US is a two party dictatorship says Ralph Nader

Posted on 09.15.11

By Eric W. Dolan

Ralph Nader appeared Thursday on Fox News to discuss a democratic primary he was organizing against President Barack Obama to “hold his feet to the fire.”

“The important thing here is if he’s not challenged from the progressive-liberal wing of his party, that elected him, it’ll be a very dull campaign, people will not be very enthusiastic, more and more people will stay home, it’s not good for him,” Nader said. “If he’s a good debater, if he knows his facts, he’ll want to be challenged because he’ll come out much sharper.”

When asked about the possibility of a third party candidate succeeding in the 2012 presidential election, Nader said it would be a hurdle for anyone who wasn’t a billionaire.

“It’s a two party dictatorship unless you’re worth billions of dollars.”

Watch video, via MoxNews.com, below:

When Sports Loses Its Soul

A League of Fans
By RALPH NADER

Why do many serious readers of newspapers go first to the Sports section? Maybe because they want to read about teams playing fun games by sports journalists and columnists, who have more freedom to use imaginative words and phrases than others in their craft.

The trouble is that ever-more organized and commercialized sports are squeezing the fun out of the games. I'm not just referring to struggles between multimillionaire players against billionaire owners--as in the current NFL lockout and the looming NBA imbroglio. I am referring to what our League of Fans Sports Policy Director, Ken Reed, calls the "win-at-all-costs (WAAC) and profit-at-all-costs (PAAC) mentalities, policies and decisions that are resulting in a variety of abuses from the pros all the way to Little League." When WAAC and PAAC run amok--and what's best for the players, the fans and the game are shoved aside--"sport begins to lose its soul."

In his first of ten "League of Fans" reports, Reed makes the case against this "soul sickness" in a 27 page Sports Manifesto (www.leagueoffans.org). The range of endemic and often worsening problems is startling for how often they have been exposed without anything significantly being done about them.

Here is a list of Reed's choices for civic action:

• Academic corruption in college and high school athletic programs.

• Rampant commercialization from the pros to our little leagues.

• Publicly-financed stadiums for wealthy owners.

• The perversity of forcing loyal fans to purchase personal seat licenses (PSLs) in pro and college football just to have the right to buy season tickets.

• The sports cartel in Division I football known as the Bowl Championship Series (BCS)--which limits revenues and opportunities (e.g., a legitimate chance at a national championship) for the conferences and schools left on the outside.

• Work stoppages in the professional sports leagues in which fans have no voice.

• Exorbitant ticket and concession prices at taxpayer-funded stadiums (where most, if not all, ticket, concession, merchandise and parking revenues typically go to the franchise owners). In addition, there are also television blackouts from these taxpayer-financed stadiums.

• A focus on elite athletic teams in high schools and middle schools at the expense of diminishing intramural programs and physical education classes for all students.

• The practice of requiring college athletes to pay their own medical bills, even though they were injured while playing for their university.

• Disparities in opportunities for females, disabled individuals, and people of color despite Title IX and other civil rights advances.

• The proliferation of youth club sports organizations that have a financial vs. an educational mission.

• The specialization and professionalization of young athletes at earlier and earlier ages.

• The increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs at all ages, by both males and females.

• The erosion of the core ideals, values and ethics of sports, resulting in escalating incidents of poor sportsmanship.

• An increase in sports injuries, most alarmingly concussions.

• A shocking increase in obesity, accompanied by a decline in physical fitness--especially among our youth.

• Dehumanizing coaches at all levels, most disturbingly, at the youth level.

As a college varsity player, a coach, marketer, teacher and author, Reed is in touch with many worried and upset sports lovers. They include parents, current and retired players, leading analysts, academics, educators, physicians, reporters and civil rights advocates. League of Fans, which I started, wants to build a strong and growing reform movement not just to curb the "excesses of the monied interests," to use a Jeffersonian phrase, but to open up opportunities for more participatory sports right down to the neighborhood levels. We have too few players and too many spectators--a reality that sports journalism should pay more attention to regularly.

There is a problem afflicting sports journalism and its comparatively immense space and time devoted to professional sports. It goes beyond a largely indifferent attitude toward this imbalance between spectators and participatory sports. Even though the concerns of many sports-lovers are based on the occasional investigatory reports or columns documenting abuses, when people acting as citizens try to do something about them, their efforts receive little, if any media coverage.

