Save Wall Street! Congress Passes jo(B.S.) Act

Wednesday, April 4, 2012 by Creators.com

by Jim Hightower

 

Hallelujah, Washington has finally heard the people's cries for jobs! In an urgent bipartisan push, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands across the aisle to pass the JOBS Act. In this time of "The Great Hurt" — with widespread unemployment, middle-class incomes tumbling and the price of gasoline skyrocketing — we can all applaud our stalwarts in the capital city for meeting the No. 1 need of America's hard-hit economy: deregulating Wall Street.

Huh? I thought this was a jobs bill?

We'll get to that, but first (as always) Wall Street bankers must be served. Yes, them. The same priests of unmitigated arrogance who caused the disastrous financial crash that continues to rumble across our land. The same Wall Streeters we bailed out with trillions of public dollars.

That Wall Street is now sulking and skulking around the U.S. Capitol, insisting that it is an economic victim, held back from its profiteering potential by government regulations to protect the public from finaglers and fraudsters. "Free Wall Street," is their cry!

Clucking with sympathy, Congress' tea party Republicans have rushed to the side of these poor, rich financiers, pledging to unshackle them from "burdensome" regulations. Serving Wall Street is not all that popular these days with voters, however, so the Repubs and their Democratic allies have committed their own fraud in order to pass this bill, deceptively titled it the "JOBS Act" (even though it doesn't actually create any jobs).

Then they pushed it in the name of small businesses (even though they quietly defined "small" as a billion dollars a year in sales). In fact, the accent on the JOBS acronym should be on "B.S." Will it surprise you to learn that the word "jobs" isn't even included in the title? Instead, JOBS stands for "Jump-start Our Business Start-ups."

Alarmingly, the so-called "onerous" regulations that Congress eliminated primarily are the extremely useful financial disclosure rules passed a decade ago to prevent another Enron scandal.

The GOP House even tried to free financial hucksters from having to tell potential investors the names of the executives running the company and — get this — from providing such essential investor information as a description of what the company does and accurate accounting of its financial condition!

The last thing our economy needs is an open invitation for a new crop of Enroners to be unleashed to defraud the public — but that's the first thing that Washington agreed to do. It's a disgrace.

While the law was rushed to passage without any public hearings in the name of hard-hit American workers and small business, all of the benefits go to corporate and financial hucksters who begged Congress to roll back financial disclosure and anti-fraud rules that were designed to protect investors, consumers and taxpayers. It's just another "tinkle-down" economic scam written by and for Wall Street fraudsters. The law makes it easier for them to raise cash for their new business schemes by deceiving investors about the risk of loses, the true financial condition of the enterprise and the amount of capital being raked off by executives.

"Free us from those pesky old regulations," demanded the hucksters, "and we'll attract speculators for corporate startups that (if they succeed and don't set up operations offshore) could possibly, someday create a few low-wage American jobs. But don't hold us to that job thing."

Sure enough, Washington's Wall Street-hugging politicos did not. Instead, they merrily passed a bill upping the likelihood of more financial swindles without even getting a promise from the swindlers that America will get some good jobs in return. The JOBS Act should be called the ROBS Act.

Whose Corporations? Our Corporations!

The idea that corporations are obligated only to shareholders is a dangerous fad. Law and precedent say they owe a strong duty to the 99%.

By Ken Jacobson, AlterNet
Posted on April 3, 2012

Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?

Historically, corporations were understood to be responsible to a complex web of constituencies, including employees, communities, society at large, suppliers, and shareholders. But in the era of deregulation, the interests of shareholders began to trump all the others. How can we get corporations to recognize their responsibilities beyond this narrow focus? It begins in remembering that the philosophy of putting shareholder profits over all else is a matter of ideology which is not grounded in American law or tradition. In fact, it is no more than a dangerous fad.

The Myth of Profit Maximizing

“It is literally – literally – malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits. That’s a corporation’s duty to its shareholders.”

Since this sentiment is so familiar, it may come as a surprise that it is factually incorrect: In reality, there is nothing in any U.S. statute, federal or state, that requires corporations to maximize their profits. More surprising still is that, in this instance, the untruth was not uttered as propaganda by a corporate lobbyist but presented as a fact of life by one of the leading lights of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, Sen. Al Franken. Considering its source, Franken’s statement says less about the nature of a U.S. business corporation’s legal obligations – about which it simply misses the boat – than it does about the point to which laissez-faire ideology has wormed its way into the American mind.

The notion that the law imposes a duty to “maximize shareholder value” – a phrase capturing the notion that profits are mandatory and it is the shareholders who are entitled to them – is so readily accepted these days because it jibes perfectly with assumptions about economic life that constantly come down to us from business and political leaders, from academia, and from the preponderance of the media. It is unlikely to occur to anyone under the age of 40 to question this idea – or the idea that the highest, or even sole, purpose of a corporation is to make a profit – because they have rarely if ever been exposed to an alternative view. Those in middle age or beyond may have trouble remembering a time when the corporation’s focus on shareholders’ interests to the exclusion of all other constituencies –customers, employees, suppliers, creditors, the communities in which it operates, and the nation – did not seem second nature.

This narrow conception of corporate purpose has become predominant only in recent decades, however, and it flies in the face of a longer tradition in modern America that regards the responsibilities of a corporation as extending far beyond its shareholders. Owen D. Young, twice chairman of General Electric (1922-'40, 1942-'45) and 1930 Time magazine Man of the Year, told an audience at Harvard Business School in 1927 that the purpose of a corporation was to provide a good life in both material and cultural terms not only to its owners but also to its employees, and thereby to serve the larger goals of the nation:

“Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality in economic opportunity? No man is wholly free until he is both politically and economically free. No man with an uneconomic and failing business is free. He is unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society, and to himself. No man with an inadequate wage is free. He is unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society, and to himself. No man is free who can provide only for physical needs. He must also be in a position to take advantage of cultural opportunities. Business, as the process of coordinating men’s capital and effort in all fields of activity, will not have accomplished its full service until it shall have provided the opportunity for all men to be economically free.”

This holistic declaration was echoed, albeit in more specific and practical terms, by the chairman of another massive US corporation, Johnson & Johnson, during World War II. In his 1943 “Credo,” a somewhat modified version of which can be found on the company’s Web site today, Robert Wood Johnson II identified five distinct constituencies and established an order of priority in which they would be served by his firm. Johnson & Johnson’s “first responsibility,” he wrote, was to its customers: “the doctors, nurses, hospitals, mothers, and all others who use our products.” In second place came employees; in third, management; and in fourth, “the communities in which we live.” The interests of the stockholders, the corporation’s “fifth and last responsibility,” appear subordinate in his mind both to the firm’s sound operation, which depends on attention to the interests of the other constituencies, and to its long-term welfare:

“Business must make a sound profit. Reserves must be created, research must be carried on, adventurous programs developed, and mistakes paid for. Adverse times must be provided for, adequate taxes paid, new machines purchased, new plants built, new products launched, and new sales plans developed. We must experiment with new ideas. When these things have been done the stockholder should receive a fair return.”

