The bad news from AfPak continues unabated, with even the military now admitting how precarious our position has become.
The Pentagon was still trying to spin its report on the war in Afghanistan issued this week as holding out hope because the instability had leveled off, even as some news outlets were noting that it documents the continued expansion of Taliban capabilities and operations.
The most significant revelation in the report, however, is that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and the U.S.-NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) joint command now acknowledge officially that the Taliban insurgents dominate a vast contiguous zone of heavily populated territory across southern Afghanistan that McChrystal regards as the most critical area in the country.
The real question is whether any of this negative intel will result in rethinking American strategy. It looks like Afghanistan's reputation as the graveyard of empires will not be challenged by the one being run by the Pentagon and its gnomish partners at the Company.
"The Pentagon’s plan to fire ballistic missiles at terrorists isn’t just a nuclear Armageddon risk. It’s a ludicrously expensive way to accidentally start World War III: each weapon could cost anywhere from a few hundred million to $1 billion." -- How To: Risk World War III, and Blow Billions Doing It by Noah Shachtman (Danger Room - Wired 2010-04-26)
Our paper money has been homely for so long, you almost think it has to be that way. And maybe it does; getting this dull, deeply conservative country to change anything is nearly impossible. I once suggested that the government is missing revenue opportunities by not selling ad space on U.S. currency. The mail response was hilarious: you would have thought I'd advocated dressing the Mall with billboards for strip clubs that took advantage of the profile of the Washington Monument; except for a few anti-tax types who immediately recognized a worthwhile proposal when they heard one, most people reacted with horror to the idea of "defiling a sacred institution."
Anyway, in response to the The Dollar ReDe$ign Project, artist and designer Michael Tyznik created this lovely and relevant series of U.S. paper basing his design on the premise that our dough is "aesthetically lacking." American banknotes, he explains,
are in dire need of a redesign. Even though the green color of money is deeply interwoven into the nation's culture, the need for color differentiation between denominations has forced the inclusion of color. The recent redesign of banknotes by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is poorly executed and aesthetically lacking. Because the coloring of the current notes is so subtle, it is still hard to differentiate between denominations by that method alone.
My proposed redesign keeps the culturally important green color of money, but introduces a brightly colored holographic strip into each denomination, making them easy to tell apart. This strip includes embossed dots for the sight-impaired as well, making currency far more accessible.
Although these elegant bills are a big improvement graphically beyond what's in your pocket, the artist's best innovation is on the reverse side:
One of the most important things about America is our Bill of Rights. It is possibly the most important information any citizen can have. The design of our money currently contains semi-religious (the eye in the pyramid) and overtly religious (“In God We Trust”) symbols and text that go against the incredibly important separation of church and state implicit in the first amendment. In my redesign, these are replaced with the text of the Bill of Rights. It has been proposed that these ten amendments are in order of importance, so it is fitting that the most important rights are included on the most common banknotes.
You'll note that Tyznik also wants to recalibrate our money: The $1 bill, he says,
lasts only 21 months before it needs to be replaced. For this reason, I propose that the $1 banknote be eliminated in favor of the current $1 coin and a new $2 coin. For this reason, Washington is depicted on the $5. I also propose the discontinuation of the penny, because it currently costs more to produce one than it is worth. This is precedented by the elimination of the half-penny in 1857, after which the smallest unit of currency, the penny, had more buying power than today's quarter does.
I think it's a measure of how seriously we need a redesign that Snopes had to go out of its way to deny that Treasury commissioned the project or planned to use it as a replacement for our current forms of U.S. legal tender.
Crime Log: "If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of 'losers' and the far shinier, spiffier world of 'winners,' we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now. We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of 'the people.' We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without comment, right before our eyes." -- American Kleptocracy: How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft by William J. Astore (TomDispatch 2010-04-20).
Musical interlude: We've been talking about The National for nearly a decade. Will we still love them now that they have a major takeout (The National Agenda by Nicholas Dawidoff) in the Times' Magazine? Sure we will.
3-Card Monte: "The drumbeat about deficits has reached deafening levels. The president warns about 'out of control' spending. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke calls for bringing deficits down. The opinion pages bristle with rants about the U.S. turning into Greece, headed to default. Next week, the first session of the president's 'National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform' will convene. The next day, shamelessly, the two co-chairs and the staff director (all committed deficit hawks) will grace a forum sponsored by the Peterson Foundation, established by Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson largely to gin up hysteria about America's long term deficits." - The Big Fix (Hold On To Your Wallets) by Robert Borosage (Campaign for America's Future 2010-04-21).
The Long War: Historian, international relations expert and former US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich talks to Bill Moyers about how we got in to Iraq and Afghanistan and why we can't seem to get out (extended video, Bill Moyers Journal 2010-04-09).