So what's the point to these exposes other than to make readers and viewers angry, cynical or frustrated, if when the readers use this information to follow up and sound the alarm to do something, the sports media looks the other way and gives the space to some athlete who is pouting or showing up late for practice?

Sports journalism has to introspect a little about a larger view of newsworthiness. Otherwise they continue to uncritically cover the big league sports business that, with few exceptions, knows few restraints to its greed and insensitivity toward fans whom they are increasingly turning off.

The Darth Vaders of Business Law

Writers of the Fine Print
By RALPH NADER

It is time to shine the light on the big, affluent corporate lawyers who anonymously create those non-competitive fine print contracts we all have to sign to purchase goods and services.

It's time for an open letter to these Darth Vaders of business law who have destroyed our freedom of contract and built a new road to serfdom made of corporate cement.

Dear Attorneys for Contract Incarceration:

Remember when you were at law school studying contracts? Your professor pressed you socratically to understand Hadley vs. Baxendale, et al. You spent just one or two classes on what are called "contracts of adhesion"—those fine print one-sided contracts that only make up 99% of all the contracts we'll ever sign.

There they are—page after page exuding the silent message of "take it or leave it." If you "leave it", then you must cross the street to a competitor—an insurance company, credit card firm, bank, auto dealer, hospital, realtor, airline, student loan company or cell phone company, awaiting you is the same fine-print contract designed to nail you to the mast. Then there are the shrink-wrap software contracts you can't even see before you buy.

If your contracts professor bothered to explain why so little course time is spent on these standard form contracts involving trillions of dollars in annual sales, he/she might have used the French phrase—"fait accompli." After all, the consumer signed or acquiesced in some way. That met the basic principle of a binding contract, say the courts (with a rare exception now and then) which is a meeting of the minds between the willing seller and the willing buyer.

Discussion over! As a shopper, prepare for the daily coercive harmony.

Imagine all the times you've "met the minds" of Bank of America, Metropolitan, Aetna, General Motors, Wal-Mart, American Express, AT&T, Sallie Mae, U.S. Air and your favorite time-sharing company for that vacation trip to Antigua. What a myth!

In this legal fiction land, the law presumes that you've read the fine print and understood it. Inscrutability is no defense. It doesn't matter that law professors, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts and your partners admit to not reading the dense legalese when they shop. Why waste their time? They can't get out of contractual prison anymore than you can. But you make zillions figuring out how to lock millions of Americans into one-side anti-consumer contracts.

You misuse your intellect to create a modern contract straitjacket that gets tighter year by year. Your innovations are enforced by status-quo judges, credit ratings, credit scores and the absence of any competition over contracts between companies in the same industry.

The straitjacket is made of figurative steel fibers composed of enforceable words. Here is a partial list of your inventions which Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren aptly calls "mice type" the equivalent of "shrubbery for muggers!"

They include (1) seller's power to unilaterally change terms or assign the contract, (2) waiver provisions of the seller's liability and payment of seller's attorney fees, (3) acceleration and delinquency clauses, (4) binding arbitration and blocking the consumer's resort to the courts and right to jury trials, (5) liquidated damage clauses. On and on go the layers of incarceration.

Pretty clever maybe, but, you aren't being fair to the powerless consumers. Remember, you've got a professional code of ethics that informs you of the obligation sometimes to say no—enough already—to your demanding corporate clients even if they can always go to another law firm that they can pay handsomely to say yes. It can be, for you, a dilemma.

Listen, I've got an exit plan for those of you pondering quitting or retiring because you can no longer stand destroying peoples' freedom of contract—one of the main pillars of our democracy—with their consequential losses of money, time, health and safety.

Come to the other side. A movement for consumer contract justice is heading your way. Don't laugh as General Motors once did in the Nineteen Sixties. Don't think that the complexity of these fine prints cannot be communicated to the buying public. ABC's Peter Jennings showed the opposite with a crisp five part TV series a few years ago. This fall, a sure best seller by David Cay Johnston titled "The Fine Print" is coming out. He has prior best sellers on tax laws that clarify the abstruse to arouse readers.

There is a huge compression of repression and resentment ready to be unleashed and converted into a widely perceived injustice. Ridding themselves of the feeling that "that's the way it is," this consumer uprising will be holding you and your companies responsible by name.

Quit and join the right side of the coming historical change breaking the chains of contract bondage. Bring your knowhow and stored archives (names redacted) of "mice type" to faircontracts.org, directed by the relentless lawyer, Theresa Amato. Soon!

