All the Countries the US is at War with after 9/11

Friday, September 16, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies
September 11 Remembered, US at War Against the World, and the Ongoing Campaign Against Israeli Occupation.

by Phyllis Bennis

 

 

September 11 commemorations were everywhere this past weekend. My own view is that the devastating attacks of September 11 were, along with an enormous human tragedy, a huge crime, a crime against humanity. But they did not threaten our country’s existence, they did not threaten our democracy. It was the acts of September 12, when the Bush administration decided to take the world to war in response, that threatened and continue to threaten our country, our democracy, our security, and the security of much of the rest of the world. 

Many of you probably saw the piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, by one of their top editors, Bill Keller, one of the “liberal hawks,” sort of apologizing for having supported the Iraq War. I sent a letter to the Times (we’ll see if it gets in!) to say that his “hard look” back is appropriate, but not nearly hard enough. He spoke of the “monster argument” being so potent in convincing him to call for war against Iraq, but where was he in the 1970s and 1980s when Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was armed and financed by the United States?

He ignored the 1990s when the people of Iraq faced not only the continuing brutality of that dictatorship but the monster of U.S.-backed economic sanctions that killed over 500,000 children.

But most of all Keller ignored the fact that the “broad consensus” he invokes was not absolute. He names one skeptic who “joined the hawk club” after Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council — but ignores all those skeptics who watched that same speech and weren’t convinced. Some of us published articles with titles like “Powell’s Dubious Case for War” within hours of Powell’s speech on February 5, 2003. He ignores — as his newspaper so often ignored — the voices of consistent skeptics, those of us who opposed the Iraq war as a drive toward power and empire, who cheered the UN when it joined millions of people around the world who said no to war. We opposed the war then, and we were right. We still are.

Now the 9/11 commemorations have come and gone, and our country is still at war.  Sometimes it seems that one way or another the United States is at war against almost the whole world:

• Official (though undeclared) wars in and against Afghanistan and Iraq
• Official (but not really a war "because U.S. troops aren’t the ones at risk") war in Libya
• Unofficial (though sort of acknowledged) war in Pakistan
• Unacknowledged (because murder-by-drone doesn’t count as war) war in Yemen and Somalia
• Indirect and diplomatic war (through $30 billion military aid enabling Israel’s occupation and by promising another UN veto) against Palestine
• Unacknowledged and denied (through still-stealth drone campaigns) war in uncertain venues mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East
• Untitled (though still accurately described as the Global War on Terror) war in the whole world
• Then there’s the not-exactly-military war, like the war against the poor in the United States because of the hundreds of billions, now trillions, of tax dollars wasted on all those other wars.

It’s been a hell of an end to summer. The new census figures out this week are horrifying. Unemployment is staggeringly high, with more than 14 million people officially unemployed — which of course don’t include those who are under-employed, working two or three slave-wage jobs to survive, or who have simply given up looking. The current new jobs program is completely insufficient. What we need is a major federal jobs program, a real WPA, that we know works. Instead, we’re seeing billions diverted to continuing illegal, useless wars.

Poverty has surged to its highest levels in almost two decades, with one out of five children and one out of six people overall living below the poverty level, including lots of families where someone does have what passes for a job these days. And remember that the official “poverty line” is just over $22,000 for a family of four, no matter where they live! Imagine that for a family in New York or Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles…

And those devastating figures are far worse when we think about where our tax money is being spent. If President Obama ended the Iraq war “right away” — just the Iraq war, not even counting Afghanistan — he could bring home almost 50,000 troops and save almost $50 billion dollars. That’s enough for one million new green middle-class jobs — starting with those returning veterans.

If the president ended the war in Afghanistan “right away” — and we’re seeing every day how the U.S. occupation is causing more, not less violence in Afghanistan — he could bring home about 100,000 troops and $122 billion of our tax money. Keeping those troops in Afghanistan costs a million dollars a year each. For every soldier we bring home, saving that million dollars, we could hire that once-soldier-now-civilian plus 19 more people in good green jobs.

That’s what I wrote about in response to the celebrations about August — the first month without U.S. casualties in Iraq — but with too many Iraqi civilians still being killed, and too many billions of our tax dollars still wasted. (I also wrote a short op-ed version that went out on IPS’s OtherWords op-ed syndication service.)

THE UN IS COMING BACK TO TOWNBut the end of summer also means the UN General Assembly is coming back into session in the next couple of weeks. And Palestine is back on the agenda. After years (more than 20 years, actually) of a failed U.S.-controlled “peace process,” the question of Palestine is once again on the global agenda of the United Nations. And once again the United States is isolated with Israel, standing almost alone in the world in opposing a Palestinian initiative for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood that has long been the claimed, but never implemented, goal of U.S. policy. The fight is ostensibly over venue, not substance; the United States, we are told, supports a Palestinian state. But we don’t support them getting it in the UN. We only support it if it is created under our auspices and control. Otherwise we’ll call it “unhelpful.”

The United States has promised to veto a UN membership bid in the Security Council. But the Palestinians may avoid that by heading straight to the General Assembly where there is no veto, but where their state recognition will not include UN membership, though it would include the potentially powerful right to join the International Criminal Court. But there are a lot of negatives as well, primarily having to do with loss of representation at the UN for Palestinian refugees and support for their right of return, and many Palestinians are against this move. Developments are very uncertain, no one is sure yet what the Palestinian diplomats actually intend to do. What is clear is that we should not allow the United States to be the ones to say “no” to the Palestinian effort.

AND BACK IN THE REGION…Lots of other Middle East news. I had a letter published in the Washington Post targeting U.S.-NATO hypocrisy in Libya and objecting to their misrepresentation of the UN resolution supposedly justifying the Western military intervention there. With regional developments changing so fast, at the moment changing especially swiftly in terms of Israel’s increasing isolation and changing relationships with its one-time allies in the region, I discussed the role of Egypt’s changes in determining Israeli actions in Gaza, with The Real News Network editor Paul Jay. (This video, along with some great footage of the protests in Israel, ends rather abruptly when the east coast earthquake interrupted our interview… it’s pretty funny.)

And I collaborated with my friend Richard Falk, the great international law scholar and the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, on an analysis of the UN’s latest report on last year’s Israel attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla — in which they managed to claim Israel’s blockade of Gaza is somehow legal.

And last, as summer wanes, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is holding our annual national conference, celebrating ten years of work changing discourse and challenging U.S. policy towards Palestine and Israel, and looking forward to a (hopefully) short time left before we can fold up shop and take a vacation, because we’ve succeeded.

Obama's Economic Policies: One Betrayal Too Many

Thursday, September 15, 2011 by TruthDig.com

by Robert Scheer

 

 

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around. 

He blindly followed President Bush’s would-be remedy of throwing money at the banks and getting nothing in return for beleaguered homeowners. Sadly, Obama has proved to be nothing more than a Bill Clinton clone triangulating with the Wall Street lobbyists at the expense of ordinary folks.

That fatal arc of betrayal was captured by a headline in Tuesday’s New York Times: 

“Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade.’ ” The Census Bureau reported that there are now 46.2 million Americans living below the official poverty line—the highest number in the 52 years since that statistic was first measured—and median household income has fallen back to the 1996 level. As Harvard economist Lawrence Katz summarized this dreary news: “This is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The late 1990s, it should be noted, is when President Clinton, working with Phil Gramm, the Republican head of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed through two critical pieces of legislation ending effective regulation of the banks. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act smashed the wall between high-flying Wall Street investment firms and the once staid commercial banks entrusted with the deposits and mortgages of America’s innocent souls. The next year Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, banning any effective regulation of the rapidly expanded trade in the collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that have since haunted the world’s economy.

The collapse of those toxic securities led to the housing crisis and resulted in 15.1 percent of Americans now living in poverty, the same level as when Bill Clinton took office. But thanks to another one of Clinton’s grand triangulation strategies, the one he called “welfare reform,” the impoverished are now denied the safety net that existed before the Clinton presidency. Although 22 percent of U.S. children are now below the poverty line, the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program no longer exists.

Some of us who voted for Obama thought he was no Clinton, but he was and is, as was demonstrated in his first days in office when he appointed two key veterans of the Clinton Treasury Department, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, to head up the Obama economic team. Geithner, as treasury secretary, is the point man for the administration’s push to pass the so-called American Jobs Act, which the president hyped in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress and the nation. It was pure Clinton bull: I feel your pain while I help the superrich pick your pocket. 

Space permits only one example, that of General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, whom Obama selected to head his “Jobs Council of leaders from different industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to help companies grow and create jobs.” Was that some cruel joke? GE under Immelt has grown and created jobs, but they are abroad rather than in our own troubled country. As a result, by the end of last year, only 134,000 of GE’s workforce of 304,000 were based in the United States; the remainder—and 82 percent of the company’s profit—were sheltered abroad.