A Shift in Accountability

By 1978 the era of deregulation had begun and signs had appeared that corporate attitudes were shifting. In that year another GE chief executive, Reginald H. Jones, wrote that the “central principle of the present system is that a director’s accountability is to the owners of the enterprise.” Having set aside the broader visions of corporate duty held by his GE predecessor Young and by Johnson, Jones in effect moved the firm’s responsibility to its shareholders from last on the list to first: “If this principle is abandoned, if other corporate constituencies are placed on a plane with shareowners, if directors are required to represent directly the interests of nonshareowner groups…there will be no clear measure of directors’ responsibility because there will be no clear consensus on primary corporate goals.”

His personal preferences aside, however, Jones realized that Americans were not yet ready to accept firms’ turning their backs on the general good, and that he and his fellow executives had something to gain from being accommodating:

“If the concern is social responsiveness, or ‘public accountability,’ the short answer is that in this country at this time, no large corporate enterprise can afford to be perceived as oblivious or contemptuous of matters of genuine social or public concern. These enterprises have to earn from the general public and their political representatives – and earn from year to year – the right to continue to function without radical new governmental constraints.”

The dawn of Ronald Reagan’s presidency found the corporate community on the fence. The “Statement on Corporate Responsibility” issued in October 1981 by the Business Roundtable, which groups the CEOs of the largest US firms, recognizes six constituencies – customers, employees, communities, society at large, suppliers, and shareholders – as forming the “web of complex, often competing relationships” within which corporations operate. It accepts the idea that “shareholders have a special relationship to the corporation” but doesn’t allow their interests to trump all others:

“Balancing the shareholder’s expectations of maximum return against other priorities is one of the fundamental problems confronting corporate management. The shareholders must receive a good return but the legitimate concerns of other constituencies also must have appropriate attention. Striking the appropriate balance, some leading managers have come to believe that the primary role of corporations is to help meet society’s legitimate needs for goods and services and to earn a reasonable return for the shareholders in the process. They are aware that this must be done in a socially acceptable manner. They believe that by giving enlightened consideration to balancing the legitimate claims of all its constituents, a corporation will best serve the interest of the shareholders.”

Even after eight years of Reagan and amid the burgeoning of free-market ideology, the Business Roundtable remained reluctant to place shareholders first, affirming in 1990 that “corporations are chartered to serve both their shareholders and society as a whole” and adding creditors to the 1981 list of constituencies, which it otherwise retained intact. It was only in 1997, in a new statement whose title substituted “Corporate Governance” for “Corporate Responsibility,” that it renounced attempts to balance the interests of corporate constituents and, having reversed its view, argued that taking care of shareholders was the best way to take care of the remaining stakeholders, rather than the other way around:

“In the Business Roundtable’s view, the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders; the interests of other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to stockholders. The notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors.”

This doctrine, known as “shareholder primacy,” now reigns in the corporate world today, and it has so increased the power of those whom it has benefited that it will not be easy to dislodge. Those who propagate it believe, or would have us believe, that it is based in law; in fact, it is supported by no more than ideology. They believe, or would have us believe, that it reflects incontrovertible and eternal truths; in fact, it is an expression of transient self-interest. They believe, or would have us believe, that it honors long precedent – but, as we have seen, its ascendency is recent, and, rather than honor it undermines precedent. Yet despite these contradictions, corporations and their allies have been exceedingly successful at selling their viewpoint to the American people.

An important step toward countering their influence can come in refusing to accept the legitimacy of shareholder primacy. Up to now, this fad has had the power to neutralize opposition in part because it has obscured the tool needed to challenge it: a clear understanding of the economic realities. For this reason, we must learn what contributions all stakeholders – not just the shareholders, but all the others as well – make to the corporation, and the extent of the risks and rewards those contributions truly entail. We must learn about the interrelation of business and government in all its complexity, going far beyond the headlines about taxes and regulation to discover who needs whom for what, and who does what for whom. And we must learn what rights corporations legitimately hold, what privileges they enjoy, and what duties they are obliged to carry out.

Without this effort, without this knowledge, we are in danger of continuing to be held captive by a fad.

"It is time for a new approach on marijuana policy," Drug Policy Coalition says to Obama

Six National Drug Policy Organizations Call on President Obama to End Unnecessary Assault on Medical Marijuana Providers
Wednesday, 04 April 2012

Contact: Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, (202) 483-5500
Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, paul@norml.org

Washington, DC -- In the wake of recent attacks on medical marijuana providers and patients by multiple branches of the federal government, including Monday's raids on Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA, a coalition of six national drug policy reform organizations is appealing to President Obama and his administration to follow its own previously stated policies respecting state medical marijuana laws. In the letter, posted in full below, the organizations call on the Obama administration to bring an end to the federal government's ongoing campaign to undermine state efforts to regulate safe and legal access to medical marijuana for those patients who rely on it.

The Obama Administration's National Drug Control Strategy Report 2012, reportedly being released in the coming days, is expected to cling to failed and outdated marijuana policies which further cement the control of the marijuana trade in the hands of drug cartels and illegal operators, endangering both patients in medical marijuana states and citizens everywhere. The members of this coalition stand together with members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, current and former Latin American leaders whose countries are being ravaged by drug cartels, state officials from five medical marijuana states, and tens of millions of Americans in their call for a more rational approach to marijuana policy.

###

THE LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA:

April 4, 2012 

President Barack ObamaThe White House
Washington D.C. 20500
Via Fax: 202-456-2461 

Dear Mr. President: 

Our coalition represents the views of tens of millions of Americans who believe the war on medical marijuana patients and providers you are fighting is misguided and counterproductive. As your administration prepares to release its annual National Drug Control Strategy, we want to speak with one voice and convey our deep sense of anger and disappointment in your lack of leadership on this issue. 

Voters and elected officials in sixteen states and the District of Columbia have determined that the medical use of marijuana should be legal. In many of these states, the laws also include means for providing medical marijuana patients safe access to this medicine. These laws allowing for the cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana actually shift control of marijuana sales from the criminal underground to state-licensed, taxed, and regulated producers and distributors. 

Instead of celebrating - or even tolerating - this state experimentation, which has benefited patients and taken profits away from drug cartels, you have turned your back as career law enforcement officials have run roughshod over some of the most professional and well-regulated medical marijuana providers. We simply cannot understand why you have reneged on your administration's earlier policy of respecting state medical marijuana laws. 

Our frustration and confusion over your administration's uncalled-for attacks on state-authorized medical marijuana providers was best summed up by John McCowen, the chair of the Mendocino County (CA) board of supervisors, who said, "It's almost as if there was a conscious effort to drive [medical marijuana cultivation and distribution] back underground. My opinion is that's going to further endanger public safety and the environment - the federal government doesn't seem to care about that." 