Your brother in law,
Ralph Nader, Esq.

Labor movement could kick-start a ‘popular revolt’ in the U.S., Nader claims

By Stephen C. Webster on 03.21.11

In an extended interview with Middle East news network Al Jazeera, consumer advocate and repeat U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader suggested that President Barack Obama is not supporting the labor movement because “they have nowhere else to go” except for Democrats.
“If he doesn’t stand up for those millions of workers, we might as well call him a president in a corporate prison called the White House,” Nader said, likening Obama’s “playing” of labor unions to the stretching of an elastic band.

But this time, Nader said, the band may be just about ready to “snap.” Should that happen, it could kick-start a “popular revolt” in the U.S., he added.

This video is from Al Jazeera, broadcast Monday, March 21, 2011.

Ron Paul, Ralph Nader agree on progressive libertarian alliance

Ron Paul, Ralph Nader agree on ‘progressive-libertarian alliance’
By Nathan Diebenow
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

In this corner, a libertarian, tea party hero who ran several campaigns as a candidate for US president on the Republican ticket. And in that corner, a progressive icon of the left who also ran several campaigns for the US presidency but on the Green Party ticket.

One might think the two men, seemingly ideologically opposed to one another, would rather argue than help one another.

However, on Wednesday's broadcast of Freedom Watch on the Fox Business channel, Judge Napolitano sat down for an amiable interview with Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Ralph Nader to discuss a progressive-libertarian alliance in the 112th session of respective chambers in Congress.

Nader, who has recently called this coalition "the most exciting new political dynamic" in the US today, explained that it works well because both groups stand against corporatists who believe government should be run in the interests of corporations.

"I believe in coalitions," Rep. Paul echoed. "They talk about we need more bipartisanship, and I say we have too much bipartisanship because the bipartisanship we have here in Washington endorses corporatism."

Paul added that he agreed with Nader on a host of issues, such as cutting the US military's budget, ending undeclared US wars overseas, restoring civil liberties and civil rights by dumping from the Patriot Act, and withdrawing from the NAFTA and World Trade Organization agreements.

"I think we should come together and work together, and I think we can," he said, noting that the coalition had previously worked on deficit financing solutions.

Rep. Paul and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the most conservative and most liberal members of their respective chambers, joined forces last session to fight for an audit of the Federal Reserve, a private institution that handles America's monetary policy, which Nader explained is under no legal control of Congress.

"The banks fund the Fed," Nader said. "It doesn't go through the congressional appropriations process as it should under our constitution."

Paul is the current chairman of a congressional subcommittee that would conduct oversight on the US Federal Reserve bank

He explained, however, that he would not have the subpoena power to force Tim Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, to testify under oath about the Fed's policies. That power is in the hands of the chairman of the full committee, he said.

"But that doesn't mean we'll go lightly on digging up for this information because Ralph is absolutely right on this thing," Paul said.

When asked, Nader stopped short of endorsing a full repeal of the Federal Reserve.

"The Fed, whatever it does, should be a cabinet-level, accountable institution," he proposed instead.

Paul also reiterated his stance that spending on overseas bases in US military's budget should be cut and that US troops should be brought home.

Big is Bad

Nassim Taleb Says No to Big Corporations and Big Government
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

The right likes big corporations but not big government.

The left likes big government but not big corporations.

Nassim Taleb hates both.

Taleb is the author of the best selling mega hit – The Black Swan (Random House, 2007).

And most recently of The Bed of Procrustus – Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Random House, 2010.)

Aphorisms as in:

"It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions.

"The difference between banks and the Mafia – banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.

"In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes. In DC, they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.

"In politics, we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big business agents on the one hand, and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic, arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

"English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy)."

If he had to choose the lesser of the two evils – big government or big corporations – which would it be?

"Both are the enemies of progress," Taleb says.

"Big corporations – their job is to suck up resources for themselves. I came to that conclusion after reading Marx. I'm not a Marxist, but I realized that large corporations are just in cahoots with big government.

"When I was debating the chairperson of Pepsico, her sole argument was – I employ 600,000 people. 600,000 people will be unemployed if I don't sell people diabetes causing drinks.

"The second problem is – you are going to be fragile when you employ 600,000. And the society will pay the price of your fragility.

"The chairperson of Pepsico will have a free option. They know they can't go bust. They know that society will prevent them from going bust."

If Taleb doesn't like big corporations or big government, then what does he like?