Ironically, GE’s ability to avoid taxes was restricted by President Ronald Reagan, who had once been a spokesman for GE but was outraged by the company’s use of tax loopholes. It remained for President Clinton to offer GE some new tax breaks. As a result of being able to shelter profit abroad last year, GE had profits of $14.2 billion but claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Immelt was the elephant in the room when Obama said in his speech last week:

“Our tax code should not give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists. It should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs right here in the United States of America.”

It has been a long time since GE was creating jobs here during its “better light bulb” days, and the last spurt of GE participation in the U.S. economy came through its unit GE Capital, which specialized in toxic mortgage lending that once produced more than half of the company’s profits but ultimately led to a taxpayer bailout. 

Someone who knows a great deal about that sort of scam is Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate and Harvard law professor pushed out of Obama’s inner circle. In launching her campaign for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts this week, Warren posted a video that clearly defined the enemy:

“Washington is rigged for big corporations. A big company, like GE, pays nothing in taxes, and we’re asking college students to take on even more debt to get an education?”

Obama in appointing Immelt last January praised him as a business leader who “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.” Apparently, what Immelt understands is that what it takes to satisfy corporate interests instead of national needs is conning a president into looking the other way while you send jobs abroad.

Recent Blackout Highlights Nation’s Rickety Power Grid

Friday, September 16, 2011 by ProPublica

by Ariel Wittenberg, ProPublica 

 

Experts say the cascading blackout that put millions of Westerners in the dark last week was no surprise: Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade.

"This is just evidence that we need a smarter, better, more secure system," said Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, who has analyzed federal data on the reliability of the nation's electric grid.

Blackouts disrupt power to at least a third of U.S. homes each year, and studies show the number of outages is rising.


The grid's shortcomings have been well-documented, but efforts to modernize it haven't kept up with demand. Many electrical transmission lines are outdated, and parts of the grid date back to the time of Thomas Edison.

The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's grid, acknowledged increasing problems with the system.

In a July interview with ProPublica, FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said that while the electric grid is reliable, it is degrading. "It's not getting better," he said. "It's getting worse."

Many experts say smart-grid technology would help. Such a system would be able to intelligently respond to sudden peaks or drops in demand and energy supply.

Last week, for example, a mishap involving a single worker doing repairs on a power station near Yuma, Ariz., led to rolling blackouts over parts of Arizona, Southern California and Northern Mexico. The short circuit caused San Diego County's power-supply system to completely shut down after it was required to take on the demand of those affected in Arizona and buckled under the extra load.

Had a smart grid been in place, it might have helped isolate the outage and prevent it from spreading. By monitoring activity on transmission lines in real time, a smart grid also can help pinpoint a problem and redirect power accordingly.

The Obama administration has allocated $11 billion in stimulus funding toward the electric grid. Of that, $4.4 billion was dedicated directly to building a smart grid. But the money will take years working its way through the bureaucratic pipeline; so far, only $1.4 billion has been spent.

Experts also say smart grids are only part of the solution, and that transmission lines also have to be built.

"These are essential facilities. They are like highways, they are like airports — everyone relies on them," former FERC Chairman Jim Hoecker said.

But transmission lines cost money, and utilities say investing too much more in infrastructure will cost consumers. According to David Owens, executive vice president for business operations at Edison Electric Institute, transmission costs make up 35 percent to 40 percent of a typical homeowner's energy bill. Shareholder-owned utilities will invest $11.2 billion in 2011 -- almost twice as much as in 2004. The increase pushes the envelope on what customers are willing to pay, Owens said.

Wellinghoff, FERC's current chairman, said the commission also needs broader authority to oversee transmission lines. That would require congressional approval.

One project that might benefit from broader FERC power is the Susquehanna-Roseland power line. The line, which would run from Pennsylvania to Northern New Jersey, has been delayed for two years because a four-mile stretch passes through a national park. Although the line would follow the same path as a pre-existing line, the National Park Service has blocked construction to analyze the effect of the line on the environment. Wellinghoff said FERC's engineers had already done an environmental review.

Absent new transmission lines and a smart grid, large blackouts could become more common.

Last week's massive outage echoed a blackout eight years ago. In 2003, a power surge on a transmission line that circles Lake Erie left dozens of cities in the East and Canada without power, shutting down 21 power plants in just three minutes.

After the power came back on, politicians, regulators and industry officials all pledged to push for a more reliable, modern grid.

But the promises did not translate into action.

"We have overharvested the infrastructure," Amin said. "We aren't milking the cow dry; we already have milked the cow dry. It has gotten to the point where there are many choke points. We cannot just sit and watch the load increase."

++++

Friday, September 16, 2011 by RT America
Follow the Crumbling Road: US Infrastructure Is Falling Apart

America is literally falling apart. From natural disasters, to massive power blackouts, to bridge collapses, U.S. infrastructure has shown that it is not up to standards. American investment in infrastructure is not keeping up with the rest of the world and could prove to be an economy killer.

The Not-So-Super Committee

Those Automatic Defense Cuts Aren't Going to Happen

by WINSLOW T. WHEELER

 

Touted as the “Super Committee” by pundits, the Joint Deficit Reduction Committee-created by the August 2 Debt Deal between President Barack Obama and the congressional Republicans-has turned out to be not so super.  The real super committees of Congress, the appropriations committees, are reasserting their control, and they are doing it with the defense budget, keeping it quite flush with money and unraveling a second round of debt reduction. 

Painful as it is to remember, the August Debt Deal-which got the country past the crisis provoked by the Republican’s refusal to allow an increase in the debt ceiling-requires the so-called Super Committee to find at least $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over the next ten years.  If the 12 congressional Republicans and Democrats on the committee fail to agree on those cuts, automatic reductions are supposed to take place: including $492 billion in the defense budget and over $400 billion elsewhere, according to the Congressional Budget Office (at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=124140).  Either, the Super Committee will cut a deal, or the defense budget gets whacked. 

It is not going to happen that way.  

First, the Super Committee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement. 

Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur.  That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen.  While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) think that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday,” and any other Apocalyptic term you can think of.  In short, the Debt Deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.  

In the 31 years I worked on Capitol Hill, I came to know several others with as much, or more, experience as I in understanding how the place operates.  Not one of the Hill veterans I have heard from believes the Debt Deal and the Super Committee are headed for anything but failure.  The Deal and the Committee were designed only to kick the can down the road to get us past last summer’s crisis-with the inevitable result of provoking others. 

The meetings held thus far by the Super Committee have made obvious its inevitable breakdown.  Hearing this week with from the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf (who conducted himself with professionalism and grace), the congressional members demonstrated precisely why the vast majority of Americans hold them in contempt.    

The committee started out by insisting that it hear not from Elmendorf but from itself.  The national audience was dragged through more than an hour of supremely self-involved Republicans and Democrats explain how the other side caused everything and their own prescriptions were the only pill to take.  When Elmendorf tried to provide a framework for addressing the issues, they simply repeated themselves. 

Consisting mostly of second stringers on budget issues and leadership errand boys (and a female) from their party caucuses, that bunch will find a $1.2 trillion budget solution sometime after pigs fly and shrimps whistle.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the real budget action on Capitol Hill was occurring.  The Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee met on Tuesday, in private, to decide on the 2012 Department of Defense Appropriations bill. It funds most, but not all, of the Pentagon’s budget.  The Subcommittee took cognizance of one of the provisions of the Debt Deal, but not any parts that had to do with the Supercommittee and the automatic cuts. 

In addition to the Super Committee and the trigger mechanism, the Debt Deal imposed-without any further palaver required-an initial phase of reductions on appropriations for the next ten years totaling over $900 billion.  While the precise budget obligation on the Pentagon in this first phase has not been entirely clear, most are now interpreting it to mean a $350 billion reduction.  In effect, that means that the Pentagon budget would be frozen at its current, fiscal year 2011 level-precisely the level set by the Appropriations Committee’s bill. 

It safely can be predicted this will be the level of Pentagon spending the entire Congress endorses for 20012, after theatrical grumbling by some Republicans about the bill’s spending being $26 billion less than Obama’s now meaningless budget request from last February.    

Even at the 2011 level, the bill is extremely generous.  The amount-about $529 billion after separate Military Construction and some other pieces are added-will be almost as much “base” spending that the Pentagon has seen in any single year for decades.  If you add the separate funding for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere ($118 billion), the amount is quite close to the Pentagon’s highest ever level since the end of World War Two-and it is well above previous secondary peaks attained in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and Ronald Reagan’s fleeting zenith in 1985. 

That “frozen” 2011 level will be also more than twice the defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Somalia-combined.  It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. 
 
While the new DOD appropriations bill was described by its architect, Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) as “not an easy allocation to meet” (committee press release is at http://appropriations.senate.gov/news.cfm?method=news.view&id=33ad4f56-b0fc-45f8-8c5b-162b5eab4791), it is actually a defense budget quite flush with money.