The Long War: Rethinking Afghanistan’s Sticky Icky Quagmire by Josh Mull (FDL's The Seminal 2010-04-20). There is definitely a huge drug problem, and our strategy seems to be the cause of it. There are much easier ways to achieve our objectives in the region than an expensive and bloody policy of military aggression, but our leaders are stuck in failed policies born of a worldview that is at once arrogant and ignorant. Time to rethink Afghanistan?
More music: Here's a number from a B.B.King special I worked on a couple of decades back. My friend Douglas Brodoff aptly called this a rock opera in 5 minutes. An honor to have been there.
Democracy in the Middle East: In spite of America's professed commitment to equality, the U.S. government makes an exception when it comes to Israel's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state, which in theory and practice means privileging Jewish citizens over all other citizens: A State for All Its Citizens by Nadim N. Rouhana (Foreign Policy 2010-04-22). A country cannot be both democratic and theocratic.
Hubris: "We can't have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all -- to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth,much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at core, is the conversion of the living -- trees or mountains -- into the dead -- two-by-fours and beer cans) -- is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years." -- No, We Can't Have It All by Derrick Jensen (excerpted from Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization (Common Dreams 2010-04-23).
Water is the new oil: Cochabamba, the Water Wars and Climate Change by Amy Goodman (TruthDig 2010-04-21). Bolivian President Evo Morales calls Cochabamba the heart of Bolivia. It was here, 10 years ago this month, that, as one observer put it, "the first rebellion of the 21st century" took place. In what was dubbed the Water Wars, people from around Bolivia converged on Cochabamba to overturn the privatization of the public water system.
Reconsideration: The Teabaggers are not the mob of racist yobs you accuse them of being. And even though Polatik's "CD sales on the Tea Party Express tour didn’t go as I had hoped...you can expect to see Polatik t-shirts, posters and videos very soon."
AfterDowningStreet.Org's David Swanson has suggestions on arguments and actions that might help Congress rethink its support for expanding hostilities in Afghanistan:
The argument for voting No is laid out here. And here.
Congress members can vote No on this one without voting to end a war, only to refrain from escalating it. And as of last winter a lot of them, including Pelosi, Obey, etc., said they opposed the escalation. They said last December that the money they were then voting for would not cover the escalation, so the fact that the escalation has begun without funding does not make it a legitimate fait accompli, but an unconstitutional abuse that can be halted and reversed. Talk of "abandoning troops" makes even less sense than usual, given that a No vote is a vote not to send them (or to bring back those just sent).
But the House can halt a war as well as an escalation if it refuses to pass future war funding. If the U.S. House of Representatives votes No on war funding, war ends. Wars have been ended this way before.
In December 2009, 34 voted No. We should reward them.
Here's a flyer on ending the war in Afghanistan: PDF. Here's a book. Here's how to step up your activism. Here's what's needed instead of bombs and guns. Here's a way to nonviolently resist. You should build a campaign in your state like this one in Maine or this one in Boston, Mass. Join midday vigils in front of every congressional office in the country on the 3rd Wednesday of the month: sign up. Tired of teabagging? Try brownbagging! Print out posters.
Facts you can use: Here's who is suffering. A report from the National Priorities Project (PDF) contains on pages 23 and 24 documentation of how investing in military reduces jobs and hurts economy. Get cost of war to your area here, but multiply it by five. Get cost of military contracts to your area here. Get the amount of money military companies give your representative here. Where U.S. public opinion is and where it's moving.
A Teach In on Capitol Hill: What Congress Must Do to End U.S. Wars and Help Secure a Peaceful Middle East
What: An Educational briefing on the U. S. agenda in the Middle East, its consequences and development of a strategy/plan to withdraw. Emphasis will be on constructive, interactive dialogue among panelists and attendees.
When: Thursday, April 29, 2010, 1:45pm – 4:00pm
Where: Gold Room (2168), Rayburn House Office Building, Independence Ave and C Street SW, Washington, D.C.
Panel: Chris Hedges, Jeremy Scahill, David Swanson, Ann Wright
Free and open to the public, the media, members and staff of Congress; beverages will be served
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. He has written nine books, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
Jeremy Scahill is the author of the international best-seller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill has won numerous awards for his reporting, including the prestigious George Polk Award, which he won twice. While a correspondent for Democracy Now!, Scahill reported extensively from Iraq through both the Clinton and Bush administrations. He has appeared on ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS’s The NewsHour, Bill Moyers Journal and is a frequent guest on other radio and TV programs nationwide.
David Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney.org, and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, Voters for Peace, and the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, and chair of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee. AfterDowningStreet was named Most Valuable Progressive by The Nation Magazine in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
Ann Wright spent thirteen years in the U.S. Army and sixteen additional years in the Army Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. In 1987, she joined the Foreign Service and served as U.S. Deputy Ambassador in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the evacuation of 2,500 people from the civil war in Sierra Leone, the largest evacuation since Saigon. She was on the first State Department team to go to Afghanistan and helped reopen the Embassy there in December 2001. On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright cabled a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stating that without the authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster. She is a member of Veterans for Peace and is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
The 'Obama doctrine': Don't detain; kill! by Asim Qureshi (Guardian UK 2010-04-11). George Bush left a big problem in the shape of Guantánamo. The solution? Don't capture bad guys; use drones to assassinate them. As David Swanson put it, murder is the new torture.
