”  No doubt, but we don’t have time to wait.

For us now the challenge is to move OWS consciousness forward to such an extent that change for the better comes onto the agenda again – not in the meretricious way it did four years ago but genuinely.  If we succeed in that, a by-product, not to be despised, will be a change in the immediate political environment far-reaching enough to compel even Obama and the Democrats to take notice and perhaps even to change the worst of their ways.

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