Artisans.

Small business.

Like the old market in Lebanon – where he was born.

"I shock people when I say the most stable system is an artisan style system. That's the only one that doesn't blow up. The world now has become too complex

"It's the Levantine system of trade and commerce. No debt. And small size. That is the most robust. These people survive much longer."

He says big corporations should never be bailed out.

Ever.

Taleb says that Ronald Reagan started it.

"This is why I get along with Ralph Nader. Nader was the first to say that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is cosmetic.

"It is Ronald Reagan who bailed out the banks in 1983 and started this whole process."

Reagan of the Milton Friedman free market philosophy?

"Exactly. There is something about governments that will be susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists to bailout the big corporations.

"Had Reagan not bailed out Citibank in 1983, we would not be here."

Where would we be?

"If the government didn't bail out Detroit and the banks, we would have a better Detroit and better banks. Smaller and more competitive companies.

"People forget that much of the growth of companies came from debt building.

"Small companies are the energetic ones. The energy and innovation comes from small companies in California. And these companies neither go into debt nor do they get bailed out."

Okay, so government shouldn't be bailing out the big banks.

But what about cracking down on corporate crime?

"If two adults want to speculate, they should be free to do so, conditional on society not bailing them out.

"The government should be there to enforce the rule of no socialization of losses. You want to make sure the banks are never big enough to take these risks at the expense of society.

"The rule is as follows – if you want a bailout, you are under our regulation. And we want you small. And we don't want you to take speculative risks. In other words, you are a utility. And you obey our rules.

"If you are not to be bailed out, then you can do what you want, providing that you don't harm the public."

But Nader's argument is that you need a strong central government to counteract big corporate power. And that of course is what corporate crime enforcement is about. You need to try and control the abuses of large corporations – to keep them in line.

"I don't mind the idea. But I prefer to let the system destroy the corporation before it becomes so big.

"It's good to think about it this way – once a corporation becomes so big, it's going to bully the public. So, you need a big public to stand against it. But a robust world is one composed of very robust cities – not city states necessarily – but strong cities and municipalities – and very strong small companies."

Taleb says – do not give children dynamite sticks, even if they come with a warning label.

And he makes a policy recommendation in this regard – ban complex financial instruments because nobody understands them.

"I don't understand them. And I wrote a text book in 1987 about them. The motivation behind these instruments is regulation. Shocking but true. Regulation had the effect of having people skirt the regulation, hire an expensive lawyer, and design a complex product to get around the regulation."

But Taleb would impose a regulation to ban them?

"I said that a product that has been traded for a long time should be traded. But a product that requires mathematical methods should not be. So, vanilla options have been traded on exchanges for hundreds of years – since Amsterdam in the 17th century – they can be traded.

"Stocks can be traded.

"But these complex products have no reason to exist other than to skirt regulations. They don't need to be there. People don't understand them. And they are designed to take advantage of people's mental biases and misunderstandings of some classes of risk."

But doesn't it require big government to ban complex financial instruments?

"The government has been doing everything but what they are supposed to do. Financial regulation did nothing but help Goldman Sachs."

But that's because that's how they set it up. It didn't have to be that way.

"It was a 5,000 page law," Taleb says. "We could write a one page law – captain goes down with the ship. Bridge engineer sleeps under the bridge. Personal liability."

Fox's Chief Legal Analyst: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for "Torturing, for Spying, for Arresting Without Warrant"

Fox News' senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.
By David Edwards, Raw Story
July 14, 2010

Fox News' senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.

In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN's Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for "torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant."

The judge believes that it is a fallacy to say that the US treats suspects as innocent until proven guilty. "The government acts as if a defendant is guilty merely on the basis of an accusation," said Napolitano.

Nader was curious about how this applied to the Bush administration. "What about the more serious violations of habeas corpus," wondered Nader. "You know after 9/11 Bush rounded up thousands of them, Americans, many of them Muslim Americans or Arabic Americans and they were thrown in jail without charges. They didn't have lawyers. Some of them were pretty mistreated in New York City. You know they were all released eventually."

"Well that is so obviously a violation of the natural law, the natural right to be brought before a neutral arbiter within moments of the government taking your freedom away from you," answered Napolitano.

"So what President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantanamo Bay, with the whole idea that he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges and the Constitution was blatantly unconstitutional and is some cases criminal," he continued.

"What should be the sanctions [for Bush and Cheney]?" asked Nader.