Prompt Global Strike: World Military Superiority Without Nuclear Weapons by Rick Rozoff (StopNATO 2010-04-10). Only one country has the military and scientific capacity and has openly proclaimed its intention to be the world’s sole military superpower. One that aspires to remain the only state in history to wield full spectrum military dominance on land, in the air, on the seas and in space. To maintain and extend military bases and troops, aircraft carrier battle groups, jet fighters and strategic bombers on and to most every latitude and longitude. To do so with a post-World War II record war budget of $708 billion for next year.
“Looting Main Street” – Matt Taibbi on How the Nation’s Biggest Banks Are Ripping Off American Cities with Predatory Deals. (Democracy Now! 2010-04-12). The Rolling Stone writer looks at the experience of one small Alabama town and its disastrous dealings with Wall Street: “The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens.”Matt Taibbi is political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. His latest article is Looting Main Street.
“Job Creation” – Stupid Is as Stupid Does by Richard C. Cook (RichardCCook.com 2010-04-06). Many commentators have said, as a joke, that it would have been cheaper if the government had just printed the money and given it away. But such an approach would not be a joke at all. Compared to what actually happened, it would be enlightened public policy.
Brief musical interlude:
A Banana Republic With No Bananas by George Washington (Washington's Blog 2010-04-12). Experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic. Are they right?
In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis by Henry A. Giroux (truthout 2010-04-14) | Crucial to a functioning democracy, though "seldom accorded the status of intellectuals that they deserved, they remain the most important component in the learning process for students, while serving as a moral compass to gauge how seriously a society invests in its youth and in the future. Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards."
"While the rest of the world spirals into economic degradation, environmental pestilence and complete systems failure of all of the old world models, Lady Gaga reigns above the flames. Pay attention to the lesson. Lady Gaga is the only person prospering in this cultural climate. Therefore she has done something right. She is the necessary evolutionary adaptation to our times and this is why she disturbs people: This is what we must all become. Indestructibly vacant." -- Jason Louv, Lady Gaga & the Dead Planet Grotesque (H+ 2010-03-16).
Here's a story about a remarkable farmer's market in Norfolk, Virginia that offers a blueprint for creating jobs and boosting a local economy:
Cow Tunnels and Manhattan by Nicola (Edible Geography 2010-04-12): Lost infrastructure or urban myth? Plus, I love this graphic: Image: Subterranean New York City, as diagrammed by National Geographic (where a scale version and bibliography are also available).
Reclaiming Our Hope by Paul Rogat Loeb (The Nation 2010-04-06). "It's been a frustrating time since November 2008, but our challenge is to spend less time bemoaning our disappointments and more energy engaging with ordinary citizens the way so many of us did a year and a half ago. If we give people enough ways to act on our present crises, we never know how history might turn."
I know I keep saying we have to reach out to the Tea Partiers because some of them, at least, are right about the problems we face if completely at a loss about solutions. Any thoughts of a possible alliance between rational people and the TPs goes out the window, however, when you witness what actually goes on at the parties:
To clear your head, here's Type O Negative doing Black No 1, their only hit, offered as an antidote to the loony Williams and, also, sadly, a farewell to Type O Neg's frontman Peter Steele who died of heart failure this week at 48.
The passage of the new health care bill is expected to have a wide-ranging effect on members of Congress during the next cycle of elections. In North Carolina, one of the nation's most powerful labor unions has decided to play a bigger role in the campaigning. The SEIU is helping to create a new political party to challenge several Democrats they helped elect just two years ago. Listen to the Story. Transcript.
In his latest dispatch, Tom Engelhardt considers the way Obama's America fights its wars:
Having watched the video of the death of the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in that July 2007 video, his father said: “At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth... If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Putting aside the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the hunting of wolves from helicopters in Alaska, Noor-Eldeen may not have gone far enough. For that helicopter crew, his son was indeed the wartime equivalent of a hunted animal. An article on the front page of the New York Times recently captured this perspective, however inadvertently, when, speaking of the CIA’s aerial war over Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, it described the Agency’s unmanned drones as “observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry.”
“Quarry” has quite a straightforward definition: “a hunted animal; prey.” Indeed, the al-Qaeda leaders, Taliban militants, and local civilians in the region are all “prey” which, of course, makes us the predators. That the majority of drones cruising those skies 24/7 and repeatedly launching their Hellfire missiles are named “Predators” should, then, come as no surprise.
Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes -- “collateral damage” -- when they are the norm, not the exception, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the “rules of engagement,” those ROEs, to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.