Moreover, the bill has several gimmicks to permit higher spending than is apparent.  It includes a clumsy ploy of moving $6.5 billion out of the capped part of the Pentagon budget that the Debt Deal limited and adding the money back into the separate (un-capped) funding for the war in Afghanistan.  (This, of course, permitted the “base” bill to contain $6.5 billion more than otherwise.)   Also, as the details trickle out next week, we will find the usual ruses, including cuts for “revised economic assumptions,” “unobligated balances” and other phony games to pretend the Committee is reducing money (rather than deferring it) and making good government decisions (rather than taking capricious cuts in military readiness while protecting procurement-and contractors). (For a previous discussion of some of these tricks, see http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=4673.) 

The bill is not a tough minded but moderate action to impose restraint on the Pentagon; it is an effort to protect Pentagon spending as much as possible.  With Robert Gates taking the lead and Leon Panetta bobble-heading in agreement, the Pentagon has resolved itself to that first phase of $350 billion in cuts over ten years.  They are not happy about it, but they will live with it in order to fend off further reductions.  The Senate Appropriations Committee leadership is in deep sympathy with that sentiment.  

Filled with bunkum to seem to be cutting at least moderately but actually rescuing unaffordable, underperforming flotsam like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee is a rear guard budget protection action.  

The gambit will be successful.  The defenders of big defense spending have been extremely vocal. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Buck McKeon (R-CA), is quoted almost every day about the cataclysm to occur if the defense budget is cut at all.  This kind of hysteria makes the assertions of Senator John Kyl (R-CO) almost seem to be the middle ground: he threatened to quit the Supercommittee if the DOD cuts go beyond the initial $350 billion. The response from Democrats and even Republicans who have previously favored more meaningful Pentagon cuts has sealed the deal: they have been completely silent. 

All that remains to be done is to let the Supercommittee proceed on its clear path to failure.  That will trigger the dreaded automatic cuts, but only nominally.  As designed, those cuts would not occur until 2013.  The big defense spender types will have all of 2012 to trash any opponents who dare to speak in favor of allowing them.  They will use their traditional slander that to be against bloat in the defense budget is to be “anti-defense.”  It has always worked in the past, especially with Democrats who want to posture themselves as moderate, such as candidate Obama. 

The Debt Deal will be rewritten; the defense budget will be “saved,” and the next budget crisis will be made both inevitable and worse. We have a lot more dysfunction in Congress and the White House yet to observe.

Goodbye Obama

So Long Labor and Greens!

by GEORGE OCHENSKI

 

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out how President Obama is going to win re-election when his administration continues to abandon its base in favor of traditional Republican supporters. Nothing illustrates this better than two recent incidents.

OnThursday, Aug. 25, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters labor is planning to scale back involvement in the Democratic Party. Then the State Department, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave a green light to construction of 1,700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline that will carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands across Montana, to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, the latter decision comes as hundreds of America’s top environmentalists are being arrested for protesting to stop that pipeline.

The reasons for the two actions are different, but the effect—losing long-time allies–is the same.

As Politico’s Byron Tau reported, Trumka made his comments during a breakfast speech sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. They must have Obama’s campaign staff sweating bullets. “We’re going to use a lot of our money to build structures that work for working people,” Trumka told reporters. “You’re going to see us give less money to build structures for others, and more of our money will be used to build our own structure.”

What Trumka was referring to is the union’s plan to launch a so-called Super PAC, now authorized by the Supreme Court’s decision that allows entities such as corporations and unions, among others, to spend unlimited funds on campaigns. The reason, he said, is that “the day after Election Day,” in 2008, “we were no stronger than we were the day before.” Trumka said some of the member unions intended to skip the 2012 Democratic Party convention altogether.

Big Labor’s gripes with Obama primarily focus on free-trade agreements that ship jobs overseas to cheap labor while America’s workers are abandoned. Trumka told reporters that Obama “started playing on the Republican ground,” adding: “As we approach this Labor Day, our working-class people are looking for three things: jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Yet, even as the AFL-CIO filled the air with ominous threats to Democrats and Obama, Obama’s administration deemed it prudent to not just abandon environmentalists, but to do so with a slap in the face.

So far, more than 300 people have been arrested in front of the White House in what is easily the longest and largest environmental protest in recent times. Among those were a number of Montanans, including Livingston’s Margot Kidder, who is best known for playing Lois Lane in the Superman movies and who in real life is a super advocate for women and the environment.

The concerns of the pipeline protestors are not theoretical. The State Department’s conclusion in its final Environmental Impact Statement is that the pipeline would have “no significant impact on the environment.” Both the Environmental Protection Agency and some of the nation’s leading environmental scientists disagree.

The EPA estimates that extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands creates 80 percent more carbon emissions that extracting and refining oil from more traditional sources. Add to that the destruction of Alberta’s boreal forests, the ongoing pollution of major rivers like the Athabasca and the enormous toxic storage ponds, and giving the Keystone XL pipeline the green light to enable and enhance tar sands extraction is anything but environmentally benign.

NASA’s lead climatologist, speaking to the National Press Club recently, laid it out rather bluntly: “We have a planetary emergency,” Dr. James Hansen said, stressing that if we continued to burn oil at our current rate, we would lose 20 to 40 percent of all species on the planet within the century, see an increase in disastrous weather events and “ruin the future for our children.” Following his remarks, Hansen accompanied 60 religious leader to protest in front of the White House and joined the ranks of 140 more people arrested Aug. 29 for trying to stop the pipeline.

Adding insult to injury, Paul Elliot, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager for her presidential bid, is now a lobbyist for the Keystone XL pipeline. And, according to emails released by WikiLeaks, the State Department’s former energy envoy, David Goldwyn, “alleviated” the concerns of Canadians about getting approval for the pipeline and went further by coaching them to improve their “oil sands messaging” by “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories” on the issue. In a disgusting demonstration of the inbred corruption that plagues D.C.–and which Obama pledged to stop—Goldwyn left the State Department and went to work for a Washington lobbying firm, recently testifying in favor of the pipeline before a Congressional committee.

One might wonder how the State Department could claim to be objective in its review of the pipeline, given the ongoing political manipulation to push the project through.

The Koch Brothers, who already import a quarter million barrels of tar sands oil per day, and have funded endless efforts to deny global warming, are pushing approval of the pipeline—which only makes the actions of the Obama administration more puzzling. A New Yorker investigative report last year said the Koch Brothers were “waging war on Obama.” They stand to profit immensely should the pipeline be built.

While telling Americans he would change the way business is done in the White House, Obama has continued the oil-baron, big-corporate policies of the last President Bush. If it’s goodbye to labor and goodbye to greens, come the 2012 elections, it’ll be goodbye to Obama.

The FBI and the Myth of Fingerprints

A "100 Per Cent Certainty"

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited in recent years as the FBI’s forensic lab. In 1997 the Bureau’s inspector general of the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were "serious and credible allegations of incompetence" and perjured courtroom testimony.

CounterPunch’s view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. For example, for years many people went to prison on the basis of the claims of a North Carolina anthropologist, Louise Robbins. She helped send people to prison or to Death Row with her self-proclaimed power to identify criminals through shoe prints. As an excellent recent Chicago Tribune series on forensic humbug recalled, on occasion she even said she could use the method to determine a person’s height, sex and race. Robbins died in 1987, her memory compromised by the conclusion of many Appeals Courts that her methodology was bosh. There have been similarly hollow claims for lip prints and ear prints, all of (added "of") them invoked by their supporters as "100 per cent reliable" and believed by juries too easily impressed by passionate invocations to 100 per cent reliable scientific data.

Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability–at least until the arrival of DNA matching–has been the fingerprint.

Fingerprints entered the arsenal of police and prosecutors in the late nineteenth century, touted as "scientific" in the manner of other fashionable methods of that time in the identification of supposed criminals, such as phrenology. A prime salesman was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and a founding huckster for the bogus "science " of eugenics. Actually fingerprints, at least in modern times, found their original use in the efforts of a British colonial administrator to intimidate his Indian laborers (whose faces he could not distinguish) from turning up more than once to get paid. He’d make a great show of scrutinizing the fingerprints he insisted they daub on his ledger book. Then, as now, the use of the so-called "unique fingerprint" has been histrionic , not scientific. In 1995, so the Chicago Tribune series discovered, " one of the only independent proficiency tests of fingerprint examiners in U.S. crime labs found that nearly a quarter reported false positives, meaning they declared prints identical even though they were not–the sort of mistakes that can lead to wrongful convictions or arrests."

Decade after decade people have been sent to prison for years or dispatched to the death cell, solely on the basis of a single, even a partial print. So great is the resonance of the phrase "a perfect match" that defense lawyers throw in the towel, as judge and jury listen to the assured conclusions of the FBI’s analysts who virtually monopolize the fingerprint industry in the U.S.A. Overseas, in London’s Scotland Yard for example, the same mesmerizing "certainty" held sway, and still does. In the U.S.A., part of the mystique stems from the "one discrepancy rule" which has supposedly governed the FBI’s fingerprint analysis. The rule says that identifications are subject to a standard of "100 per cent certainty" where a single difference in appearance is supposed to preclude identification.