"They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant," said Napolitano.

"I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It's a moral crime," he said.

This isn't the first time that Napolitano's comments have veered away from the standard talking points at Fox News. He has predicted that Arizona's controversial immigration law will be blocked by the court. Napolitano also said Arizona's governor would "bankrupt the Republican Party" fighting for the law.

The liberal blog Crooks and Liars has more details on the Nader/Napolitano inteview.

Andrew Napolitano: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for Torturing, for Spying and Arresting Without Warrants

By Heather Monday Jul 12, 2010 4:00pm

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

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The Great Gap in Financial Reform

A Letter to Obama, Schumer and Shelby

By RALPH NADER

Dear President Obama, Senator Schumer and Senator Shelby:

On the eve of the portentous Senate debate over the extent to which the financial industry is to be so as to avert future megacollapses on the backs of taxpayers, workers and consumers, a great gap has been left unattended.

That gap pertains to the continued powerlessness of the investors and consumers—the people who bear the ultimate brunt of Wall Street’s recklessness, avarice and crimes and who have the greatest interest in strong regulatory enforcement.

Among all the amendments filed for the upcoming Senate debate, only amendment number 29, introduced by Senator Schumer, provides a facility to establish an independent non-governmental non-profit Financial Consumers’ Association (FCA).

Amendment 29 includes the following for funding this unique institution:

“…the financial industry has enjoyed virtually unlimited access to represent its interest before Congress, the courts, and State and Federal regulators, while financial services consumers have had limited representation before Congress and financial regulatory entities;” and

“…the Federal Government has a substantial interest in the creation of a public purpose, democratically controlled, self-funded, nationwide membership association of financial services consumers to enhance their representation and to effectively combat unsound financial practices.”

Anyone modestly familiar with the history of regulatory failures knows that the gross disparity of power and organized advocacy between big business and consumers outside of government leads to an absence of fair standards and law enforcement.

It also leads, as everyone knows, to massive taxpayer bailouts, subsidies and guarantees when these giant banks and other financial firms immolate themselves, after enriching their bosses, while engulfing tens of millions of innocent people in the subsequent economic conflagration.

Given all the privileges and costly rescues for culpable corporations that flow regularly from Washington, D.C., adopting ever so mildly the principle of reciprocity makes a powerful case for facilitating a nationwide Financial Consumers’ Association—one that would be composed of voluntary memberships by consumers who, through their annual dues, will sustain the FCA for an expert place at the table.

Senator Schumer, when he was a Congressman during the savings and loan bailout in the nineteen eighties, introduced such a proposal. But the bankers took the $150 billion bailout and blocked this reciprocal respect for depositors in the House Banking Committee.

Then Representative Schumer and his supporting colleagues on that Committee understood that without the supposed beneficiaries of regulatory authority being organized to make regulation and deterrence work, the Savings and Loan collapse could happen again. And so they became prophetic beyond their wildest nightmares.

Before he died in a plane crash in 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone recognized the need for such a facility, when he introduced the Consumer and Shareholder Protection Association Act.

A key enhancing feature in amendment 29 is a requirement that invitations to membership in the FCA be included in the billing envelopes or electronic communications of financial institutions with their customers. At no expense to these vendors, these notices would ensure that the maximum number of consumers are invited to join and fund such a democratically run, educational and advocacy organization.

In early 2009 I met with Chairman Christopher Dodd and explained the nature and importance of the FCA and Senator Schumer’s earlier role in advancing this civic innovation. He seemed receptive to the idea and urged us to have his colleague Senator Schumer take the lead, which he has done with amendment 29 just a few weeks ago. Senator Shelby and I have also discussed the FCA proposal.

The major valiant but overwhelmed consumer groups, who experience daily this enormous imbalance of power between corporations and consumers, presently stacked by unprecedented amounts of federal funds and bailout facilities for the misbehaving companies, support the creation of a self-funded FCA.

The Federal Government has long paid for facilities in the U.S. Department of Agriculture for agricultural businesses to band together and assess themselves to promote beef, corn, cotton and other commodities to increase their profits. By contrast the FCA, once launched, would be composed of consumers paying their own way to preserve their hard-earned savings from predatory financial speculators.

Allow one prediction. Even if the ultimate legislation comes out stronger than expected on such matters as derivatives, rating agencies, too big to fail, using depositor funds for speculation, and the consumer financial regulatory bureau, unless the consumer-investor is afforded modest facilities to band together with their experts and advocates, the laws will hardly be enforced with sufficient budgets, personnel and regulatory will power.

