at-Largely

Plumbers = Authorities now?

Okay boys and girls, let us read this article together and see what the actual scandal is (see poll after):

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, who led investigations into companies blamed for the state's subprime mortgage mess, resigned under a cloud on Wednesday after admitting to an affair with a female staff member.

"Unfortunately, it is now clear that the last step I must take to fix these problems is to resign as attorney general effective immediately," Dann told reporters.

In addition to Dann's relationship with a member of his staff, his office was roiled by sexual harassment claims.

Also, local media reported that authorities staged a raid on the attorney general's offices on Wednesday, carting away documents as part of an undisclosed investigation.

Well, can you spot the actual scandal in this story?

South winning "cold" civil war?

Michael Hirsh writes in Newsweek that the South appears to have won a new kind of Civil War. I have always called this "new" war a Cold Civil War and there is nothing new about it. Here is what Hirsh writes:

"In  the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

This thought, which has been recurring to me regularly over the years as I've watched the Southernization of our national politics at the hands of the GOP and its evangelical base, surfaced again when I read a New York Times story today. The article was about an "American Idol" contestant--apparently quite talented--who was eliminated after she sang the title song from "Jesus Christ Superstar." When it debuted 38 years ago, the rock opera was considered controversial for its rather arch portrayal of a doubt-wracked, very human Jesus, but the music was so good and the lyrics so clever that it quickly became a huge hit. In the delicate balance of forces that have always defined American tastes--nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation--art, or at least high craft, it seemed, had triumphed. But our national common denominator of taste is so altered today that the blasphemous dimension of "Jesus Christ Superstar" now trumps the artistic part. And somehow, no one is surprised. Our reaction is more like, "Why would she risk singing a song like that?"'

Actually while I agree in part with the phenomenon that Hirsh is describing, I would disagree on two major points.

The South has not "transformed the sensibility of the country," rather, the South has purchased enough media outlets to make it seem as though their message is all-pervasive when it is simply purchased and still as unpalatable as ever.  More importantly, what is generally thought of as the South should really be defined as the corporatism or Plantationsim. It is the same forces that led us to the Civil War to begin with and to imperialism, which is now sinking this entire nation.

Scoop: Do Test Makers Cheat Copyright?

Posted by David L Steinhardt

With this year's 25 Most Censored Stories up (see Larisa's post from yesterday), it's time to revisit one from 2003.

But first, some background:

A funny thing happened to my friend Steven last year. So funny, he's suing.

Steven Michael Harris has been a Broadway actor, the youngest-ever Ringmaster for the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus, a neuroscience theorist, and a school presenter. He had just done a presentation about writing at a school, a presentation that includes excerpts from his children's book about circus life, This Is My Trunk.

The school's principal soon called not only to thank him for a great presentation, but also to tell him how thrilled the kids were, when they took a standardized test the next day, to see that an excerpt from Steven's book was part of the test.

Steven didn't know his book was excerpted in standardized tests.

The book had been published by Atheneum in 1984. Steven's contract specified that if the book ever went out of print, all rights would revert to him. Additionally, the contract specified that if Atheneum, or a potential successor company, were ever declared bankrupt, that all rights would revert to him.

By 1990, the book had gone out of print. In 1991, Maxwell Communications, which owned Macmillan (of which Atheneum was a division), went bankrupt. One would think his contract would have terminated, and that he alone would have had the power ever since to make decisions about, and profit from, This Is My Trunk.

But in 2007, Simon & Schuster, the new corporate parent of what had been Atheneum, was still selling portions of Steven's book to McGraw-Hill for use in standardized tests.

How could they get away with this? Well, tests are secret. Even the copyright office doesn't receive a copy. They're handled under a special procedure. Everyone who handles the tests are obligated to maintain secrecy as well.

The school principal, when telling Steven about his book's inclusion in the test, let one very big cat out of the bag.

On April 10, 2008 Steven filed suit in federal district court in New York, against both Simon & Schuster and McGraw-Hill, charging copyright infringement.

In 2002, my elementary-school classmate Jeanne Heifetz made news by blowing the lid off of how standardized tests heavily edit some literary excerpts in the name of "sensitivity guidelines" that end up not only violating authors' copyrights, but test students on words writers never wrote. The story made 2003's 25 Most Censored list.