In this way, for instance, assassination-by-drone has become an ever more central part of the Obama administration’s foreign and war policy, and yet the word “assassination” -- with all its negative implications, legal and otherwise -- has been displaced by the far more anodyne, more bureaucratic “targeted killing.” In a sense, in fact, what “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture) were to the Bush administration, “targeted killing” is to the Obama administration.
We are at a point when our failure to deal with internal problems -- sclerotic democratic institutions, kleptocratic rule in Washington, the decrepit infrastructure, a failing education system, massive loss of meaningful jobs, the mortgage crisis, the failure to provide affordable, universal health care -- may offer an opportunity to rethink the assumptions underpinning liberal militarism.
To Organize Against Wall Street, We Need a Narrative Focusing on Crime and Massive Fraud by Danny Schecter
In politics, it’s always all about the narrative, about how issues are framed.
As we ask ourselves, how we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with millions out of work, and millions more losing their homes, and yet, with no real mass mobilization or ongoing response from the progressive world.
To understand this paradox, we need to reflect on how most of us we define the problem.
To this day, there has not been an aggressive investigation of who and what brought down the system ala the Pecora Commission appointed by FDR. Instead we have a wimpy ineffectual body that can’t get its act together. The New York Times, which hailed its appointment, now buries its defacto obit way back in the business section, noting it has “been hobbled by delays and internal disagreements and a lack of focus,”
At the same time, the bookshelves are filling up with volumes of complicated treatises on the complexities of derivatives, risky profit models and credit default swaps. The practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics are having a field day with longwinded dissertations that fail to engage the popular imagination.
We had a word for this when I worked in network television—MEGO, standing for “My Eyes Glaze Over!”
More popular writers are spinning catchy “yarns” like “The Big Short” which put it all down with psychologically-driven, character-based storytelling to how deluded everyone on Wall Street was. That leaves us feeling superior to the dunderheads who lost us trillions and, then, laughed all the way to their mansions in the Hamptons.
Hahaha.
Missing is a hardnosed look at the financial crisis as a crime story---an approach that allows for morality as well as indignation, and resonates with public anger. It touches the nerve that most people feel.
This is why former Bank Examiner William Black focuses on looting and CEO fraud. He helped send over a thousand bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the l980’s.
And, this is also why Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, the state where most of our corporations are registered, says categorically the whole crisis rests on a foundation of crime.
Action: contribute to the production of Plunder at dissector@mediachannel.org.
Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and is a frequent contributor to Global Research (Global Research articles by Danny Schechter).
Last August, the presidential press corps followed Barack Obama and his family to Martha's Vineyard for their brief vacation. The coverage focused on summery fare—a visit to an ice cream parlor, the books the president had brought along. Nearly everyone mentioned his few rounds of golf, including his swing, and the enthusiasm of onlookers. What caught my eye, though, was the makeup of his foursome. The president was joined by an old friend from Chicago; a young aide; and Robert Wolf, Chairman and CEO, UBS Group Americas. In a decidedly incurious piece, a New York Times reporter made light of Wolf's presence:
"The president has told friends that to truly relax he prefers golfing with young aides...But he departed from that pattern Monday when he invited a top campaign contributor, Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank, to join him for 18 holes. Call it donor maintenance."
Wolf, however, is hardly—as the Times suggested— just another donor. For one thing, he is a leading figure in an industry that almost brought down the entire financial system—and then was the recipient of astonishing government largesse. UBS, along with other banks, benefited directly from the backdoor bailout of the insurance giant AIG.
But UBS stands alone in one rather formidable respect—it was the defendant in the largest offshore tax evasion case in U.S. history, accused of helping wealthy Americans hide their income in secret offshore accounts. To settle a massive investigation, UBS forked over $780 million to the US treasury. This settlement came shortly before Wolf rounded out Obama’s golfing party. Given this rather problematical situation, why then would the President choose UBS’s Wolf of all people for this honor?
Wolf declined a request for an interview about his relationship with the President, so it was not possible to pose that question to him. This hardly matters, though, for the story goes far beyond Wolf and UBS. It involves Republicans as well as Democrats, the Bush Administration as well as Obama’s. More importantly, behind the trivialized golf outing on Martha’s Vineyard, lie the interests that increasingly set the course for every administration. And that now game the system so well that the rest of us—wherever we live in the world—are kept fighting for the scraps.
BOTH SIDES NOW
When most people criticize those aspects of government that seem most impervious to the democratic process, they cite the permanency and perceived self-interest of the mandarins of the Washington bureaucracy. But when it comes to real power, an ability to come out ahead no matter which party is in power, it’s hard to top certain financial institutions.
UBS is very much a part of that permanent government. Though not a household name in the United States, UBS is a major player in the Beltway game. During the 2008 campaign, while Robert Wolf was courting Democratic hopeful Obama, his UBS cohort, former Senator Phil Gramm, was working the other side of the street. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1990s, Gramm, a corporate-friendly Texas Republican, played a key role in the deregulation of the banking industry, an act so central to the nation’s financial collapse. Since 2002, Gramm has been UBS Americas’ vice chairman. In 2008, he was the leading economics adviser for Obama’s opponent, John McCain—and even touted as a possible treasury secretary in a McCain administration.