The National Drug Control Strategy you are about to release will no doubt call for a continuation of policies that have as a primary goal the ongoing and permanent control of the marijuana trade by drug cartels and organized crime. We cannot and do not endorse the continued embrace of this utterly failed policy. We stand instead with Latin American leaders, members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and the vast majority of people who voted you into office in recognizing that it is time for a new approach on marijuana policy. 

With approximately 50,000 people dead in Mexico over the past five years as the result of drug war-related violence, we hope that you will immediately reconsider your drug control strategy and will work with, not against, states and organizations that are attempting to shift control of marijuana cultivation and sales, at least as it applies to medical marijuana, to a controlled and regulated market. 

Sincerely, 

Drug Policy Alliance (DPA)
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)
Marijuana Policy Project (MPP)
National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA)
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) 

cc: Eric Holder, Attorney General, Department of Justice
James Cole, Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice
Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

Verizon's Cozy Deal With Cable Would Create a Wireless Duopoly

Tuesday, 03 April 2012

By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report
Verizon Wireless and America's biggest cable companies want to sell you everything in one package: wireless, broadband, cable TV and a telephone landline. This might sound like an easy option, but consumer groups say that the consolidation deals behind these service bundles could crush competition in the market and raise prices for everyone.

Verizon Wireless plans to purchase $3.6 billion worth of unused wireless spectrum from a joint venture representing the big cable providers Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks. Verizon is also buying $315 million worth of spectrum from the Cox cable company. In a separate deal that anti-trust watchdogs brought to the attention of regulators, Verizon and the four cable companies will also market each others' products under a controversial joint-marketing agreement. Consumers could, for instance, buy a wireless plan from Verizon when purchasing cable Internet from Comcast.

Verizon claims it's trying to boost 4G coverage, meet the growing demand created by smartphone technology and offer customers some one-stop shopping. Opponents of the deal, however, say Verizon already holds the greatest amount of prime mobile broadband spectrum. If the proposed deal goes through, Verizon and its biggest competitor, AT&T, would hold more wireless spectrum nationally than all other providers combined and essentially become a market duopoly, according to Parul Desai of the Consumer Union, which publishes Consumer Reports.

Desai said the whole deal would reduce competition among all the companies involved. Verizon is essentially giving the cable companies control of the landlines and the cable companies are giving Verizon control of the wireless spectrum. Verizon would have little incentive to compete with the cable companies with its FiOS high-speed wired Internet service, and cable companies would have little incentive to compete for wireless service. Time Warner, Cox and Comcast already operate as monopolies in some regions, Desai said, and the deal could leave consumers with little or no choice in landline and broadband providers.

Desai said the cable companies had begun to invest in wireless, which is why the companies have unused spectrum to sell, but once they realized it would be tough to compete with Verizon Wireless and AT&T, they decided to sell out their holdings in exchange for a firmer grip on landlines.

"The wireless side will be dominated by Verizon Wireless, and they'll get out of the landline game, and cable will get out of the wireless game so they can dominate the landline game," Desai said. "... So what happens when you sell the spectrum and it continues to go to the top two players? It makes it easier to squeeze out some of the smaller players."

Two smaller telecommunication firms, Level 3 Communications and MetroPCS, have filed briefs with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opposing the deal. Desai said the deal isn't just bad for smaller firms; it's also bad for consumers, who will be left with fewer options and could eventually pay higher prices because Verizon and the cable companies will not be competing with one another.

Rural consumers could be especially affected because the companies will have less incentive to expand infrastructure to underserved areas, and by reducing competition, rural consumers could pay higher prices and even lose services, according to Edyael Casaperalta, who works to bring high-speed Internet access to rural areas with the Center for Rural Strategies. Rural residents are often low income, Casaperalta said, and may not be able to afford bundled packages offered under the joint-marketing agreement.

"Knowing that there's a lack of interest in rural customers, there's already less competition for rural customers to be able to get better services and better prices, and this type of transaction will create even less competition, if any at all," Casaperalta said.

The Justice Department and the FCC are currently reviewing the proposed deal, and the FCC must approve the spectrum transfers. In December, just days before Verizon announced its deal with the cable companies, AT&T and T-Mobile abandoned a $39 billion merger andplaced the blame on regulators. AT&T canceled the acquisition, which critics feared would also create a wireless duopoly, after resistance in the FCC and legal challenges spooked investors.

Congress is also weighing in on the Verizon deal. On March 21, the Senate Antitrust Committee held a hearing on the deal titled "The Verizon/Cable Deals: Harmless Collaboration or a Threat to Competition and Consumers?" The hearing featured Comcast and Verizon executives butting heads with consumer advocates.

Verizon Executive Vice President Randal Milch told the committee that Verizon needs more spectrum to respond to the growing demand caused by the "explosive" use of smartphones, tablets, and other data-intensive devices.

"We are only buying spectrum not currently in commercial use in order to put it to use serving customers, and no customer will see fewer choices or increased prices as a result of this transaction," Milch said.

Joel Kelsey of the Free Press, a media policy group, told the committee that it's always dangerous to consumers when media consolidations reduces competition.

"Allowing for further consolidation in this marketplace will only drive prices higher, reduce consumer choice, and have drastic consequences on the rate of innovation as the companies involved are freed from competition and find diminishing value in investing in better infrastructure," Kelsey said.

The proposed deal also raised ire among unions, but instead of outright opposing a deal that labor groups see as a potential job killer, two unions have proposed stipulations to the FCC. The Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have asked the FCC to only approve the deal if Verizon agrees to continue developing its FiOS Internet service, which they fear could go under if Verizon decides not to compete in the landline market. The unions also asked the FCC to prohibit cross-marketing services in Verizon territory and require that the companies allow customers to buy individual services at bundle prices without buying the whole service bundle.

Dark Energy Confirmed

How ancient sound waves shaped the entire universe
BY ALASDAIR WILKINS APR 3, 2012

Just 30,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe started singing. Vast soundwaves rang out and expanded through the primordial cosmos, their ripples determining the universe's large-scale structure. And this all fits perfectly with one particularly theory of dark energy.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS, has just completed a massive survey of a whopping 327,349 galaxies. These galaxies are on average about six billion light-years away, which was quite possibly the most momentous time in the universe's history since the Big Bang itself. Six billion years ago, the universe reached a tipping point, where the matter in the universe became spread out enough that the force of gravity could no longer slow down the universe's attraction. Instead, the repulsive force of dark energy took hold, and the universe has been speeding up its expansion ever since.

By studying these hundreds of thousands of galaxies, all dating back to right about the time dark energy emerged as the dominant force in the universe, cosmologists can hopefully learn more about this mysterious...something. Dark energy is everywhere - it likely accounts for about 73% of all the mass-energy in the universe - and fifteen years of astronomical observations tell us that it's absolutely essential to explaining the behavior of the universe.