Give the consumer a modest round in this prolonged deliberation following the destructive events of 2008.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Americans Hate the New Airport Naked Body Scanners

We're so scared of trrrists that we succumb to being publicly humiliated for an upgrade in airport security--one which easily can be debated as to its effectiveness? It might have caught the underwear bomber, but it would not have caught the 9-11 hijackers. I'm a portly fellow, too, none too proud of my pear shape. I might just be done flying if this is yet another humiliating part of flying along with being stranded on a runway for 12+ hours, the shoe thing, being frisked, sniffed, and felt up, having your possessions rummaged through, and worse.

I'm not afraid of terrorists! Why are so many people afraid of terrorism? 9-11 was something truly out of the ordinary that no one (except for those in Bush's inner circle who had Richard Clarke's brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to crasha plane into a skyscraper") outside of political power could have foreseen. We have enough security in place to keep it from happening again. The fact that pilots keep the door to the cockpit locked the entire flight and the fact that air marshalls are now on more than half of all flights is enough to prevent most terrorist attacks on flights.

It's not perfect, but should be enough to abate this constant obsession with terrorists. That was one of the goals al Qaeda had on 9-11 (in addition to bankrupting the US...hmmmmm...)and what they want with every attack they make--make us so scared wechange our lives to accommodate that fear. And that means the terrorists have won the round because we are so consumed with the possibility of terrorist attacks, we let it make us afraid of them to the point of relinquishing our fundamental rights to privacy. It's the most quoted line with respect to security and freedom because it is the greatest line on that subject:

"Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
--Ben Franklin

***

Hundreds Of Americans File Complaints Over Naked Body Scanners
Rising wave of anger in response to virtual strip-search contradicts media spin

by Paul Joseph Watson

Despite establishment media spin that naked body scanners are being meekly accepted by a compliant public, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that there have been more than 600 formal complaints about the devices in the last year.

Furthermore, the documents reveal anger at TSA officials for refusing to offer passengers a pat-down alternative, as well as forcing children to go through machines which provide crisp images of genitalia, a particularly outrageous scenario in light of last week’s story concerning a TSA worker who was charged with multiple child sex crimes having raped an underage girl.

“Hundreds of U.S. air travelers have lodged complaints over use of full-body security scanners in the past year, charging they violate personal privacy and may be harmful to their health, documents released on Tuesday showed,” reports Reuters.

The Reuters piece amounts to little more than another whitewash of the issue, claiming that privacy filters blur sensitive areas of the body, an assertion contradicted by other journalists who investigated trials of the technology, as well as readily available sample imageswhich clearly show that the penis and testicles are visible.

The Transportation Security Administration also downplayed the issue as insignificant, claiming that over 600 complaints about body scanners which are installed in just 21 airports in the U.S. was an “infinitesimally small” number.

“I was not given an option to use the whole body screening device. Neither was anyone else. It appeared that everyone was being required to go through the devices, even children,” said one complaint from an unidentified traveler who flew through the Tulsa airport in May 2009.

As we reported last month, airport staff have also been accused of printing out and circulating naked images of famous people, a complete abuse of the “professionalism” we were promised would be exercised by those in control of these systems.

Courts have consistently found that strip searches are only legal when performed on a person who has already been found guilty of a crime or on arrestees pending trial where a reasonable suspicion has to exist that they are carrying a weapon. Subjecting masses of people to blanket strip searches in airports reverses the very notion of innocent until proven guilty.

Barring people from flying and essentially treating them like terrorists for refusing to be humiliated by the virtual strip search is a clear breach of the basic human right of freedom of movement.Security experts agree that such scanners would not even have stopped the incident that has been exploited to justify their widespread introduction – the Christmas Day underwear bomber.

Not only have the scanners proven to be a total violation of privacy, but major international radiation safety groups are now warning of the health risks they pose.

Despite governments claiming that backscatter x-ray systems produce radiation too low to pose a threat, the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety concluded in their report that governments must justify the use of the scanners and that a more accurate assessment of the health risks is needed.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, according to the report, adding that governments should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”

“The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,”reported Bloomberg.

We are joining the hundreds of other Americans who protested naked body scanners as an affront to privacy, dignity, and a health risk, by launching our naked body scanner contest in an effort to focus public attention on how we must stop these machines now before they are installed in the streets and become another tool of control and oppression as part of the prison planet being constructed around us.