The 1997 lab scandals threw a shadow over the FBI’s forensic procedures as a whole and the criminal defense bar began to raise protests against prosecutorial use of latent fingerprint identification evidence, as produced by FBI procedures. In 2002 Judge Louis Pollak, in a case in Pennsylvania, initially ruled that the FBI’s fingerprint matching criteria fell below new standards of forensic reliability (the Daubert standards) stipulated by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ultimately he was persuaded that the FBI’s fingerprint lab had never made a mistake. In 2004, in U.S. v. Mitchell, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld these same procedures.

Now at last, in 2006, the FBI’s current inspector general, Glenn Fine, has grudgingly administered what should properly be regarded as the deathblow to fingerprint evidence as used by the FBI and indeed by law enforcement generally.

The case reviewed by Inspector General Fine, at the request of U.S. Rep John Conyers and U.S. Senator Russell Feingold, concerns the false arrest by the FBI of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Beaverton, Oregon.

On March 11, 2004, several bombs exploded in Madrid’s subway system with 191 killed and 1,460 injured. Shortly thereafter the Spanish police discovered a blue plastic bag filled with detonators in a van parked near the Acala de Heres train station in Madrid, whence all of the trains involved in the bombing had originated on the fatal day.

The Spanish police were able to lift a number of latent prints off the bag. On March 17 they transmitted digital images of these fingerprints to the FBI’s crime lab in Virginia. The lab ran the images through its prized IAFIS, otherwise known as the integrated, automated, fingerprint identification system, containing a database of some 20 million fingerprints.

The IAFIS computer spat out twenty "candidate prints", with the warning that these 20 candidates were "close non-match". Then the FBI examiners went to work with their magnifying glasses, assessing ridges and forks between the sample of 20 and the images from Spain. In a trice the doubts of the IAFIS computer were thrust aside, and senior fingerprint examiner Terry Green determined that he had found "a 100 per cent match" with one of the Spanish prints of the fourth-ranked print in the IAFIS batch of 20 close non-matches. Green said this fourth ranked print came from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield’s prints were in the FBI’s master file, not because he had been arrested or charged with any crime, but because he was a former U.S. Army lieutenant.

Green submitted his conclusions to two other FBI examiners who duly confirmed his conclusions. But as the inspector general later noted, these examiners were not directed to inspect a set of prints without knowing that a match had already asserted by one of their colleagues. They were simple given the pair of supposedly matched prints and asked to confirm the finding. (These two examiners later refused to talk to the FBI’s inspector general.)

The FBI lost no time in alerting the U.S. Prosecutor’s office in Portland, which began surveillance of Mayfield with a request to the secret FISA court which issued a warrant for Mayfield’s phone to be tapped on the grounds, laid out in the Patriot Act, that he was a terrorist, and therefore by definition a foreign agent.

Surreptitious tapping and surveillance of Mayfield began. On April 2, 2004, the FBI sent a letter to the Spanish police informing them that they had a big break in the case, with a positive identification of the print on the bag of detonators.

Ten days later the forensic science division of the Spanish national police sent the FBI its own analysis. It held that the purported match of Mayfield’s print was "conclusively negative". (The inspector general refers to this as the "negativo Report".)

The next day, April 14, the U.S. Prosecutor in Portland became aware of the fact that the Spanish authorities were vigorously disputing the match with Mayfield’s left forefinger. But by now the Prosecutor and his team were scenting blood. Through covert surveillance they had learned that Mayfield was married to an Egyptian woman, had recently converted to Islam, was a regular attendee at the Bailal mosque in Portland, and had as one of his clients in a child custody dispute an American Muslim called Jeffrey Battle. Battle, a black man, had just been convicted of trying to go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban.

Armed, so they thought, with this arsenal of compromising detail, the U.S. Prosecutor and the FBI had no patience with the pettifogging negativism of the Spanish police. So confident were the Americans of the guilt of their prey that they never went back to take another look at the supposedly matching prints. Instead, on April 21, they flew a member of the FBI’s latent print unit to Spain for on-the-spot refutation of the impertinent Madrid constabulary.

The Inspector General’s report makes it clear that the FBI man returned from Spain with a false account of his reception, alleging that the Spanish fingerprint team had bowed to his superior analytic skills. The head of the Spanish team, Pedro Luis Melida-Weda, insists that his team remained entirely unconvinced. "At no time did we give our approval. We refused to validate the FBI’s conclusions. We kept working on the identification."

By now either the U.S. Attorney’s office or, more likely, the FBI was leaking to the press news of the pursuit of a U.S. suspect in the Madrid bombing. But they knew that the actual evidence they had on Mayfield was virtually non-existent, aside from the fingerprint. On May 6, the U.S. Prosecutor in Portland told U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones that the Spanish police had ultimately accepted the FBI’s match, that Mayfield, alerted by the stories in the press about an unnamed suspect, might start destroying evidence, and that, therefore, they wanted to seize Mayfield, using the now favored charge du jour of the war on terror, claiming him to be a "material witness". Judge Jones okayed an arrest warrant.

Mayfield had no idea that the FBI had been tapping his phones and secretly rummaging through his office. The first time he became aware that he was a citizen under suspicion was on the afternoon of May 6. On that day eight FBI agents showed up at his law office, seized him, cuffed his hands behind his back, ridiculed his protestations. As they approached the door, Mayfield implored them to take the handcuffs off, saying he didn’t want his clients or staff to see him in this condition. The FBI agents said derisively, "Don’t worry about it. The media is right behind us."

Mayfield ended up with two federal public defenders, Steven Wax and Christopher Schatz. Like many such, these two were dedicated to their interest of their client, tireless and resourceful. Their first concern was to get Mayfield out on the Multnomah federal detention center in downtown Portland. Though jailed under an alias chosen for him by the U.S. Prosecutor, the feds had immediately leaked this alias–Randy Barker–to The Oregonian newspaper, and a guard at the jail had promptly roughed up Mayfield.

The two public defenders went before Judge Jones and asked that as a material witness he be kept under house arrest, there being scant apparent evidence against him. Judge Jones finally compelled the U.S. Prosecutor to say what evidence he had against Mayfield. A fingerprint, said the U.S. Prosecutor, withholding from the court the fact that this fingerprint was highly controversial and had been explicitly disqualified by the Spanish police.

The federal defenders questioned the imprisonment of their client, faced penalties of the utmost gravity, on the basis of a fingerprint. Judge Jones allowed as how he had sent people to prison for life on the basis of a single fingerprint. Mayfield’s attorneys asked to see a copy of the allegedly matched fingerprints and have them evaluated by their own expert witness. Knowing he was on thin ice the U.S. Prosecutor refused, claiming it was an issue of national security. Under pressure from Judge Jones, himself pressured by the assiduous federal defenders, the U.S. Prosecutor finally agreed he would give the prints to an independent evaluator selected by Judge Jones.

The prints were given to Kenneth R. Moses of San Francisco, an SFPD veteran who runs a company called Forensic Identification Services which, among other things, proclaims its skills in "computer enhancement of fingerprints". It was "quite difficult", Moses said, because of "blurring and some blotting out", but yes, the FBI had it right, and there was "100 per cent certainty" that one of the prints on the blue bag in Madrid derived from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield.

Moses transmitted this confident opinion by phone to Judge Jones on the morning of May 19. Immediately following Moses’ assertion, the U.S. attorney stepped forward to confide to Judge Jones dismaying news from Madrid from the Spanish police that very morning. The news "cast some doubt on the identification". This information, he added, "was classified or potentially classified".

The prosecutors then huddled with the judge in his chambers. After 20 minutes, Judge Jones stormed back out and announced that the prosecutors needed to tell the defense lawyers what they had just told him. The prosecutor duly informed the courtroom that the Spanish police had identified the fingerprint as belonging to the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian national living in Spain. Daoud was under arrest as a suspect in the bombing. Judge Jones ordered Mayfield to be freed. The U.S. prosecutor said he should be placed under electronic monitoring, a request which the judge turned down.
Four days later, on May 24, the warrant for his detention was dismissed.

The FBI sent two of their senor fingerprint analysts to Spain on a mission to salvage the Bureau from humiliation. The two analysts did their best, returning with the claim that the fingerprint sent to the FBI by the Spanish police was of "no value for identification purposes", a claim which the inspector general later shot down by pointing that only a few weeks thereafter the FBI’s latent fingerprint unit concurred with the Spanish national police lab’s determination that the print on the bag matched the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud.

The FBI lab fought an increasingly desperate rearguard battle, eventually claiming that it had been the victim of an excessive reliance on technology. The inspector general points out that the only investigator in the FBI’s lab to emerge with any credit is in fact the IAFIS computer that had stated clearly, "close, no match".