And yet, it's difficult to even conceptualize what it is even in the vaguest of terms, in part because we may not even have the physics yet to explain what it is. (In case that makes you skeptical of dark energy's very existence, I'd recommend our own Dr. Dave Goldberg's spirited defense of the stuff.) The hope is that the data we get from BOSS - which includes their distances from each other and the universe's age and rate of expansion relative to each galaxy - can help eliminate some dark energy models while illuminating others.

The good news from BOSS is that it really does look like astrophysicists are on the right track when it comes to dark energy, and one model in particular is coming away looking very good. Central to these findings are baryon acoustic oscillations. These are the primordial soundwaves I mentioned earlier. These acoustic waves were formed just 30,000 years after the Big Bang, as regular matter started collapsing around dense dark matter.

The resultant pressure forged these waves, which oscillated outwards for about 350,000 years, tracing out the future structure of the universe as they went. By the time the universe had cooled enough to stall these waves, matter had clumped around the center and edges of the wave, causing more galaxies to form in these areas than elsewhere.

That's the theory behind these baryon acoustic oscillations, or BAOs, and it turns out all the galaxies spotted by BOSS are exactly where they should be according to the BAO model...assuming dark energy was also there to direct how these countless galaxies cluster together. Speaking to BBC News, Professor Will Percival of the University of Portsmouth explains how all the measurements confirm both BAOs and dark energy:

"Because you can trace this pattern all the way through the Universe, it tells you a lot about its content. If it had a different content - it had more matter, or it had less matter, or it had been expanding at a different rate - then you'd see a different map of the galaxies. So, the fundamental observation is this map. What we find is everything is very consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity, coupled with the cosmological constant that he put into his equations. He put it in originally to make the Universe static, and then took it out. But if we put constant in with the opposite sign, we can get acceleration. And if we do that, we find equations that are perfectly consistent with what we're seeing."

In particular, the BOSS survey found a number of pairs of galaxies that were separated by a distance of some 500 milllion light-years. That's the precise distance predicted by the cosmological constant. This constant is simply the idea that the amount of repulsive energy - dark energy, in other words - is uniform across all space, and this amount is proportional to the size of the universe.

The cosmological constant isn't necessarily an elegant solution, insofar as it introduces a new arbitrary constant that is apparently hardwired into the structure of the universe just because. And yet all this BOSS data suggests that it's the cosmological constant at the heart of dark energy, even if that simply shifts the big mystery back one step. Still, for anyone looking for real, tangible evidence of dark energy's existence, look no further than BOSS.

And there's still plenty more where that came from. The survey itself is still only about a third complete, and the more galaxies cosmologists have to play around with, the more we can restrict with models of dark energy work and which do not. There are dark energy tests that won't work with just a few hundred thousand galaxies that could reveal major breakthroughs if we have millions to work with.

That's why the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, slated to launch around 2019, is so exciting - it is set to measure the precise positions of some 50 million galaxies going back over 10 billion years. Dark energy is officially running out of places to hide.

arXiv via BBC News.

99% Spring

Tornado takes SUV for a sky ride

(Locally, we got pounded by tornadoes. No reported deaths so far.--jef)

by CRAIG CIVALE | WFAA
Posted on April 4, 2012

FORNEY — With all the damage we've seen in this Kaufman County community northeast of Dallas, it is amazing that no one was seriously hurt.

No one knows that better than Mary Anne Quiñonez, who was picking up her daughter Lucia at Crosby Elementary School just a few blocks away from the epicenter of tornado damage in the Diamond Creek subdivision.

Her split-second decision to get out of her sport utility vehicle and go into the school likely saved her life.

The SUV ended up in the middle of a field, heavily damaged after being swept more than 100 yards into the sky by the menacing funnel cloud.

"That's my car," Quiñonez said as she was shown a cell phone photo of what was left of it. Her decision to ride out the storm with her daughter inside the school turned out to be the correct one.

"It was like banging against the school; you could hear it banging," Lucia Quiñonez said.

As they hunkered down in the dark with other students and teachers, the tornado tore through, ripping off the school's roof; flipping cars in the parking lot; and sending Quiñonez' SUV so far, she couldn't find it.

"I turned to my daughter and I said, 'Lucia, my car is gone!' And she looked and said, 'It's gone!'"

It wasn't until she saw the aerial images from HD Chopper 8 that she finally figured out what had happened.

"I saw a live shot of you guys focusing on my car," Quiñonez said. "We literally, all of us, were at the TV ... oh my God, that is my car!"

The Quiñonez family is just one of scores who are giving thanks that they were not seriously injured in the disaster.

Crosby Elementary School will be closed on Wednesday as the Forney ISD evaluates the damage.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew was being enforced at the Diamond Creek subdivision to discourage looting in the 75 homes that were damaged.

How America's Security-Industrial Complex Went Insane

If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?
By Rachel Maddow, Crown Publishing
Posted on April 3, 2012

The following is an excerpt from Rachel Maddow's new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.

###

It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.

Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khān (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Khān often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.

There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Khān were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property barons of Wazir Akbar Khān: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.

No one sold the American people on this incarnation of Wazir Akbar Khān as one of the desired outcomes of all those hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent in Afghanistan. But it is what we have built at Ground Zero Afghanistan. Whatever we were aiming at, this is the manifest result.

Consider also the new hundred-million-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Fallujah, Anbar Province, Iraq, which provides only spotty wastewater treatment to the people of that city. In 2004, after the US military all but demolished Fallujah in the deadliest urban battle of the Iraq War, it was decided that the way to turn the residents of the recalcitrant Sunni Triangle away from Al-Qaeda and toward their country’s fledgling government would be to build a sewage system for all of Fallujah. The initial $33 million contract was let to a South Carolina company in June 2004, while the city was still smoldering. There was no time to waste. The Bush administration’s Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office identified the sewage system as a “key national reconciliation issue.” The goal was to have it up and running by the beginning of 2006.

Nearly five years after the deadline, having clocked in at three times its initial budget, there was still not a single residence on line. Accordingly, the plan was “descoped”—scaled down—to serve just a third of the city. In the midst then of doing a third of the work for triple the money, there was talk of walking away from the project without connecting even that one-third of Fallujah residences to the aborted plant. We had built a shit-processing plant that didn’t process shit.

And it gets worse. According to a 2008 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, about 10 percent of the money paid to Iraqi subcontractors for the Fallujah project ended up in the hands of “terrorist organizations.” According to that same report, residents near two particular pump stations “[might] become angry” if the system ever did come on line, because “funding constraints” made “odor control facilities” impractical. Even households that were not part of the collection system would still be subject to what the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works delicately called the “big stink.” The eighty-page report also noted, with dry finality, “The project file lacked any documentation to support that the provisional Iraqi government wanted this project in the first place.”