Not only have authorities in Europe promised to roll out mobile body scanners on the streets to mass scan crowds of people, but Homeland Security has even gone a step further,developing Orwellian mind-reading devices that are set to be installed as part of unconstitutional checkpoints at public events.

We are offering our biggest prize fund ever of $15,000 for the entries that most successfully highlight the true agenda behind naked body scanners and where this is all heading unless we put our foot down now and help to build momentum behind public pressure to remove the scanners from airports.

***

Whatever Happened to "We the People"?

Whatever Happened to "We the People"?
By RALPH NADER

The twin swelling heads of Empire and Oligarchy are driving our country into an ever-deepening corporate state, wholly incompatible with democracy and the rule of law.

Once again the New York Times offers its readers the evidence. In its February 25, 2010 issue, two page-one stories confirm this relentless deterioration at the expense of so many innocent people.

The lead story illustrates that the type of massive speculation—casino capitalism, Business Week once called it—in complex derivatives is still going strong and exploiting the weak and powerless who pay the ultimate bill.

Titled “Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide,” the article shocks even readers hardened to tales of greed and abuse of power. Here are the opening paragraphs: “Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.”

“Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American Insurance International Group /AIG/, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.”

“These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company, or in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.”

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house—you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

These credit-default swaps increase the dreaded “systemic risk” that proliferates until it lands on the backs of taxpayers, workers and savers who pay the price. And if Greece goes, Spain or Portugal or Italy may be next and globalization will eventually bring the rapacious effects of mindless speculation to our shores.

Greece got into financial trouble for a variety of reasons, but it was widely reported that Goldman Sachs and other big banks showed them, for generous fees, how to hide the country’s true financial condition. Avarice at work.

Note two points. These derivatives are contracts involving hundreds of billions of dollars and are essentially unregulated. These transactions are also essentially untaxed, unlike Europe’s value added tax on manufacturing, wholesale and retail purchases. The absence of government restraints produces unlimited predation.

As astute investors in the real economy have said, when money for speculation replaces money for investment, the real economy suffers and so do real people. Remember the Wall Street collapse of 2008 and who is paying for the huge Washington bailout.

The other story shows that the Presidency has become a self-driven Empire outside the law and unaccountable to its citizens. The Times reports “how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.” Working with Pakistan’s counterpart agency, the C.I.A. has had some cover to do what it wants in carrying out “dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year,” according to the Times.

“Secret War” has been a phrase applied numerous times throughout the C.I.A’s history, even though the agency was initially created by Congress right after World War II to gather intelligence, not engage in lethal operations worldwide.

Unrestrained by either Congress or the federal courts, Presidents say they can and do order their subordinates to go anywhere in the world, penetrate into any country, if they alone say it is necessary to seize and destroy for what they believe is the national security. American citizens abroad are not excluded. Above the law and beyond the law spells the kind of lawlessness that the framers of our constitution abhorred in King George and limited in our country’s separation of powers.

Because our founders would not tolerate the President being prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, they placed the war-declaration and appropriations authorities in the Congress.

Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama believe they have unbridled discretion to engage in almost any overt or covert acts. That is a definition of Empire that flouts international law and more than one treaty which the United States helped shape and sign.

Equipped with remote and deadly technologies like drones flying over Pakistan and Afghanistan by operators in Nevada, many civilians have been slain, including those in wedding parties and homes. Still, it is taking 15,000 soldiers (U.S. and Afghan) with the most modern armaments to deal with three hundred Taliban fighters in Marja who with many other Afghans, for various motivations, want us out of their country. Former Marine Combat Captain Matthew Hoh described these reasons in his detailed resignation letter last fall.

Mr. Obama’s national security advisor, Ret. General James Jones estimated that there are about 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with the rest migrating to other countries. And one might add, those whose migrate are increasing their numbers because they cast themselves as fighting to expel the foreign invaders.

So many capable observers have made this point: occupation by our military fuels insurgencies and creates the conditions for more recruits and more mayhem. Even Bush’s military and national security people have made this point.

The American people must realize that their reckless government and corporate contractors are banking lots of revenge among the occupied regions that may come back to haunt. We have much more to lose by flouting international law than the suicidal terrorists reacting to what they believe is the West’s state terrorism against their people and the West’s historical backing of dictatorships which oppress their own population.