The bottom line: UBS hedged its bets, and so had an inside track no matter which party took the White House. Thus, when Obama won, it was Wolf who ascended. The new president named the banker-donor to his White House Economic Advisory Board.
The important machinations behind this accrual of influence rarely get attention in the frenzied hustle of the news cycle. One reason is that they do not seem like news at all, since they are essentially woven deeply into the fabric of politics and government, thus hidden in plain sight. Another is that they are dauntingly complex.
Some things are simple, though. Like the fact that a UBS executive is a dubious candidate to serve as an economic advisor to the president. For one thing, the company’s track record at the time of the election was distinctly underwhelming. UBS suffered major losses on subprime lending, and had to raise money from the Singapore government and other entities. As Slate’s money columnist Daniel Gross quipped back in 2008, “UBS used to stand for Union Bank of Switzerland. But perhaps it should stand for Untold Billions Squandered. Or Underwater Bi-Lingual Schleppers.” Furthermore, UBS’ stock lost nearly 70 percent of its value even before the recession really kicked in—making it the worst performing foreign bank operating here.
Given this damning set of facts, Wolf made both an odd choice as a presidential adviser and a peculiar pick for that intimate round of golf.
“HIDE FUNDS HERE”
Despite being the world’s biggest manager of private assets, UBS has stayed pretty much below the domestic radar. The Alpine quiet surrounding its activities was, however, quietly shattered in mid-2007, when an IRS audit of a US citizen led to a UBS banker who then revealed certain UBS practices that encouraged wealthy Americans to hide taxable income. UBS bankers had apparently used every trick in the book—including giving customers code names and assisting them with or providing them with untraceable pay phones, encrypted computers, fake trusts, document-shredding and even counter-surveillance training.
Security State: Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing by Andy Worthington (AndyWorthington.com 2010-04-06): A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”
Media: How journalists become prisoners of their preconceptions: The Bias of Veteran Journalists by Lane Wallace (The Atlantic 2010-04-05).
Musical Interlude:
One, two, kiss your daddy do
Nine, ten, daddy will say when
Daddy loves his baby, daddy loves his baby
Daddy loves his baby and baby's gonna get a big bang outa that
(writer: unknown)
I'm just sayin'.
Media: The Creed of Objectivity and The New York Times by Barnabe F. Geisweiller: Just how objective can the New York Times' correspondent in Israel and Palestine, Ethan Bronner, be when he has a son serving in the Israel Defense Forces - the Israeli army. In an article published March 28, Bronner showed there was cause for concern (truthout 2010-04-06).
Bozo Nation: "Right. I get it. I should probably ignore him. Why should I waste time writing about Glenn Beck again? As hard as it is to believe, most days I intentionally ignore Glenn Beck posts and videos on the blogs. My recurring reaction is generally twofold. One: he's exhausting to watch because just as I'm wrapping my head around one line of googly-eyed horseshit, he belts out another ridiculous, melodramatic or dangerous line, and before I know it, I'm faced with a log-jam of crazy, forcing me to scramble for either an oxygen mask or a stiff drink. And, two: why pay attention to the television equivalent of an escaped mental patient screaming gibberish on the median strip at a busy intersection?" -- Bob Cesca Exposing Glenn Beck as a Dangerous Fraud (Huffington Post 2010-04-07)
Profile: Merry Prankster still stirring the pot by Brad Oswald (Winnipeg Free Press 2010-04-05) | Paul Krassner has been an inspiration to me for 45 years. Plus, yesterday was his birthday.
Book review: Behind Obama’s Cool by Gary Wills (New York Times 2010-04-07) | In his reading of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick's exhaustive pre-presidential biography, the always thoughtful Wills ponders how our shape-shifting prez got that way.
Social Media: How I learned to love Twitter by @MargaretAtwood (Guardian UK 2010-04-07) | I keep telling writers why they should love Twitter. Maybe now they'll believe me.
Oddities: Finally, a reminder from an unexpected source of all the little wonders of the universe that we miss every day:
For three years The Nation has been reporting on military doctors' fraudulent use of personality disorder to discharge wounded soldiers. PD is a severe mental illness that emerges during childhood and is listed in military regulations as a pre-existing condition, not a result of combat. Thus those who are discharged with PD are denied a lifetime of disability benefits, which the military is required to provide to soldiers wounded during service. Soldiers discharged with PD are also denied long-term medical care. And they have to give back a slice of their re-enlistment bonus. That amount is often larger than the soldier's final paycheck. As a result, on the day of their discharge, many injured vets learn that they owe the Army several thousand dollars.
According to figures from the Pentagon and a Harvard University study, the military is saving billions by discharging soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan with personality disorder.