When, finally, late in 2011, seven years into the project, at a cost of $108 million, we managed to get a quarter of the homes in Fallujah hooked into that system, this partial accomplishment was not met with resounding huzzahs. “In the end it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy,” the Special Inspector General said in 2011. “It is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the investment.” A hundred million American dollars, partially diverted to the groups fighting US troops, to build (poorly) a giant, unwanted wastewater-treatment project that provides nothing but the “big stink” for three-quarters of the city. No one would argue for something like this as a good use of US tax dollars. But it is in fact what we bought.

###

Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay.

The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.

It is a big, big idea, and perhaps necessary—the financial commitment to it implies at least that we think it is. But it turns out Liberty Crossing is a bureaucratic haystack into which the now even more vast intelligence community tosses its shiniest needles. When a businessman relayed to CIA agents in Nigeria that his son seemed to be under the spell of terrorists and had gone to Yemen, perhaps for training, that duly reported needle got sucked into the fifty-thousand-reports-per-year haystack, only to be discovered after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to set off a bomb he’d stuffed into his underpants. “The complexity of this system defies description,” a retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence specialist told the Post reporters. “We can’t effectively assess whether it’s making us more safe.”

###

If no one knows if it’s making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed? Liberty Crossing is slated to almost double in size over the next decade. Remember the fierce debate in Congress over whether or not it’s worth it to do that? No? Me neither. But we keep building it. We keep chugging along.

National security is a real imperative for our country—for any country. But the connection between that imperative and what we do about it has gone as frowsy as my hometown’s little pump station in high August. Our national security policy isn’t much related to its stated justifications anymore. To whatever extent we do argue and debate what defense and intelligence policy ought to be, that debate—our political process—doesn’t actually determine what we do. We’re not directing that policy anymore; it just follows its own course. Which means we’ve effectively lost control of a big part of who we are as a country. And we’ve broken faith with some of the best advice the founders ever gave us.

Our constitutional inheritance didn’t point us in this direction. If the colonists hadn’t rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn’t exist. The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. The founders feared that maintaining one would drain our resources in the same way that maintaining the eighteenth-century British military had burdened the colonies. They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it. Those worries about the inevitable incentives to war were part of what led to the division of government at the heart of our Constitution, building into the structure of our new country a deliberate peaceable bias.

But in the past generation or two, we’ve drifted off that historical course. The steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.

The good news is we don’t need a radical new vision of post–Cold War American power. We just need a “small c” conservative return to our constitutional roots, a course correction. This book is about how and why we’ve drifted. It wasn’t inevitable. And it’s fixable.


Copyright © 2012 Rachel Maddow From the book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

The Department Of Homeland Security Is Buying 450 Million New Bullets

Eloise Lee | Mar. 28, 2012 | Business Insider
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office is getting an "indefinite delivery" of an "indefinite quantity" of .40 caliber ammunition from defense contractor ATK.

U.S. agents will receive a maximum of 450 million rounds over five years, according to a press release on the deal.

The high performance HST bullets are designed for law enforcement and ATK says they offer "optimum penetration for terminal performance."

This refers to the the bullet's hollow-point tip that passes through barriers and expands for a bigger impact without the rest of the bullet getting warped out of shape: "this bullet holds its jacket in the toughest conditions."

We've also learned that the Department has an open bid for a stockpile of rifle ammo. Listed on the federal business opportunities network, they're looking for up to 175 million rounds of .223 caliber ammo to be exact. The .223 is almost exactly the same round used by NATO forces, the 5.56 x 45mm.

The deadline for earlier this month was extended because the right contractor just hadn't come along.

Looks like the Department of Homeland Security means business.

Even worse than SOPA: New CISPA cybersecurity bill will censor the Web

Published: 04 April, 2012 - RT
An onrush of condemnation and criticism kept the SOPA and PIPA acts from passing earlier this year, but US lawmakers have already authored another authoritarian bill that could give them free reign to creep the Web in the name of cybersecurity.

As congressmen in Washington consider how to handle the ongoing issue of cyberattacks, some legislators have lent their support to a new act that, if passed, would let the government pry into the personal correspondence of anyone of their choosing.

H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in America’s war against cyberattacks. But the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties. Critics have already come after CISPA for the capabilities that it will give to seemingly any federal entity that claims it is threatened by online interactions, but unlike the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Acts that were discarded on the Capitol Building floor after incredibly successful online campaigns to crush them, widespread recognition of what the latest would-be law will do has yet to surface to the same degree.

Kendall Burman of the Center for Democracy and Technology tells RT that Congress is currently considering a number of cybersecurity bills that could eventually be voted into law, but for the group that largely advocates an open Internet, she warns that provisions within CISPA are reason to worry over what the realities could be if it ends up on the desk of President Barack Obama. So far CISPA has been introduced, referred and reported by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and expects to go before a vote in the first half of Congress within the coming weeks.

“We have a number of concerns with something like this bill that creates sort of a vast hole in the privacy law to allow government to receive these kinds of information,” explains Burman, who acknowledges that the bill, as written, allows the US government to involve itself into any online correspondence, current exemptions notwithstanding, if it believes there is reason to suspect cyber crime. As with other authoritarian attempts at censorship that have come through Congress in recent times, of course, the wording within the CISPA allows for the government to interpret the law in such a number of degrees that any online communication or interaction could be suspect and thus unknowingly monitored.

In a press release penned last month by the CDT, the group warned then that CISPA allows Internet Service Providers to “funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls.

The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient,” reads the warning.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, another online advocacy group, has also sharply condemned CISPA for what it means for the future of the Internet. “It effectively creates a ‘cybersecurity'’ exemption to all existing laws,” explains the EFF, who add in a statement of their own that “There are almost no restrictions on what can be collected and how it can be used, provided a company can claim it was motivated by ‘cybersecurity purposes.’”

What does that mean? Both the EFF and CDT say an awfully lot. Some of the biggest corporations in the country, including service providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter or AT&T, could copy confidential information and send them off to the Pentagon if pressured, as long as the government believes they have reason to suspect wrongdoing. In a summation of their own, the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, explains that “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy” either “a system or network of a government or private entity” is reason enough for Washington to reach in and read any online communiqué of their choice.

The authors of CISPA say the bill has been made “To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities,” but not before noting that the legislation could be used “and for other purposes,” as well — which, of course, are not defined.

“Cyber security, when done right and done narrowly, could benefit everyone,” Burman tells RT. “But it needs to be done in an incremental way with an arrow approach, and the heavy hand that lawmakers are taking with these current bills . . . it brings real serious concerns.”

So far CISPA has garnered support from over 100 representatives in the House who are favoring this cybersecurity legislation without taking into considerations what it could do to the everyday user of the Internet. And while the backlash created by opponents of SOPA and PIPA has not materialized to the same degree yet, Burman warns Congress that it could be only a matter of time before concerned Americans step up to have their say.