The inspector general writes the bottom line on the "science" of fingerprint matching He gets the FBI’s top examiner to admit that if Mayfield had "been like the Maytag repair man" and not a Muslim convert married to an Egyptian, "the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism."

And Daoud’s fingerprint match? We don’t know, but if he was convicted on the basis of fingerprints alone, we would say there is grounds for an appeal.

'Shy' children at risk of being diagnosed with mental disorder

(Good fucking grief! The psychiatric industry has gone nuts itself. They are out of their minds turning every little childhood issue or dilemma into a psychiatric disorder. OK, see, when people think I go off on rants too much, this is one of the reasons why. This is insane!--jef)

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Children who are merely shy or sad are at risk of being diagnosed with mental disorders and given powerful drugs, experts warn.

By Martin Beckford, Health Correspondent

14 Sep 2011

Psychologists say that new guidelines being developed in America will lead more young people seeing their common problems regarded as illnesses that must be treated, rather than just being given support.

They fear that pupils who are quiet at school could be diagnosed with “social anxiety disorder” while those who become withdrawn after suffering a bereavement are classified as having a “depressive disorder”.

Children who just talk back to adults or lose their temper regularly could be diagnosed with “oppositional defiant disorder”.

As a result, those found to have these increasingly broad mental disorders could be prescribed powerful medication such as Prozac or Ritalin to control or alter their behaviour.

Now the pressure is increasing for a national review of the use of such drugs on schoolchildren as well as more research into their long-term effects, following a vote at the TUC Congress on Wednesday.

Kate Fallon, general secretary of the Association of Educational Psychologists, told delegates: “Behaviours develop over a long period of time, often with a range of complex causes; we can’t ‘cure’ the behaviours we don’t like with a quick fix of medicine. They usually require careful management by all the adults around the child.

“In 2013 we’re expecting new criteria for the definition of mental illness to be adopted here in the UK. These criteria will lead to many more children being diagnosed as mentally ill, based on reports of their behaviours.

“A shy child could be diagnosed with social anxiety; a sad or temporarily withdrawn child could be diagnosed with depression.

“These are conditions which are also likely to be treated with medication – and under these circumstances, Congress, we will be putting potent drugs into children with little or no understanding of what it will lead to.

“In a society that wants quick results using drugs to improve behaviour is very tempting. But there can be other ways of improving children’s behaviour which typically involve time and energy from people.”

Research has found that children under the age of six are being prescribed the drug Ritalin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, prompting calls for the Department of Health to investigate the scale of the problem and the potential long-term damage it may be causing.
Recent figures show 650,000 children aged between eight and 13 are on the pscyhotropic drug, up from just 9,000 two decades ago, while others are taking Prozac for depression or anxiety.

Fears are growing that the number of children diagnosed with mental disorders and prescribed drugs will increase still further after 2013, when a new “bible” of the psychiatric profession is published.

Known as DSM-5, the book widens the diagnostic criteria for many supposed conditions including social anxiety disorder, better known as shyness, and will likely be adopted by the health authorities in Britain after appearing first in the US.

The proposed new definition for social anxiety disorder states that it is marked by “fear or anxiety about one or more social situations in which the person is exposed to possible scrutiny by others. Examples include social interactions (e.g., having a conversation), being observed (e.g., eating or drinking), or performing in front of others (e.g., giving a speech)”.

In children this fear could be expressed by “crying, tantrums, freezing, clinging, shrinking or refusal to speak in social situations”.

Young people will be deemed as having oppositional defiant disorder if they display symptoms including losing their temper, arguing with adults, deliberately annoying people or being “spiteful or vindictive at least twice within the past six months” to people other than their brothers or sisters.

The British Psychological Society has also raised concerns about the proposed revisions to the DSM.

It does not dispute that some children have emotional and behavioural problems but says that patients and the public are “negatively affected” by the continued “medicalisation” of natural and normal responses to their experiences, and that classifying such problems as “illnesses” ignores their wider causes.

Prof Peter Kinderman, chairman of the society’s Division of Clinical Psychology, said: “We’re not certain that a diagnosis and a medical response is the best way to help these kids.
“Absolutely understand and help, not necessarily diagnose and treat.”

FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

• By Spencer Ackerman
• September 14, 2011  | WIRED

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

The FBI’s Islam Training Documents

Militancy Considerations 

Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law 

Doctrinal Basis for Jihad 

Chart: Violence and Adherence to the Torah, Bible and Koran

These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.

“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”

The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.

Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.

Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny.

They certainly aren’t the first time the FBI has portrayed Muslims in a negative light during Bureau training sessions. As Danger Room reported in July, the FBI’s Training Division has included anti-Islam books, and materials that claim Islam “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” When Danger Room confronted the FBI with that material, an official statement issued to us claimed, “The presentation in question was a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced.”

But these documents aren’t relics from an earlier era. One of these briefings, titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law,” took place on March 21.

The Islam briefings are elective, not mandatory. “A disclaimer accompanied the presentation stating that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government,” FBI spokesman Christopher Allen tells Danger Room.

“The training materials in question were delivered as Stage Two training to counterterrorism-designated agents,” Allen adds. “This training was largely derived from a variety of open source publications and includes the opinion of the analyst that developed the lesson block.”

Not all counterterrorism veterans consider the briefings so benign. “Teaching counterterrorism operatives about obscure aspects of Islam,” says Robert McFadden, who recently retired as one of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service’s al-Qaida-hunters, “without context, without objectivity, and without covering other non-religious drivers of dangerous behavior is no way to stop actual terrorists.”

Still, at Quantico, the alleged connection between Islam and violence isn’t just stipulated. It’s literally graphed.

An FBI presentation titled “Militancy Considerations” measures the relationship between piety and violence among the texts of the three Abrahamic faiths. As time goes on, the followers of the Torah and the Bible move from “violent” to “non-violent.” Not so for devotees of the Koran, whose “moderating process has not happened.” The line representing violent behavior from devout Muslims flatlines and continues outward, from 610 A.D. to 2010. In other words, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.

Training at Quantico isn’t designed for intellectual bull sessions or abstract theory, according to FBI veterans. The FBI conducts its training so that both seasoned agents and new recruits can sharpen their investigative skills.

In this case, the FBI’s Allen says, the counterterrorism agents who received these briefings have “spent two to three years on the job.” The briefings are written accordingly. The stated purpose of one, about allegedly religious-sanctioned lying, is to “identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam and their impacts on Law Enforcement.” Not “terrorism.” Not even “Islamist extremism.” Islam.

According to this FBI training, religious Muslims have been and always will be agents of aggression.

What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include “immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.

On Tuesday, the leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), warned that law enforcement lacks “meaningful standards” to prevent anti-Islam material from seeping into counterterrorism training. Some FBI veterans suspect the increased pressure on American Muslims has a lot to do with the kind of training that Quantico offers.

“Seeing the materials FBI agents are being trained with certainly helps explain why we’ve seen so many inappropriate FBI surveillance operations broadly targeting the Muslim-American community, from infiltrating mosques with agents provocateur to racial- and ethnic-mapping programs,” Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Danger Room after being shown the documents. ”Biased police training can only result in biased policing.” (Full disclosure: This reporter’s wife works for the ACLU.)

The chief of the Training Division, Assistant FBI Director Thomas Browne, came into his current job in January. His official biography lists no terrorism expertise beyond serving as a coordinator for a bureau “Domestic Terrorism Program” in Tennessee sometime in the last decade.

It is unclear what vetting process the FBI used to approve these briefings; if any Muslim scholars contributed to them; and what criteria Quantico uses to determine Islamic expertise. “The development of effective training is a constantly evolving process,” says FBI spokesman Allen. “Sometimes the training is adapted for long-term use. This particular training segment was delivered a single time and not used since.”

Several of these briefings were the work of a single author: an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop. In 2006, before he joined the Bureau, he gave an interview to the website WorldNetDaily, and discussed some of the themes that made it into his briefings, years later. The Prophet “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism,” Gawthrop told the website, which would later distinguish itself as a leader of the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory that denies President Obama’s American citizenship.

At the time, Gawthrop’s major suggestion for waging the war on terrorism was to attack what he called “soft spots” in Islamic faith that might “induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target.” That is, to discredit Islam itself and cause Muslims to abandon their religion. “Critical vulnerabilities of the Koran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal,” he said. Alas, he lamented, he faced the bureaucratic obstacle of official Washington’s “political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the religion of Islam,” according to the website.


Back then, however, Gawthrop didn’t work for the FBI. He had recently stepped down from a position with the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity. That agency came under withering criticism during the Bush administration for keeping a database about threats to military bases that included reports on peaceful antiwar protesters and dovish Church groups. It is unclear how Gawthrop came to work for the FBI.

Through an intermediary, Gawthrop told Danger Room that he was unavailable for comment before our deadline.