In July 2007 the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs called a hearing to investigate PD discharges. Barack Obama, then a senator, put forward a bill to halt all PD discharges. And before leaving office, President Bush signed a law requiring the defense secretary to conduct his own investigation of the PD discharge system. But Obama's bill did not pass, and the Defense Department concluded that no soldiers had been wrongly discharged. The PD dismissals have continued. Since 2001 more than 22,600 soldiers have been discharged with personality disorder. That number includes soldiers who have served two and three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"This should have been resolved during the Bush administration. And it should have been stopped now by the Obama administration," says Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. "The fact that it hasn't is a national disgrace."
The rest of the story: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100426/kors/print by Joshua Kors (The Nation 2010-04-07)
They discuss American involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and US nuclear policy from the 1960s to the present. Play:
For cable:
For dial-up:
Download: MP3 File
Jonathan Schell's thinking on nuclear strategy is distilled in Reaching Zero (The Nation 2010-04-01).
Compiled by Michael Munk (MichaelMunk.com 2010-04-07)
US military occupation forces in Iraq under Commander-in-Chief Obama suffered eight combat casualties in the week ending April 6, 2010* as the official total since the 2003 invasion rose to at least 74,791. The total includes 35,250 dead and wounded from what the Pentagon classifies as "hostile" causes and more than 39,845 (as of April 3, 2010) dead, injured and sick from "non-hostile" causes requiring medical evacuation.
The actual total is well over 100,000 because the Pentagon chooses not to count as "Iraq casualties" the more than 30,000 veterans whose injuries-mainly brain trauma from explosions - were diagnosed only after they had left Iraq.** In addition, Iraq Coalition Casualties names eight service members who died of wounds after they left Iraq but are not counted by the Pentagon.
US media divert attention from the actual cost in American life and limb by occasionally reporting only the total killed (4,391 as of April 6, 2010) but rarely mentioning the 31,770 wounded in combat. To further minimize public perception of the cost, they almost always ignore the 38,845 (as of April 3, 2010)*** military victims of accidents and illness serious enough to require medical air evacuation, although the 4,391 reported deaths include 911 (up one this week) who died from those same causes, including at least 207 suicides through April 3, 2010.***
In the longer piece on Peace Action West that this is cut from, Rebecca Griffin argues that we must face the "truly horrifying" costs of the American military adventure in Afghanistan.
by Rebecca Griffin
The US military admitted earlier this week that US special operations forces killed five innocent civilians in Gardez, including two pregnant women. The two women leave behind sixteen motherless children. While the military has denied any kind of cover-up of the raid, there were signs of evidence tampering at the scene:
And in what would be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said that he did not have any information about the Afghan investigation, which he said remained unfinished.
In an interview, a NATO official said the Afghan-led investigation team alerted American and NATO commanders that the inquiry had found signs of evidence tampering. A briefing was given by investigators to General McChrystal and other military officials in late March.
“There was evidence of tampering at the scene, walls being washed, bullets dug out of holes in the wall,” the NATO official said, adding that investigators “couldn’t find bullets from the wounds in the body.”
Civilian casualties have been a continued source of outrage in Afghanistan, and General McChrystal has received praise for his attempts to lower the number of civilian casualties. While the intent is admirable, it is unrealistic in practice. McChrystal recently commented on their inability to decrease the number of shootings of innocent people at military checkpoints with the startling admission that, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
Following this tragic story comes the release of a video of US soldiers in a helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq as though they were in a video game. The soldiers killed over a dozen people in the suburb of New Baghdad, including two journalists working for Reuters. (Warning: the video is disturbing and contains some explicit language.)
Wikileaks received the video and supporting documents from military whistleblowers and the Pentagon has confirmed that the video is authentic. It paints a disturbing picture of soldiers shooting into a group of mostly unarmed civilians, and at times laughing about it, with authorization from their superiors. When a van arrives to pick up the wounded and dead, they open fire, wounding two children. One of the pilots can be heard saying, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
Julian Assange of Wikileaks made an important point about the nature of the video on Democracy Now this morning:
What’s important to remember is that every step that the Apache takes in opening fire is authorized. It does pause before shooting. It explains the situation, sometimes exaggerating a little to its commanders, and gets authorized permission.
These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots have evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted, by the war that they are looking for excuses to kill. That is why you hear this segment, “Come on, buddy! Just pick up a weapon,” when Saeed, one of the Reuters employees, is crawling on the curb. They don’t want him for intelligence value to understand the situation. The man is clearly of no threat whatsoever. He’s prostate on the ground. Everyone else has been killed. They just want an excuse to kill. And it’s some kind of—appears to me to be some kind of video game mentality where they just want to get a high score, get their kill count up. And later on you’ll hear them proudly proclaiming how they killed twelve to fifteen people.
The Pentagon has stated that an investigation was already held into the incident and no one is being charged with wrongdoing.