“One of the lessons we learned in the reaction to SOPA and PIPA is that when Congress tries to legislate on things that are going to affect Internet users’ experience, the Internet users are going to pay attention,” says Burman. H.R. 3523, she cautions, “Definitely could affect in a very serious way the internet experience.” Luckily, adds Burman, “People are starting to notice.” Given the speed that the latest censorship bill could sneak through Congress, however, anyone concerned over the future of the Internet should be on the lookout for CISPA as it continues to be considered on Capitol Hill.

The Corporate Media Crisis

Everything Old is New Again
by ROBERT JENSEN

(This essay is excerpted from the foreword of  Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era, editors Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks.)

The managers of commercial news organizations in the United States love to proclaim their independence from the corporate suits who sign their paychecks. Extolling the unbreachable “firewall” between the journalistic and the business sides of the operation, these editors and news directors wax eloquent about their ability to pursue any story without interference from the corporate front office.

“No one from corporate headquarters has ever called me to tell me what to run in my paper,” one editor (let’s call him Joe) told me proudly after hearing my critique of the overwhelmingly commercial news media system in the United States.

I asked Joe if it were possible that he simply had internalized the value system of the folks who run the corporation (and, by extension, the folks who run the world), and therefore they never needed to give him direct instructions.

He rejected that, reasserting his independence from any force outside his newsroom. I countered:

“Let’s say, for the purposes of discussion, that you and I were equally capable journalists in terms of professional skills, and we were both reasonable candidates for the job of editor-in-chief that you hold. If we had both applied for the job, do you think your corporate bosses would have ever considered me for the position given my politics? Would I, for even a second, have been seen by them to be a viable candidate for the job?”

Joe’s politics are pretty conventional, well within the range of mainstream Republicans and Democrats – he supports big business and U.S. supremacy in global politics and economics. In other words, he’s a capitalist and imperialist. I am on the political left, anti-capitalist and critical of the U.S. empire. On some political issues, Joe and I would agree, but we diverge sharply on the core questions of the nature of the economy and foreign policy.

Joe pondered my question and conceded that I was right, that his bosses would never hire someone with my politics, no matter how qualified, to run one of their newspapers. The conversation trailed off, and we parted without resolving our differences.

I would like to think my critique at least got Joe to question his platitudes, but I never saw any evidence of that. In his subsequent writing and public comments that I read and heard, Joe continued to assert that a news media system dominated by for-profit corporations was the best way to produce the critical, independent journalism that citizens in a democracy needed. After he retired from the paper, he signed on as a “senior adviser” with a high-powered lobbying/public relations firm, apparently without a sense of irony, or shame.

The collapse of mainstream journalism’s business model has given news managers less time to pontificate as they scramble to figure out how to stay afloat, but the smug, self-satisfied attitude hasn’t changed much.

As a former journalist, I certainly understood Joe’s position. When I was a working reporter and editor, I would have asserted my journalistic independence in similar fashion, a viewpoint that reflected the dominant assumptions of newsroom culture. We saw ourselves as non-ideological and uncontrolled. We knew there were owners and bosses whose political views clearly were not radical, and we knew we worked in a larger ideological system. But we working journalists were convinced that we were not constrained.

It was not until I got some critical distance from the daily grind of journalism that I learned there were compelling analyses of the news media that questioned those assumptions I had taken for granted. That media criticism, which had taken off in the 1970s on the heels of the progressive and radical social movements of the ‘60s, was a rich source of new insights for me, first as a graduate student and later as a professor.

But that was only part of my education about the political economy of journalism. As is so often the case, I needed to look to the past to better understand the present. While I had immersed myself in contemporary criticism, I had been slow to look at history, and turning to the critiques of journalism from the progressive/populist era of the early 20th century proved fruitful. Early critics of the commercial news media were pointing out the ways that media owners’ interest in profit undermined journalists’ desire to serve the public interest. Owners and managers are interested in news that serves the bottom line, while journalists are supposed to be pursuing news that serves democracy.

The writings collected and analyzed in this volume provide that historical context. This material is important for the ways it reminds us of a simple truth: An overwhelmingly commercial, for-profit media system based on advertising will never adequately serve citizens in a democracy. But while history helps us recognize simple truths, it does not lead to simplistic predictions – we study history not only to identify the continuities, but also to help us understand the effects of the inevitable changes in institutions and systems.

Indeed, news media and society as a whole have changed over the century. Most obvious are the recent economic changes that have undermined the business model of commercial media. Newspapers and broadcast television stations were wildly profitable through the 20th century, which subsidized an annoying cockiness on the part of owners, managers, and working journalists. Competition from digital media has wiped that smug smile off the face of mainstream journalism, leaving everyone scrambling to come up with a new model. But to focus only on the recent economic crisis would be to miss other trends in the past century that are at least as important.

Reporters who were once members of the working class have become quasi-professionals, and that professionalization of journalism has had effects both positive (elevating ethical standards) and negative (institutionalizing illusory claims to neutrality). Too often journalists in the second half of the 20th century acted as part of the power structure rather than critics of it, as reporters and editors increasingly identified with the powerful people and institutions they were covering rather than being true adversaries.

In the 21st century, the idea of professional journalism – whatever its problems and limitations – is under assault from a pseudo-journalism driven by right-wing ideology. The assertion that the problem with media is that they are too liberal is attractive to many ordinary people who feel alienated from a centrist/liberal elite, which appears unconcerned with their plight. But the right-wing populism offered up by conservatives obscures the way in which elites from that perspective are equally unconcerned with the struggles of most citizens.

So, we sit at a strange time: Professional journalism is inadequate because of its ideological narrowness and subordination to power, but the attacks on professional journalism typically are ideologically even narrower and are rooted in a misguided analysis of power. Some of us are tempted to applaud the erosion of the model of professional journalism we find inadequate for democracy, but a more politicized model for journalism likely will follow the right-wing propaganda that has dominated in the United States in recent decades.

Does history offer insights as we struggle to create a more democratic news media? My reading of the past century leaves me focused on two points.

First, we have to be clear about what we mean by “democracy.” The elites in the United States prefer a managerial conception of democracy based on the idea that in a complex society, ordinary people can participate most effectively by choosing between competing groups of political managers. A participatory conception understands democracy as a system in which ordinary people have meaningful ways to participate in the formation of public policy, not just in the selection of elites to rule them.

Second, we must recognize that expansions of individual freedom do not automatically translate into a deepening of democracy. Though legal guarantees of freedom of expression and political association are more developed today, there is less vibrant grassroots political organizing compared with the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In other writing I have referred to this as the “more freedom/ less democracy” paradox, and it is central to understanding the perilous political situation we face. (see Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004), Chapter 4, “More Freedom, Less Democracy: American Political Culture in the Twentieth Century,” pp. 55–76.)

The lesson I take away: Real democracy means real participation, which comes not from voting in elections or posting on blogs, but from a lifelong commitment to challenging power from the bottom up.