‘Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization.’

The FBI didn’t always conflate terrorism with Islam. “I never saw that,” says Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s most distinguished counterterrorism agents and author of the new memoir The Black Banners, who retired from the bureau in 2005. “Sometimes, toward the end of my time, I started noticing it with different entities outside the FBI. You started feeling like they had a problem with Islam-as-Islam, because of the media. But that was a few people, and was usually hidden behind closed doors.”

Soufan, a Muslim, has interrogated members of al-Qaida and contributed to rolling up one of its cells in Yemen after 9/11. But by the logic of the FBI’s training materials, Soufan’s religious practices make him a potential terrorist.

McFadden, the former NCIS counterterrorist, has a lot of respect for his FBI colleagues, who he believes are ill-served by these Islam briefings. “These are earnest special agents and police officers who want to know how do their job better,” McFadden says.

Too often, McFadden says, counterterrorism training becomes simultaneously over-broad and ignorant. “Instead of looking for indicators of nefarious behavior, you have a sweeping generalization of things like, for instance, the Hawala system,” McFadden explains. “It’s a system that most of the developing world and expatriates from it use to move money around, including terrorists. But you can’t say the whole hawala system is about terrorism, just like you can’t say that Islam as a whole has anything to do with bad behavior.”

McFadden, a Catholic, believes that obsessing over obscure Koranic verses is as useful a guide to terrorist behavior as “diving into the rite of exorcism” is to understanding Catholicism.

On April 6, barely two weeks after the “Islamic Motivations for ‘Suicide’ Bombers” briefing at Quantico, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the bureau’s budget before a congressional committee. Among his major points: the FBI needs cooperation from American Muslims to stop the next terrorist attack.

“Since September 11th, every one of our 56 field offices and the leadership of those offices have had outreach to the Muslim community,” Mueller said. “We need the support of that community … our business is basically relationships.” That is exactly the opposite message sent in the training rooms of Quantico, where the next generation of FBI counterterrorism is shaped.

NASA's Kepler telescope finds planet orbiting two suns

An artist's conception of Kepler-16b

A planet orbiting two suns - the first confirmed alien world of its kind - has been found by Nasa's Kepler telescope, the US space agency announced.

It may resemble the planet Tatooine from the film Star Wars, but scientists say Luke Skywalker, or anyone at all, is unlikely to be living there.

Named Kepler-16b, it is thought to be an uninhabitable cold gas giant, like Saturn.
The newly detected body lies some 200 light years from Earth.

Though there have been hints in the past that planets circling double stars might exist - "circumbinary planets", as they are known - scientists say this is the first confirmation.
It means when the day ends on Kepler-16b, there is a double sunset, they say.

'Stunning' Kepler-16b's two suns are smaller than ours - at 69% and 20% of the mass of our Sun - making the surface temperature an estimated -100 to -150F (-73 to -101C).

The planet eclipses, or transits, both stars; and the stars regularly eclipse each other too

 

The planet orbits its two suns every 229 days at a distance of 65m miles (104m km) - about the same distance out as Venus.

The Kepler telescope, launched in 2009, is designed to scour our section of the Milky Way for Earth-like planets.

"This is really a stunning measurement by Kepler," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science near Washington DC, a co-author of the study.

"The real exciting thing is there's a planet sitting out there orbiting around these two stars."
Kepler finds stars whose light is regularly dimmed when an orbiting planet passes between the star and the telescope.

In this case, the team was also able to observe dimming when one star passed in front of the other.

Nasa's scientists saw additional dips in the light in both stars at alternating but regular times, confirming the dual orbit of the planet.

Data collected by the Kepler telescope allows for very precise measurements of the mass, radius and trajectories of all three bodies - the best ever estimates of a extra-solar planet.

The finding was reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

ADD & ADHD: No Typical Diagnosis According to ADD Panel

 

Vidlink 

Struggling! 

How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” Out of Normal Children

On March 21, 2000, fourteen-year old Matthew Smith was having a good time skateboarding with two of his cousins. Suddenly, he collapsed to the floor and started turning blue.  His cousins called 911 but the paramedics couldn’t revive him.. At the hospital he was pronounced dead from a heart attack – a heart attack caused by Ritalin.

Matthews parents had been giving him Ritalin since he was six years old.  Ritalin is classified as a Schedule II drug, which the DEA reserves for the most dangerous and addictive drugs that can be prescribed legally.

But to the educators at Matthews school, Ritalin was simply a magic pill that made troublesome students easier to manage.

Prior to being diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (or ADHD or ADD for short), Matthew was an energetic, boisterous highly social child who did not focus on his school work quite the way his teachers wanted him to.
 
Was he in dire need of medication?

The push to label Matthew occurred when he was in the first grade.  School officials said that he was fidgety in his seat and would sometimes disrupt the class, and that he often had trouble staying focused on his work.

The school social worker called Matthews parents and said that Matthew needed to take medication saying, “He’s got ants in his pants”

This unqualified social worker made the diagnosis and recommendation for medication and handed them a list of physicians who would provide them with a prescription.

Even though technically this constitutes practicing medicine without a license, this same process has been occurring in school districts all across the nation by thousands of teachers, administrators, counselors, psychologists and social workers for years now.

According to Dr. Fred Baughman, there is an epidemic taking place all across America.  This is happening everywhere.

Parents are told to place their children on Ritalin or Adderall (generic name is "Amphetamine") or else the student will be placed in special education programs or refused attendance at school.

“Parents are succumbing to the threats from school officials without any idea of the possible side effects or negative consequences.”

In San Diego at just one school, 65 percent of the fifth graders had been diagnosed with ADD and were on medication.

There are over 6 million children in the United State who have been diagnosed with ADHD and drugged for ADHD.

“We are drugging normal children so that they act less like normal children and forcing them to act like the docile adults who are supposed to be teaching them”.

Dr. Baughman is one of numerous medical professionals who recently testified in front of the FDA and Congress.

“ADHD is not a disorder or disease or a syndrome or chemical imbalance of the brain.  It is not over-diagnosed, under-diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed.  It doesn’t exist in 3%, or 5%, or 10 % of the population.  In fact, it doesn’t exist at all.  It’s is 100% Fraud.”

Dr. Baughman and many others believe that there is no medical basis for the diagnosis.

“It is a manufactured disease-an invented disease that results in huge profits for psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies.”

We have allowed school and health care professionals to blanket classify behavior and establish bounds for student conduct in the school environment.  We hand out drugs to kids as freely as we give them Flintstone vitamins.

In spite of schools with posted signs everywhere that say “drug free zones” it turns out that nearly everywhere, the most effective drug pushers are the legal ones.

Dr. Baughman, author of the new book, The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” Out of Normal Children says that parents and educators have to stop thinking that the use of drugs is necessary.

“We’ve gone on a diagnostic frenzy and sought out a chemical means for achieving peace and quiet in the classroom.  Ritalin may solve problems for schools but it’s not helping the children.”

“Right now, the diagnosis of children is subjective and behavioral and is not biological.  We’ve got to change that.”

Once children are labeled as ADHD they are no longer treated as normal.  And once a child is viewed as abnormal   The rigorous medical research shows that ADD and ADHD simply do not exist.

“The real question is how we go about destroying the monster we’ve created.  We’ve been conned into believing that evil forces reside within our children.  We’ve been lulled into believing there is a collective madness

Our children act in ways that bother adults.  We’ve got to now teach the adults that the solution is up to them.  We know that there are sane people who are horrified at the thought of participating in a massive abuse of children.

It’s horrifying.  There are over half a million children between the ages of 2 and 5 now being treated with powerful drugs for ADHD.  Nobody has any idea of the effects these drugs will have on children so young.

Lewis Black Summarizes Democrats & Republicans

 

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WTC #7 Collapse footage from a different angle

(I'm not a "Truther" but then, I've not seen this footage before tonight. Of course, with digital technology, anything can be faked, but if it's real, then I could consider becoming a Truther. How can this video be explained in a way that doesn't scream conspiracy?--jef)

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Rank-and-File Economics: Fighting for a Wage- and Job-Led Recovery

Wednesday, September 14, 2011 by Dollars & Sense

by Katherine Sciacchitano

 

Riddle 1: When is a recovery not a recovery?
Answer: When profits are at record levels, corporations are sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and unemployment is still at 16+% and rising.

Riddle 2: When is a stimulus not a stimulus?
Answer: When it’s less than one-fourth the size of the hole in the economy it is intended to fill.

Riddle 3: When will it be possible to rebuild the economy?
Answer: When the U.S. labor movement joins with community and international labor allies to demand global economic development, jobs, and rising wages.

When the U.S. housing bubble burst in 2008, putting jobs first was a no-brainer. Global unions demanded immediate action. The G-20—the group of 20 nations charged with coordinating a global response to the crisis—agreed. Governments rushed to do stimulus spending. The worst was prevented.