There have been a lot of euphemisms and opaque language used in the debate about the merits of the current strategy in Afghanistan. Many proponents of the war build support around benign-sounding efforts like “population-centric counterinsurgency strategy.” They portray this effort as a more friendly form of war, with the vision of the US troops sweeping into Marja, scaring the bad guys out of town, dropping in a new government and bringing peace and stability to the people. These two incidents are surely just two of many in the hellacious reality of war. Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal makes an important point about civilian casualties:
Perhaps right on cue there is this horrifying story that not only did US Special Operations forces kill three Afghan women, they covered up the crime – even going to far as to dig bullets out of the bodies of the victims. It is yet another reminder that for all the talk of protecting civilians – and all of General McChrystal’s noble efforts to prevent civilian deaths — they are still happening, and they are still undermining our population centric goals in Afghanistan (again when you put 100,000 US troops, who are trained to kill and protect themselves, in a foreign country none of this should be even slightly surprising).
And as much as I hate to write it, this is likely only going to continue – and we wonder why we can’t convince local Afghans to side with us?
That’s not to even mention the nearly more than 1,000 US and ISAF soldiers who have died. That trend will only continue with the impending increase in troop levels. The first three months of 2010 already saw double the American casualties of the same period in 2009. Thousands of soldiers have been wounded, and their stories are seldom told to the American public.
When we debate this war, let’s be real about what we are debating. Let’s not debate a sanitized version of military efforts in Afghanistan. Those who think that the war in Afghanistan is essential to our security must weigh our gains against the dirty, messy reality of US and Afghan casualties, not an unrealistic vision of soldiers sitting safely in rooms piloting unmanned drones and Afghans embracing the military presence despite the occasional accidental air strike.
"Light 'em all up."
In the years since the "incident," as Reuters has tried to uncover what happened, U.S. military authorities have stonewalled, whitewashing the horrific actions of our gunners as within the rules of engagement. Watch the video: if these fighters are acting within officially sanctioned parameters, then the rules need to be changed. You can't win the hearts and minds of people by murdering them.
In the video, there are two separate attacks on civilians on the ground: at the first, the gunships fire on an unthreatening group whose main offense seems to be that they are men of fighting age; then they unload on a van of people attempting to tend to the wounded and dying from the first attack. The pilots and gunners sound both bloodthirsty and oddly detached, like teenage boys yelling "Kill! Kill! Kill!" in a video arcade.
Although from the air, the helicopter crews couldn't have known that children were in the cab of the Good Samaritans' van -- "Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Haha," American reliance on massive preemptive force makes the killing of civilians certain -- premeditated -- and therefore criminal. Firing on a van of medical workers doesn't spawn political martyrs, it makes real ones. If soldiers who commit acts like these are not held accountable, more such tragedies will be impossible to avoid. Of course, if we weren't there at all, such tragedies would be impossible to occur.
The Afghan war itself is counter-productive and stupid as policy and needs to be brought swiftly to a conclusion. In any war, it is a certainty that some innocent people will be harmed. But Obama's expansion of this war -- essentially an intervention in a civil war -- is especially tragic, because the certainty of the outcome -- the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces from the country -- and the willingness of the other side to negotiate create the conditions for a swift settlement.
The Obama administration, which claims to prefer diplomacy to force, could use the threat of immediate withdrawal to make Karzai negotiate a deal with the Taliban (an outcome made all the easier now that the Afghan president has threatened to join the Taliban as his way of punishing the Americans for criticizing his gangsterish regime). The sooner an agreement is reached the more the Taliban will be deterred from expanding its influence beyond its sanctuaries in the south and east, the more U.S. gains in the recent fighting can be consolidated, and the more reduced will be the opportunities for corruption and fraud in the areas controlled from Kabul.
Even assuming that the entry into Afghanistan was unavoidable in the aftermath of 9/11, there is little question that the project has soured and cannot be won militarily. Comparisons to the Vietnam war are inexact, but there is one eerie echo from that conflict: we appear to be destroying Afghanistan in the effort to save it. Dialogue and serious compromise are far more likely to produce a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan than blasting villagers from helicopters and pilotless drones.
Obama will not be able to go into the next presidential campaign without progress toward peace in the region, which means that there will be a sit-down with the Taliban sooner or later. Sooner is infinitely preferable. If the corrupt, inept Karzai is an obstruction to peace, he can easily be bargained away as part of the final deal (someone should slip Karzai a copy of the biography of Vietnam's President Diem -- it's possible he takes American rhetoric seriously; it's probably better for all concerned if he finds out now with whom he's in bed).
A negotiated settlement soon would not only save American and Afghan lives, but would avoid a precipitate withdrawal just before 2012 that would embarrass the American president and leave Afghanistan in ruins. Surely we'd rather spend our billions rebuilding the country than destroying it. Better to negotiate a compromise that takes into account the aspirations of both sides in the conflict (by which I mean Kabul and the Taliban) for the future of the country than to continue a policy that is to the advantage of no one. One thing all sides can probably agree on: Afghanistan's future must not, will not, can not include occupation by American troops.
The faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a group of distinguished outside judges has selected "The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States." We began with a list of eighty nominees. Our purpose was to call attention to and honor work of exceptional importance and quality - journalism that brilliantly met the challenges of this difficult decade.
Walter Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll, Stephen Kurkjian, Tom Farragher, Michael Paulson, Kevin Cullen, Ben Bradlee Jr., Mark Morrow - The Boston Globe: Abuse in the Catholic Church" 2002
In the 2009 seal hunt, Canada's commercial sealers slaughtered just over 72,000 seals, most of them babies. Sealers clubbed, shot, and skinned seal pups as young as 12 days old in the largest hunt of marine mammals in the world. Seal hunting is an off-season activity for Canada's east coast commercial fishermen. They earn a small fraction of their incomes from selling seal skins to the fur industry.
The connection between the commercial fishing industry and the seal hunt gives consumers all over the world the power to end the cruel slaughter of seals. The Canadian fishing industry has suffered a $750 million (Canadian) decline in the value of snow crab exports to the United States since the boycott began. That's more than $200 million a year.
Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’? by Chris Hedges (TruthDig 2010-03-29). "The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die."
The Inhumanity of War by Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute (Huntington Post 2010-04-03). Constant warfare is good for America and boon to the world. Not.
Nearly six months ago, in a must-read piece in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer pondered the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program (The Predator War 2009-10-26), Obama's ramping up of the terror bombing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The situation has only become more dire in the months since; as with the torture of prisoners, the debate over the indiscriminately murderous drones has devolved into an argument over how far we can go without committing acts that are actually indictable: see, Drone Attacks Are Legit Self-Defense, Says State Dept. Lawyer by Nathan Hodge (Danger Room 2010-03-26) and The Legal And Moral Issues Of Drone Use (NPR 2010-03-30) with Peter Bergen, Amitai Etzioni and Philip Alston.
Will the Pentagon send surveillance drones and other military support to the Somali government for its offensive against al-Qaida-linked insurgents, as the Associated Press reports? Perhaps you should ask your members of Congress.
Newsweek calls Afghanistan’s police force a ”$6 billion fiasco” that could cost us the war. Nation building is a risky business; no wonder presidential candidates promise not to do it.
"A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush." By Charlie Savage and James Risen (New York Times 2010-03-31).
And speaking of the important role of late night comedians in our national dialog, David Letterman's interview of Tea Party member Pam Stout on the Late Show was a "quietly remarkable piece of television," according to Entertainment Weekly's tv critic Ken Tucker.
Catch Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner's Fun for the Whole Family episode on BloggingHeads -- will health care reform give Obama a foreign policy boost?; Obama and Netanyahu, less than the best of pals; The Frumble in the Jungle; can conservative intellectuals ride the Tea Party tiger?; the Catholic Church’s systemic failure; is the Greek financial crisis just the tip of the iceberg?:
Speaking of the Frumble in the Jungle, Carl Bloice takes on The Myth of the Sensible Center (Black Commentator 2010-04-01). Left, Right and Center become meaningless anyway when the central ideologies controlling our politics, corporatism and militarism, are forbidden subjects.
US GAO releases 2010 Assessments of Selected Weapons Programs (2010-03-30), one- or two-page assessments of 70 weapon programs, most found wanting against "best practices" criteria.
Music video of the week is from a tribute to Skip Spence's legendary Oar (full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for the second Moby Grape album), with a wild guitar solo by Wilco's Nels Cline:
Women in Their 90'S Who Make A Difference Today by Joan Wile (AfterDowningStreet 2010-04-03). My 94-year-old mother, having lent a hand in the battle to permit wind farms in New England, now wants take on the war in Afghanistan. "I think you should leave the world a little better than you found it," she says.
It took a while for the corporations to lay their cold dead hands fully on the the switches of mass media access after the terrifying (to them) social, intellectual and artistic cacophony of the 60s. Throughout the 70s and 80s, though, brief flashes of anarchy and creativity could still sneak past the cultural police lines, as in this energetic Black Leather Monster by punk rockers Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics on “Solid Gold,“ the pop hits countdown that usually featured lipsyncing bubblegum bands and eroto-aerobic dance routines.
A Critic's Place, Thumb and All is a thoughtful meditation on the future of arts criticism by Times film critic A.O.Scott (New York Times 2010-03-30).
Finally, a song much abused by karaoke singers is given its most disturbing reading ever:
Most conceptual art you can "get" in an elevator pitch. The Running Fence was something to see.
As David Swanson put it, 
"While the rest of the world spirals into economic degradation, environmental pestilence and complete systems failure of all of the old world models, Lady Gaga reigns above the flames. Pay attention to the lesson. Lady Gaga is the only person prospering in this cultural climate. Therefore she has done something right. She is the necessary evolutionary adaptation to our times and this is why she disturbs people: This is what we must all become. Indestructibly vacant." -- Jason Louv, 
Profile: 