The problem, in short, is not just a media that doesn’t serve democracy, but a political, economic, and social system that doesn’t serve democracy. Paradoxically, radical movements have over the past century won an expansion of freedom, but much of the citizenry has become less progressive and less politically active at the grassroots. Concentrated wealth has adapted, becoming more sophisticated in its use of propaganda and skillful in its manipulation of the political process.

Journalism’s claim to a special role in democracy is based on an assertion of independence. The corporate/commercial model puts limits on journalists’ ability to follow crucial stories and critique systems and structures of power. Flinging the doors open to a more ideological journalism in a society dominated by well-funded right-wing forces will not create the space for truly independent journalism that challenges power.

The simple truth is that a more democratic media requires a more democratic culture and economy. The media critics in this volume articulated that idea in the context of their time. We need to continue that tradition.

No Fault Corporate Crime

Holding Holder to Account
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Ten years ago, if you wanted to quickly find out what was going on in the world of corporate crime, you would just type in the word “fined” into a news database.

Up would come a series of penalties or fines brought against big corporations by federal law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C.

Exxon fined for pollution.

Or ADM fined for antitrust violations.

But over the past decade, corporate lobbyists have worked their will in Washington, and enforcement against corporations has been watered down to the point where now corporate crime enforcement is way down the list.

Last night I typed “fined” into Google News – and these were the top five stories that came up:

1. A french perfume executive was fined for making racist remarks.
2. Fifteen people were fined for spitting in India.
3. The NBA fined Los Angeles Clippers foward Reggie Evans $25,000 for making an obscene gesture.
4. Only twenty five dog owners in northeast Scotland have were fined in the last year for dog fouling.
5. And the Houston Dynamo soccer midfielder Colin Clark was fined for using a gay slur at a ball boy.

Story number six did have to do with corporate crime – but it was from Europe.

Last week, the EU fined 14 air-shipping companies a combined $225 million for price fixing.

Now, try typing in the phrase “corporate crime” into Google News.

The phrase has been pretty much banished from American journalism and politics.

So, when you type in the words “corporate crime” into Google News, you will primarily see reports from overseas say the Irish Times or a newspaper in Australia – or you will see a quote from Ralph Nader, or a story from Corporate Crime Reporter.

Last night, I typed in the words “corporate crime” into Google News, and much to my surprise the first thing that came up was a Reuters story about the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

I have been reporting on Holder since he took office three years ago.

As far as I can tell, last month was the first time in his three years as Attorney General that he uttered the phrase “corporate crime.”

And this is what he said at a meeting of state Attorney Generals in Washington.

“We’re gonna make some news with regard to holding individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes,” Holder said.

Get it?

We’re going to hold individuals responsible.

Not hold corporations responsible.

Hold individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes.

Now, what Holder said here is important.

Because he comes from a corporate law firm – Covington & Burling – where he represented primarily corporations, not individuals.

And when he leaves office, Holder most likely will return to Covington & Burling.

Where he will represent primarily corporations – not individuals – against federal law enforcement officials, in their increasingly weakened state.

Every week in Corporate Crime Reporter, we run a question/answer format interview with someone who has something to say about corporate crime.

When we started Corporate Crime Reporter 25 years ago this month, our first ever interview – the first of now over 1,200 interviews – was with Rudy Giuliani – who at the time was the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

At the time, Giuliani believed that if you were to bring a case against a major American corporation, you secured a guilty plea, or took the case to trial.

Or you just didn’t bring the case.

And Giuliani’s view was the view of federal law enforcement back then.

Bring a criminal charge if you have a criminal case. And secure a guilty plea. Or don’t bring the case.

As a result, major American corporations were convicted of crimes on a regular basis.

Because they engaged in crimes on a regular basis.

And the message was sent – you commit a crime, you will be convicted and publically shamed.

Today, major American corporations are still committing crimes on a regular basis.

But the difference is today major American corporations are rarely convicted of their crimes.

It’s not that they no longer engage in corporate criminal behavior.

It’s that they have set up a system where they no longer have to plead guilty to their crimes.

Instead, they settle these major corporate crime cases with deferred and non prosecution agreements.

These are the criminal equivalents of the neither admit nor deny consent decrees used for decades by the Securities and Exchange Commission and that recently have come under fire by federal judge Jed Rakoff in New York.

And so, if you are a criminal defense attorney at Holder’s former firm of Covingon & Burling, this is how you practice corporate crime law:

1. Your client comes to you with evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the corporation.
2. You approach the Justice Department and disclose it.
3. The Justice Department offers you a deal.
4. The Justice Department says to you – if you cooperate in the criminal investigation against the individuals involved at the company, we will let you off the hook with a deferred or non prosecution agreement.
5. There will be no criminal conviction against your corporate client.
6. But you must cooperate against the individuals involved.
7. And those individuals will likely be convicted and go to jail.

Thus, Holder’s statement – “We’re gonna make some news with regard to holding individuals responsible for things we tend to think of as corporate crimes.”

Last month, we interviewed David Uhlmann.

Uhlmann is the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at the Justice Department.

And he’s currently a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

When Uhlmann was head of the Environmental Crimes Section, he didn’t use deferred and non prosecution agreements in corporate crime cases.

Uhlmann says that deferred and non prosecution agreements have no place in major corporate crime cases.

These agreements were originally meant for minor street cases, not major corporate crime cases.

When the Department entered into a non-prosecution agreement last year to resolve criminal investigation into the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, Uhlmann wrote a scathing opinion article in the New York Times titled For 29 Dead Miners, No Justice.

“Twenty-nine miners died in West Virginia. They died because Massey had a history of mine safety violations,” Uhlmann told us.

“They died at a facility where the company kept a double set of books – one for internal purposes, which documented violations, and one for mine safety officials that covered up those violations.”

“To enter a non-prosecution agreement in a case where 29 people died and there is so much evidence of criminal wrongdoing reflects poorly on the Justice Department.”

Uhlmann says that the Environmental Crimes Section to this day does not settle corporate crime cases with deferred and non prosecution agreements.

Maybe that’s why Holder and his aides stripped the Environmental Crimes Section of authority over the criminal investigation into the Gulf oil spill cases and gave it to the Criminal Division.

Uhlmann believes that it will be a travesty of justice if the Department doesn’t secure guilty pleas in the Gulf oil spill cases.

But they didn’t in the Massey Energy case.

And the odds are not good that they will in the BP oil spill cases.

Not that crimes weren’t committed in the Gulf oil spill cases. They clearly were. But after all, Holder is from Covington & Burling. And he’s going back to Covington & Burling. And his top deputies came from corporate law firms and they are going back to corporate law firms.

Obviously, this practice of no fault corporate crime has taken hold at the top and been filtered right down through the entire federal enforcement system.

Last month, I caught this headline from a Canadian newspaper:

“Wal-Mart Pleads Guilty in Teen’s Death.”