Then in the spring of 2010 the Greek debt crisis hit. Markets plummeted. The G-20 pulled back and told countries to cut spending. Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and the U.K. have since enacted austerity packages with drastic spending and wage cuts.

The global jobs crisis is now worse than ever. Between 2007 and 2010, 30 million workers lost their jobs worldwide. In the United States, GDP is falling, jobs have declined since the recovery started, and the unemployment rate is rising again as federal stimulus funds fade and layoffs mount in the states. The Brookings Institution estimates it will take over ten years to return to normal employment levels, even at pre-crisis growth rates. Now, real wages are falling as well.

Union reps negotiating contracts with state and local governments are on the frontlines of the resulting battles. Flanked as they are by terrified members on one side, and angry tax payers and state legislatures attacking wages, benefits, and bargaining rights on the other, their problems go far beyond what can be solved at the bargaining table.

The out-of-the-box solution would be to organize for a comprehensive program of job creation. Blueprints for jobs-based recoveries do exist. But such blueprints need “rank-and-file economists” to turn them into brick and mortar. With Democrats and Republicans actively vying to impose austerity, those rank-and-file economists—community organizers as well as union reps—must tell, not ask, our elected representatives what we need. Then they have to engage in the drawn-out battle to make what we need a reality.

A major obstacle to struggle is the widespread belief—even among many union members—that there is little that government can do besides cut spending, and that only the private sector can create jobs.

Yet the fact that so many are frustrated with government over the high unemployment is evidence that on some level people do believe government action is not only possible but necessary. A rank-and-file economics needs to channel that frustration and nurture that belief. It needs to explain why the “free market” isn’t going to create the jobs that are needed. It needs to educate people about the real causes of the crisis. And it needs to convince community and union members that a positive agenda for long-term growth still exists.

First, we have to arm ourselves by educating ourselves.

The Private Sector Can’t Do It Alone
Here in the United States, people are surrounded by the narrative that only the private sector can create jobs. Even those who acknowledge that we need to rebuild our infrastructure and that rebuilding would create jobs are likely to say that we can’t afford public investment right now. Instead, the argument goes, we should cut taxes and let corporations create the jobs and the investment we need: too much public spending got us where we are; every tax dollar spent by the government is one less dollar business could be used to create jobs.

There are three main responses to these arguments.

First, corporations already have enough cash to invest; tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy aren’t going to lead to more job creation.

The Bush tax cuts didn’t boost job creation, they didn’t boost wages, and they didn’t boost investment in the real economy. What they boosted was corporate profits and the deficit. Today businesses are sitting on record profits and $1.7 trillion in cash that they don’t want to invest. What investment is being done is aimed at boosting productivity and cutting labor costs—that is, cutting jobs. The jobs problem is not due to businesses not having enough cash to invest. Further enriching corporations with tax cuts isn’t going to fix it.

Second, the deficit didn’t cause the crisis; the crisis caused the deficit.

Calls to cut government spending in order to spur growth ignore the fact that the economic crisis we’re in has nothing to do with government spending. The deficit didn’t cause the crisis. The crisis caused the deficit. The spike in the deficit is principally due to the drop in revenues as people lost jobs and businesses lost sales. What additional spending we have done in the past three years—for the stimulus program and for TARP—was temporary. And as economist Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has calculated, in the long run the U.S. budget deficit would virtually disappear if it brought its health-care spending in line with other industrialized countries, all of which have universal health coverage.

Third, there are times when government spending is essential to help the economy over a crisis and when failure to spend will make the deficit worse.

In the short term, the best way to reduce the deficit without increasing unemployment is to recover from the crisis, not cut spending and create more joblessness while the economy is still weak. This is a lesson we should have learned from the last great global economic collapse, the Depression of the 1930s.

Before the 1930s, most economists believed that economies recovered naturally from recessions: in a downturn, either prices would fall and stimulate spending, or wages would fall and stimulate hiring, or both. But when consumers and businesses stopped spending during the Depression, falling wages and prices made the economy worse. It took the New Deal to get the economy growing. From 1933 through the end of the Depression, GDP rose and fell with government spending. By 1936 unemployment had fallen from 23% to 9%. But in 1937 unemployment rose again after Roosevelt cut the budget to reduce the deficit. After that it took massive spending for World War II to return the economy to full employment.

Stimulus Isn’t Enough Either
Given the lessons from the Depression of the 1930s, why didn’t the Obama stimulus plan work better than it did?

One reason is that the housing bubble drained nearly $1.4 trillion in annual spending, yet the Obama administration proposed a stimulus that was only $825 billion spread over several years. Congressional Republicans then reduced that number to $727 billion. They also cut proposed spending for infrastructure, green energy, and aid to states so they could increase tax cuts, even though tax cuts are known to create fewer jobs.

But the deeper reason the Obama stimulus failed is that the administration misunderstood the nature of the crisis. The country needs more than stimulus spending for recovery. It needs a sustained program for rebuilding the real economy and raising wages. The problem isn’t just that cutbacks over the past decades have left us with a shortage of over two trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. It’s that growing inequality has created too big a hole in demand.

During the boom following World War II, the United States regularly used government spending to ease recessions. The idea was that instead of waiting for unemployment to push down wages in the hopes that low wages would boost hiring, the government should boost job creation, and hence wages, by plugging holes in private consumption with public expenditures.

This worked because during the post-war boom, wages as a matter of policy rose with productivity. Recessions were due to short-term policy missteps or the “business cycle”—production temporarily getting ahead of demand. When that happened, businesses made fewer profits and investment would fall. Government spending would boost demand. And demand would spur investment.

In the current economy, stimulus spending can’t accomplish what it did in the post-war economy. Not only have we just had a massive financial crisis rather than a dip in the business cycle, but the crisis happened after decades of stagnating wages. Since the 1980s, demand has been based not on rising wages, as it was in the post-war era, but on household debt backed by the rising prices of assets such as stocks and real estate.

With the bursting of the housing bubble, 28% of homeowners are now under water. Under these circumstances, households that get a temporary bump in disposable income from a stimulus package are as likely to pay down debt as they are to increase spending. Even households that aren’t in debt may save instead of spending because of fear of unemployment. The economy may get a small boost. But businesses correctly see that demand isn’t there and hold back from investing. The economy remains in a hole unless the government embarks on a sustained program of rebuilding wages, jobs, and the real economy.

How We Unlearned Equality
To understand what it will take to rebuild the economy, we have to understand the strength of the post-war economy and how it was reversed.

The great economic lesson of the post-war era was the importance of equality for economic growth and stability. The period before the Great Depression had been marked by steep inequality, debt, and bubbles. Following World War II, the governments of the United States and most of Western Europe made commitments to full employment and rising wages in order to avoid another similar collapse. Global growth reached record rates. Inequality declined. And there were no serious global financial crises.

In the United States, real hourly wages roughly doubled during this period. The policies that made this wage growth and stability possible included corporate acceptance of collective bargaining; a strong social safety net; high quality public services; regulation of business; progressive tax systems—where corporations and the wealthy are taxed at higher rates—to help pay for public services and the cost of regulation; deficit spending to stimulate the economy during economic downturns, thereby preventing wages from falling; and a willingness to lower interest rates when unemployment rose.

Corporate tolerance for these pro-labor policies was transitory and grudging: it lasted as long as the extraordinary post-war levels of profit lasted. Once global profit rates slowed, corporations fought to reverse wage growth and restore profit rates under the guise of the policy mix that came to be known as neoliberalism. They attacked labor rights, the minimum wage, and unemployment insurance. They pushed to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy, shifting the tax burden to working people instead. They lobbied to privatize public services and deregulate industries—opening opportunities for profits, denigrating the role of government, and increasing the likelihood of financial crises. The rhetoric of balanced budgets and self-reliance replaced support for a strong safety net and stimulus spending to stabilize wages during recessions. And interest rate hikes were used to minimize inflation—now touted as a primary threat to living standards—by raising unemployment and keeping wages low.

There were changes in international policy as well. After World War II, U.S. trade policy had focused on opening up markets for U.S. exports, which meant not only higher profits but higher domestic employment. Under neoliberalism, boosting profits meant moving production to lower cost areas overseas and exporting back to the United States. It meant cutting jobs at home as well as and pushing down wages abroad.

In short, while the post-war strategy supported rising incomes in the United States and much of the rest of the world, the strategy from the 1980s onward was built on stagnating or falling wages for workers generally. The result was that the global rate of profit rose while hourly wages stagnated or fell, with few exceptions, throughout the globe—not just in the United States and developing countries, but in Europe as well.

To compensate for stagnating purchasing power, U.S. consumers borrowed, and the finance industry made credit more available: between 1981 and 2007, the last year of the housing bubble, household debt doubled as a percentage of GDP. The U.S. consumer became the consumer of last resort for the world. And the global economy balanced precariously on U.S. consumer debt and the dollar.