My pal Steven's lawsuit appears to be blowing the lid off an equally nefarious practice. Expect to hear more.

I thought domestic propaganda was illegal?

An excellent article in the NYT today illustrates our continued march toward the marriage of corporate and state interests, otherwise known as fascism:

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

Um, excuse me, were these flights funded by tax dollars?

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

<snip>

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Propaganda at Fox News? No? Really? I am shocked... shocked I tell you.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

Um, I thought domestic propaganda was illegal? Just to summarize, military analysts presented as experts on media outlets delivered government propaganda that benefited military contractors these so called experts had a financial gain in. That about cover it? It's time to bring out Immortal Technique's The 4th Branch. The video is not made by him, rather, by a fan of his and posted on YouTube:

 

"U.S. lacks counterterror plan in Pakistan," no, say it ain't so...

Before we delve into the GAO's report on Bush-Cheney's lack of interest in our national security (otherwise known as the war OF terror FOR profit), just remember these 10 most important facts about Pakistan:

1. Major training center for terrorists
2. Gives safe passage to a number of terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and the Taliban
3. Was directly involved in financing the attacks of September 11
4. Its major military intelligence organization, ISI, deeply rooted in support for terrorist activities
5. Was directly involved in training the terrorists involved in attacking Britain on July 7
6. Is the major proliferator of WMD to terrorist groups and countries extremely hostile to the US
7. Is the major supplier of weapons to North Korea, Iran, etc.
8. Its ISI assassinates its own political leaders
9. Its ISI is involved in the assassinations of Western journalists, including reporter Danny Pearl.
10. Is heavily involved in the drug trade, specifically the heroin trade

As you all well know, the Bush administration chose - AFTER 9/11 - to partner with Pakistan in order to attack Iraq... m'kay? Now for the GAO report:

"The Bush administration has failed to develop a government-wide plan to combat terrorism in the unruly tribal areas of Pakistan, even though top American officials concede that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to attack the United States and established safe havens in that border region, government auditors said Thursday.

In a searing report, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, sharply criticized the administration for relying too heavily on the Pakistani military to achieve American counterterrorism goals while paying only token attention to economic development and improving governance.

Nearly $6 billion of the $10.5 billion in aid that Washington has provided Pakistan since 2001 has been directed toward combating terrorism in the tribal areas, the report said. But about 96 percent of that assistance has gone to reimbursing Pakistan for its use of 120,000 troops in counterterrorism missions that have shown little success.

In a rare acknowledgment, senior officials at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad told the government auditors that they had received no strategic guidance from Washington on designing, carrying out, financing and monitoring a government-wide strategy, the report said."

War on terror? What war on terror?

Iran Hits the Fan Says Buchanan

by Jeff Huber

You can rest easy.  Political pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan predicted on Sunday that there is a "Fifty-fifty chance of U.S. air strikes on Iran by October."  I just love the all out commitment involved in making a fifty-fifty prediction: there’s a hundred percent chance you’ll be right.  Of course, the very fact that Pat Buchanan mentions something might happen means the odds are that it won’t. 

Don’t get complacent, though.  Just like the cataclysmic natural disaster that strikes every century or so, once in a blue moon it turns out that Pat Buchanan knew what the hell he was talking about. 

Similarly, we might expect that the Bush administration knows that attacking Iran would be the worst imaginable thing they could do—for the Bush legacy, for U.S. foreign policy, and for stability in the Middle East.  A strike on Iran would be an act of sheer lunacy; so the Bush administration might just do it. 

And now for the Communist delegation...

So we have fascism back in office with the election of Silvio Berlusconi to Prime Minister (for a third time) and just to even out the tyrant playing field, Russian President, soon to be Prime Minister, has also agreed to be the United Russia party chairman at the same time:

"Surprising no one, President Vladimir Putin accepted an offer Tuesday to lead the dominant political party in Russia once he leaves office next month and takes the post of prime minister, potentially setting the stage for years of power-sharing with President-elect Dimitri Medvedev, his hand-picked successor to the Kremlin.

At a party congress that played like a disconcerting mélange of U.S. national political convention, Soviet-era Communist Party Congress and corporate pep rally, Putin agreed to be the chairman of United Russia, a party that has been regarded as an arm of the Kremlin since it was created in 2001.