The story began:

“Walmart Canada pled guilty Tuesday in the case of a teenager who was electrocuted on the job last year."

When I saw that, I went to our federal OSHA web site and searched for a similar case. And I found one also from last month where a Verizon worker was electrocuted on the job. OSHA proposed a civil fine of $140,700.

The point is that a criminal conviction sends a message that a civil fine or a deferred and non prosecution can’t.

A criminal conviction says to the corporation – what you have done is serious and we are bringing out our most serious weapon to bear – a criminal conviction.

Corporations get it.

What big corporations fear most is the reputational hit of that headline –“Wal-Mart Pleads Guilty in Teen’s Death." Corporations will do – and have done – everything in their power to avoid that headline.

So, our criminal justice system is out of whack.We must get back to the days of when you brought a case, you secured a guilty plea or you went to trial. Like Professor Uhlmann says, deferred and non prosecution agreements have no place in corporate crime practice.

And now the question becomes – how to bring back some balance to our corporate criminal justice system?

There is a clear power imbalance in Washington with the corporate law firms holding the upper hand. Young law students would much rather go for the fancy offices and big salaries of a corporate law firm than a Justice Department cubicle.

When I was a teenager, I had an uncle who would warn me about U.S. colleges being high priced tool factories for the corporations. The choice of which college or law school to go to was not nearly as important as the choice of what you did with your education.

Education for what? – was the question we were asked. And it was made clear to us that a decision to work for a corporate law firm or not was a moral choice.

And that’s what is missing. A moral code and a shaming mechanism to enforce it.

We were told, in effect, – shame on you if you decide to slave away working to undermine the criminal justice system on behalf of Wal-Mart and BP or Massey Energy.

Sure, every corporation deserves legal representation. But it doesn’t have to be you.

We must also shame our public officials into securing convictions when convictions are warranted. To insist on corporate criminal prosecutions in worker death cases where warranted. To do away with deferred and non prosecution agreements in corporate crime cases. To demand action where action is due.

It’s shameful that more than three years since the financial crisis crippled the American economy there has not been a single prosecution of a Wall Street firm even though fraud and financial misrepresentations played a significant role in the meltdown.

Even Sixty Minutes pointed this out in December of last year.

But still, nothing.

And before he goes back to Covington & Burling, Eric Holder has to be held to account.

It is shameful that Holder cares more about individual wrongdoing than he does about corporate wrongdoing.

Most importantly, we need to support our local corporate crime police, to bolster their enforcement budgets, to begin to level the playing field between corporate criminals and the police.

Funny, but not funny "ha ha"

Denmark's 50 percent wind commitment and a path to fully renewable power

By James Holloway | Ars Technica

Denmark's Horns Rev offshore wind farm as it stands today

Denmark has committed to generating 50 percent of its electricity from wind sources by the year 2020, by which time the country hopes to have reduced CO2 emissions by 34 percent compared to 1990 levels. This renewed commitment to wind forms the central pillar in an energy bill that commits to obtaining 35 percent of the country's energy from renewable sources by that time. And Denmark actively aims to lower energy consumption, with 2020 usage 12 percent lower than that of 2006.

"Denmark will once again be the global leader in the transition to green energy," said Martin Lidegaard, Denmark's Minister for Climate, Energy and Building. "This will prepare us for a future with increasing prices for oil and coal. Moreover, it will create some of the jobs that we need so desperately, now and in the coming years."

The bill passed with a near-unanimous 171 votes out of the parliament's 179 seats.

"Once again" is a telling choice of words from Lidegaard, but it raises a question: if not Denmark, what country was leading the pack with renewable energy prior to the bill's passing? Certainly, wind already makes up a higher proportionate of Denmark's energy mix than it does any other country's—21 percent as of 2010, with Portugal (18 percent) and Spain (16 percent) not far behind.

Indeed, Denmark tops the wind charts whichever metric you care to throw at it: installed capacity per person, per square kilometer, per unit of GDP—as of 2010 (PDF) at any rate.

But when it comes to the contribution made by all renewable sources of energy, Denmark fell into eighth place based on installed power in 2009, behind Sweden, Latvia, Finland, Austria, Portugal, Estonia, and Romania. Even factoring in Denmark's aspirations for 2020 (according to the Renewables Global Status Report 2011(PDF), published prior to this bill), the country would only be elevated to sixth place, assuming it meets its target of a 30 percent renewable energy share. (These figures are for the EU alone.)

EU renewables shares of final energy, 2005 and 2009, with targets for 2020

Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century

But Denmark has only raised the bar by 5 percent of its total energy use, to 35 percent. Sweden met its target for a 50-percent renewable share in 2009, thanks to the gargantuan contribution made by the country's hydroelectric infrastructure. By what measure, then, does the new announcement return Denmark to the top of the league?

The short answer is, it doesn't. The government sees the 2020 targets as stepping stones to the end goal—100 percent of the country's energy to be supplied from renewable sources by 2050. But even that wouldn't leave it on top; Scotland is aiming for a 100-percent renewable energy contribution by 2020.

Wind has a tremendous role to play in Denmark's renewable grand expansion, with 1500MW of new offshore wind capacity due for completion by the 2020 deadline. A third installation, with 400MW of capacity, will be built at Horns Rev; while a 600MW farm will be built in the Baltic at Kriegers Flak (where hurricanes aremercifully absent). The latter has been described as the world's first offshore "supergrid," and will additionally provide electricity to Germany.

But it would be misleading to portray Denmark as a country putting all of its eggs into a windy basket. It isn't so much as placing a "price on carbon" as the OECD has recommended. Denmark seems to be making efforts(PDF) to ban it outright, phasing out coal power generation in favor of biomass energy and investing in geothermal energy.

At the smaller scale, Denmark is banning the installation of oil-fired and natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2013, and providing over $7.5 million to fund the conversion of domestic boilers to renewable equivalents. Further investment is being made available to industries that use renewable energy to fuel manufacture and the like, as well as for the promotion of CHP (combined heat and power) schemes.

The government also recognizes the need to modernize the grid to accommodate intermittent renewable sources (an oft-cited stumbling block for the rollout of renewable energy in the US), with an agreement being put in place with electricity distributors for remotely-readable "smart" electricity metering.

In the arena of transport, the government is making $12.5 million of subsidies available for electric vehicle recharging stations, and mandating that all fuel must be at least 10-percent biofuel by 2020. It has also committed to eliminating fossil fuels entirely from the island of Samsø, a proto-renewable energy community where 100 percent of electricity is already provided by wind power.

If you'll permit a West Wing reference, Denmark might be thought of as adopting one of President Bartlet's theories of economics and applying it to energy policy—at least partially. "Everybody's got a magic lever they want you to push. I studied economics all my life but in this job only a fool is ever certain. You don't push any one lever; you wanna push a little on them all." Denmark's certainly pulling all the levers—not a little, though. A lot.

Attack of the Infographics!