By the early 2000s, balancing on U.S. consumer debt meant balancing on the housing bubble: dollars exited the country to pay for imports and were recycled back, not as demand for U.S. exports, but as demand for investment in U.S. mortgage securities and other financial assets. The world found out how painful a balancing act this was when the U.S. housing bubble burst, homeowners defaulted on mortgages, and the banking system nearly collapsed, cutting off the supply of easy credit. Global demand plummeted. It hasn’t recovered since. Tackling Inequality Head-on In its own terms, neoliberalism worked: it increased profits, suppressed wages, and shifted tax burdens from the wealthy to lower income workers. Proponents have seized on the deficits created by the crisis to slash social spending, helping insure against future tax increases for those at the top.

The contradictions should be obvious to all: suppressing wages suppresses demand, and balancing consumer spending on debt rather than wages destabilizes the U.S. economy and the global economy. Cutting government spending before we rebuild private demand will throw the country and the world back into recession. It will keep U.S. unemployment at Depression-era levels. And it will result in larger, not smaller, deficits.

Yet the contradictions don’t register because people have a deep-seated belief that the very inequality that is crashing the system is essential to growth and jobs—that by limiting inequality we are limiting our ability to generate wealth.

To build momentum for a jobs- and wage-based recovery, the labor movement has to tackle the belief in inequality head on. It needs to show that the jobs crisis can only be addressed by rebuilding and rebalancing the national and global economies with higher wages and greater equality.

Going Global: Coordination, not Competition
Jobs debates tend to focus on national needs. We’re told repeatedly that competition is the key to a country’s economic success: increase productivity, decrease labor costs, hone our technology, and we’ll beat out the other guy to get the jobs. But the kind of development the world needs for recovery isn’t a zero-sum game. U.S. labor needs healthy manufacturing and wage growth in other countries every bit as much as we need a revival of manufacturing and wages in the United States.

Achieving the objectives proposed in this article—rising wages, demand-led growth, and global development—will require both struggle and international coordination. Labor is familiar with many of the economic tools that will be needed to achieve these core objectives, but it is used to applying them in a national context only, not advocating for their use as part of a global development agenda. Here are a few of the most familiar tools that will be needed and what labor can add by pressing for international coordination:

Fiscal and monetary policy to support employment growth. Governments need to return to wider use of fiscal and monetary policy to stimulate demand and put a floor on unemployment. But in a global economy, stimulus spending can end up “leaking” out of a country when consumers buy imports. Stimulus is most effective when countries act together so one country can’t “steal” demand from another by keeping its wages and demand low while another country raises wages and expands demand.

Labor rights and employment regulation to raise wages. Using fiscal and monetary policy to put a floor on unemployment can help keep wages from falling. But wage growth needs a vigorous commitment to collective bargaining, social benefits such as health care and pensions, minimum and living wage laws, and a strong safety net for unemployed and underemployed workers. These policies are most effective when widely adopted, both because widespread adoption raises global demand and also because it discourages low-wage competition.

Tax reform to provide adequate revenues. Tax reform is needed to ensure that the wealthy and corporations pay their share of the costs for the economic crisis, and to provide revenue for rebuilding and development. Corporate tax reform in particular needs to be coordinated to prevent corporations from gaming differences in countries’ tax rates by relocation or transfer pricing. Since the crisis began, a vigorous global movement has sprung up for a financial transaction tax, which could raise hundreds of billions globally from the finance industry.

Industrial policy to nurture high-wage manufacturing sectors. Ultimately, strong job growth is needed to support strong wage growth. Countries that have developed successfully—including the United States and Britain in their early years, Europe and Japan after World War II, the Asian Tigers in the 1980s, and now China—have done so by using industrial policies to nurture infant industries and growth. These policies have included such measures as regulation of the movement of capital in and out of the country; government investment in infrastructure, education, research and development; requirements that corporations purchase inputs locally and train local workforces; and facilitating the availability of credit for key industries and sectors. Since the eighties and nineties, neoliberal policies and trade agreements have sought to ban many of these policies and make countries dependent on transnational corporations instead. International labor campaigns to eliminate these bans will be critical for reversing this dependence and the advantage it gives corporations over labor. Freeing countries to use industrial policy will in turn be critical for the growth of green manufacturing and energy production as the world grapples with climate change.

Rebuild and Rebalance
A broad consensus is developing within the global labor movement on how this rebuilding and rebalancing needs to take place. There are three main goals:

Raise wages, raise demand. The most pressing economic problem today isn’t government debt or deficits. It’s the hole in demand left by 30 years of wage suppression, and the danger of another period of bubble-fueled growth. To be sustainable, demand has to be based on wages, not on household debt. Inequality isn’t just painful for workers. It’s destabilizing for the global economy. Correcting inequality isn’t a matter of charity. It’s a matter of economic survival.

First and foremost, rebalancing the global economy means correcting the global wage imbalance by creating jobs and raising wages. This imbalance isn’t primarily about high- versus low-income countries. It’s about the share of national incomes going to workers wages and the share going to profit. Since 1980, the share of income going to labor has fallen steadily in all regions of the world, with the possible exceptions of East and Central Asia. The decline hasn’t been due to shifts to low-wage occupations. It hasn’t been limited to low-wage countries. And it has occurred at all income levels. It’s also getting worse. In the current recovery, U.S. corporations captured a whopping 88% of the growth in national income through the beginning of 2010, while only 1% went to labor. Compare that to the recovery after the 1991 recession, when 50% of the growth in national income went to labor.

Replace growth based on low-wage exports with wage- and demand-led growth around the world. As U.S. corporations moved overseas in the eighties and nineties, the U.S. government used the carrot and the stick—as well as its powers over the IMF and the World Bank—to persuade destination countries to cut government spending, let wages fall, remove regulations on movement of foreign capital known as “capital controls,” and “devalue” currencies to artificially force down the price of exports. The result was intensified global competition and the emergence of an “export-led” model of growth: economies grew not because rising wages grow domestic demand, but because suppressed wage growth (or falling wages) pushed down the price of exports. Regardless of their income level, countries that adopt the export-led model suppress both wage growth and demand for imports. They export more than they import. And they run permanent trade surpluses while their trading partners lose jobs and run deficits.

European countries that are sharply reducing deficits to deal with the current crisis and letting wages stagnate or fall are turning to the export-led growth model in hopes of becoming “more competitive.” This kind of “competitiveness” as a primary strategy for global growth isn’t the solution for lagging incomes. It’s a recipe for an intensified race to the bottom and permanently depressed wages. It’s also impossible for a majority of the world to “export” its way out of the crisis and back to growth; for every country that exports, another must be able to import. The solution, whether in Europe or the developing world, is to trade in the model of export-led growth for one based on rising wages and domestic demand.

Create a global model for economic development and decent work. The idea of stimulus spending is that it “jumpstarts” a cycle of demand, investment, and job creation when a basically healthy economy stalls. Today, living on the “other side” of the export-led model the United States helped create, U.S. consumers are too mired in debt, corporations too addicted to outsourcing and cutting jobs and wages, and the country too far behind in infrastructure spending for this kind of stimulus to be effective. We need to rebuild, not “jumpstart,” the U.S. economy. The same is true overseas. Developing countries mired in the export-led model also suffer from a long-term lack of public investment and infrastructure.

To replace the export-led growth model unions need to demand a global agenda for decent work. This in turn requires a program for sustainable development that includes support for public services such as education and health care, funds for infrastructure, and support for sustainable manufacturing and green energy in both advanced and developing countries. The jobs and wages created by this investment will in turn build the base of demand needed for sustained demand-led growth.

Closer Than We Think

There are ways out of the current jobs crisis. Budget-cutting, austerity, and intensified wage competition aren’t among them. Unionists need to keep their eyes on the ball: The chief barrier to recovery is the lack of global demand. A main cause of the current crisis is a multi-decade, multi-pronged strategy of wage suppression across the world. And the response must include global coordination for economic development—a global New Deal.

Governments committed to neoliberal policies won’t be the prime movers behind a global New Deal. That’s labor’s job. So is forging the ties with other labor movements that will be needed to carry on the struggle both nationally and internationally (see sidebar).

This struggle must take place country by country. Over the past decade U.S. unionists have fought successful battles for living wage ordinances. They have won community benefits agreements from corporations receiving public funds, locking in pledges to create jobs and respect labor rights. They’ve renewed the battle for single-payer health care and made common cause with immigrant workers working at the margins of the U.S. economy. There is crucial organizing for a national infrastructure bank, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, putting a floor on foreclosures, and taxing the wealthy. Learning new strategies is not going to be the hard part of U.S. labor. Nor will forging international linkages with unions in other countries—a process which will deepen understanding of common problems and exponentially increase the energy and clarity of struggle.

The hard part will be unlearning the indoctrination we’ve received about the crisis, the role of government in the economy, and the free market. Once we do that, we can build successful movements at home and abroad. We’re closer than we think to the army of rank-and-file economists that we need.