American was not designed for Kings and their runaway military pursuits. How tragic that we have now come to this entrenched imperium so loathed by the founding fathers and so forewarned by George Washington’s enduring farewell address.

Where are “We the People”?

King Obesity

By RALPH NADER
King Obesity sat grandly on a huge hassock atop a throne composed of solidified animal fat surveying his domain. The last thirty years have been bullish for Obesity, during which the number of seriously overweight children in America tripled. Eating fat, sugary and salty food while sitting for hours daily looking at video screens, being bused to and from school, and not having to bother with physical education, millions of lads and lassies were following orders.

An agitated messenger arrived in the throne room, breathing heavily from his travels. “Oh, my liege, Obesity, I have disturbing news. Michelle Obama, the First Lady, is launching a nationwide project she calls ‘Let’s Move’ to combat childhood obesity and shed billions of pounds of your stuff. She claims that success would reduce all types of diseases now and later, save on medical costs, as well as raise the energy level and self-esteem of millions of children. Here, Your Eminence, are the complete details of her plan.”

Obesity was a hard person to agitate. He had heard of these campaigns before. They went nowhere. He shook his heavy jowls and rubbed his many-layered belly, which was his way of saying “ho, hum, here we go again.”

His fleshy fingers clutched the plan by those people he always called the “lean and meaners,” and saw that improvement in the school lunch program’s menu, exercise at school, farmers’ markets and community gardens were at the top of the action list. Obesity chortled at his adversaries’ naivete and reticence.

For some reason, they avoided the real causes of his success in pouring massive amounts of empty calories into the mouths and down the throats of these children who cry out for more and more of them.

It is all about who owns the tongues of these youngsters, not who reaches their brains, mused Obesity. Ownership, Obesity knew, belonged to his most faithful allies—the vast fast food and food processing industry and their clever advertisers. For decades these companies have transformed millions of young tongues into fast food first responders.
The tongue has been turned against the brain for so long that the kids’ parents and even some grandparents accept this conditioned response. Look what they head for in the movies, what they choose in the supermarkets, what they order in the chain restaurants and takeouts. It’s all about the pipeline full of enlarged amounts of sugar, fat and salt, dude! Hour after hour, day after day, these pipelines are flowing to the delight of their video-addicted young customers.

Obesity has been defeating his principal opponents – Knowledge, Nutrition, and Health – for so long, he sleeps most of the day when he is not eating. So, Michelle Obama is going to concentrate on the schools. Hah, not a chance unless she wants a rebellion of the kids, whose habit is to cast aside much of the cooked and raw vegetables even when they’re hungry. The school vending machines are stocked with the perfect junk food and nearby stores can make up for any lack of ready supply.

So, though knowing better, school lunch managers, to quell any unrest, load up on sugar-glazed cookies called Crunchmania Cinnamon Buns and sugar-laden cereals for breakfast. At lunch there are dollops of modified cornstarch, lipolyzed butter oil, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar-flavored milk.

It wasn’t accidental that McDonald’s most successful words to get children to nag their parents were “It’s a Child’s World”. So, if sincere schools can’t get the children to eat their fruits and vegetables, what about the burdened, commuting parents? Can they overcome the daily barrage of junk food and drink that shapes their children into Pavlovian specimens—mere conditioned responders? Don’t be silly. They eat from the same menu.
Obesity continues to bet on the children’s tongues as wards of the irresistible junk food companies. After all, his ranks keep swelling and the Fat Pride movement is picking up steam.

The messenger, standing with military erectness, deferentially asked: “Oh master, what are you thinking?” Obesity looked down on him and rendered his conclusion: “So long as the lean and meaners do not focus on the battle for the tongues and their captors and instead concentrate on presenting nutritious foods to children while explaining why and how they are good for them, I say to you and all messengers of these tidings, do not worry, Obesity is and will continue to be king.”

“Why,” he continued, “just a few days before Michelle Obama’s multimedia White House event announcing ‘Let’s Move’ with former NFL runner, Tiki Barber, Barack Obama was with a group of schoolchildren. As if being at the White House was not enough excitement for the students, what did Mr. Obama do? He presented each of them with a box of red, white and blue M&Ms imprinted with the Presidential seal and his signature, no less.”
With that pontification, a smiling Obesity picked up a dozen triple deck cheeseburgers, a gallon of thick ice cream milk shakes, 100 Hostess Twinkies, topped off with a bucket of sweetened lard to start his third meal of the day.

Ralph Nader is the author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, a novel.