Until Medvedev takes office May 7, Putin said it would be inappropriate for him to be officially affiliated with a particular party. Once he is prime minister, he said, he sees no such problem, calling a dual party and government role "a perfectly civilized, natural and traditional practice for democratic states."

Between Berlusconi and his friend Putin, Europe is facing some hard-line extremists in the upcoming years. Remember the good old days when it was easy to tell the bad guys from the good guys? The Soviet regime was bad. The fascist regime was bad. The United States was good. Things are no longer this simple and American is no longer shining the torch of democracy from across the ocean.

Of violent sex crimes covered up by your tax dollars...

This story is incredibly difficult to read. We all know that sex crimes and violent murders increase in a war zone. Normal people asked to kill on a daily basis as their duty are affected in the most terrible way and for the rest of their lives. That is why a strict military code, domestic and international law are all required to keep otherwise sane and non-criminal people from going over the edge. Recruiting standards also usually hope to help identify some of the more vulnerable (mental illness, criminal background, etc.) before any conflict begins. Add to all of this aggressive training and discipline and together, these factors usually help (not avoid) our military personnel from collectively (although not individually) becoming a criminal enterprise of the deranged.

Under the Bush-Cheney doctrine of corporate greed and fuck-the-troops mentality  - not to mention the unprecedented lack of training and supervision, lax recruiting standards and suspension of legal controls - and the use of contractors who are under no law apparently, and we have in fact a corporate-military gang of violent offenders. Instead of addressing the problem they have created, however, the Bush-Cheney administration and their corporate no-bid contracting buddies have pressured the victims of these violent crimes into silence and government resources to cover-up these crimes. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our American victims of our other American victims as well as criminals who are themselves being guided by a criminally corrupt group of corporations and a criminally corrupt government. Here is a story of this America from the excellent investigative reporting of Karen Houppert:

"That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand--but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. "Because then, all of a sudden, if you've done exactly what you've been instructed not to do--tell somebody--then you're in danger," Smith says."

Washington Not Ready to Add Nicaragua to the Axis of Evil

From my friend, the excellent Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly's National Security Editor:

"When Daniel Ortega unexpectedly led his left-wing party back into power in Nicaragua in early 2007, he faced a dark future — literally.

The lights were going out all over the country. Its ancient power systems leaked so much electricity that even its one creaky oil refinery, privatized by his pro-American predecessors, couldn’t make up for shortages.

Blackouts were shutting off power for as much as 12 hours a days in many towns and cities. Food spoiled. Ice melted. Children read by candlelight.

The dire situation had helped bring down Ortega’s rivals, and now it could quickly undo him and his Sandinista party.  But Ortega had an ace: Venezuela’s garrulous anti-American leader, Hugo Chavez.

They struck a deal — and what a deal it was.Chavez would supply cheap oil on easier terms than a subprime mortgage.  Not only that, the deal was made between Chavez’s state oil company and shadowy entity set up by Sandinista party officials — not, in other words, the Nicaraguan government, according to knowledgeable sources.

Ever since, the commercial entity, known by its Spanish acronym, ALBANISA, has in turn been selling cheap oil to party officials who hold the mayorships in scores of Nicaraguan towns and villages. Not only that, a chunk of the proceeds are then recycled back to party officials for local economic and social projects.   

Ortega and the Sandinistas have benefitted, big time — and so have Nicaraguans. The blackouts have ended. Fertilizer, also produced by the Venezuelan oil, is plentiful.

Yes, the cost of energy to Nicaraguan consumers has risen 18 percent, according to independent figures and Latin American news media, but that’s only half the rate of the rest of the region.

So Nicaraguans have done well by Ortega and Chavez, the Mussolini-like orator whose grandiose vision of leading a regional economic and political alliance against the United States gained a significant new piece."

Speaking of Iran Contra (and apparently Miami, yet again)...

Um, why is this not the lead story everywhere? The New York Times delivers a Pulitzer-worthy piece on US arms shipments to Afghanistan, while everyone else is busy with Hillary and/or Obama hysteria:

"But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

<snip>

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation."

Like I said... where the hell is the 24/7 coverage of this story? Consider that in one week we learn that the Pentagon sent (by accident) to Taiwan and now we learn about this, and neither story is getting the attention it needs. Why? Read the whole thing, all seven pages of this fine piece of reporting.