Donkeyphant

Donkeyphant :: Blackwater before drinking water - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Blackwater before drinking water - Palast
Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 6:39 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust

Blackwater before drinking water

Greg Palast
Sunday 17 January 2010

1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honor�, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed � without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?

Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its "austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.

From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a fact of life too, Mr. President.

***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend's medicines to her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please contact Haiti@GregPalast.com immediately.
Urgently recommended reading - The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.

Donkeyphant :: We love the troops but fucking hate the Generals - Moore

Author: donkey
Subject: We love the troops but fucking hate the Generals - Moore
Posted: Mon Nov 30, 2009 4:11 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Dear President Obama,
Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.
It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).
So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea -- "Let's invade Afghanistan!" Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.
There's a reason they don't call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan's nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don't believe it, give the British a call. I'd have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev's number though. It's + 41 22 789 1662. I'm sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you're about to commit.
With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the "war president." Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line -- and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.
Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn't have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.
I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush's Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.
Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"
Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.
We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?
Don't be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn't be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can't change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.
The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can't be won over by abandoning the rest of us.
President Obama, it's time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, "No, we don't need health care, we don't need jobs, we don't need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, 'cause we don't need them, either."
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that's what they'd do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.
All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam "might" be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish -- the full terror of which we scarcely know.
When we elected you we didn't expect miracles. We didn't even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has.
Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God's sake, stop.
Tonight we still have hope.
Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON'T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother's son.
We're counting on you.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
P.S. There's still time to have your voice heard. Call the White House at 202-456-1111 or email the President.

Donkeyphant :: Why I voted No on healthcare deform - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: Why I voted No on healthcare deform - Kucinich
Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2009 7:09 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Congressman Dennis Kucinich after voting against H.R. 3962 addresses why he voted NO, stating:

"We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system."

"Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick."

"But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies - a bailout under a blue cross."

"By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress' blog, Think Progress, states, 'since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.' Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that 'money will start flowing in again' to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy."

"During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The 'robust public option' which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies."

"Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks' hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy - in which most Americans live - the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street."

"This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America's manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care."

"Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America's businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals."

Donkeyphant :: Republican Party is a mindset based on hate - Gore Vidal

Author: donkey
Subject: Republican Party is a mindset based on hate - Gore Vidal
Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 3:42 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Gore Vidal says it all.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece

Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it�s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred � religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word �conservative� you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They�re not, they�re fascists.

Donkeyphant :: HIT MEN AND THE NEXT DROWNING OF NEW ORLEANS - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: HIT MEN AND THE NEXT DROWNING OF NEW ORLEANS - Palast
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 4:40 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

ECONOMIC HIT MEN AND THE NEXT DROWNING OF NEW ORLEANS

Hurricane Bush Four Years Later, Part 2

by Greg Palast

This week only, our readers can download, free of charge, Greg Palast's film, "Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans." Or donate and get a signed DVD. Watch the 1-minute trailer ...

Who put out the hit on van Heerden?

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow � months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with ... getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I've been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden's job didn't die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced � for good.

So who done it?

Here are the facts.

Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans, those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.

First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with flooding.

"Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast," Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. "Seeing what kind of bad citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil."

Well, we need oil, don't we?

True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden's research. "Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal marsh); once you carve it up, it's just like bleeding a wild animal, hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to flooding from coastal and tidal surges."

So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden, wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling itself "America's Wetland" gave the university a fat check for $300,000.

After a little digging, I found that it wasn't really "America's Wetland," the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely "green-washed" the money through "Wetlands."

Was this Big Oil's "thank you" to LSU for canning van Heerden? The University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden's firing ("It's a confidential personnel matter").

Bosworth notes such a grant to the University "doesn't come without strings attached." And this "Wetland" grant appears to have some tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast's environment, guided by a committee of what the school's PR office describes as "experts" in coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron � and Shell Oil.

You can't challenge Shell's expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, "has dredged 8.8 million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing the loss of 22,624 acres."

Shell too is a sponsor of "America's Wetland."

Bad Behavior

Van Heerden and his team of hurricane experts at LSU have other enemies, notably Big Oil's little sisters: The Army Corp of Engineers and its contractors. One internal University memo that has come to light is a complaint from the Army Corp of Engineers' Washington office to an LSU official demanding to know why van Heerden's "irresponsible behavior is tolerated."

By van Heerden's bad "behavior," they seem to be referring to the professor's computer model of the Gulf which predicted, years before Katrina hit, that the levees built by the Army Corp were too short. The Army Corp, van Heerden asserts, compounded the danger to New Orleans by going shovel-crazy, with massive dredging and channel-cutting sought by shipping interests.

Following the complaint from Washington, the University took away van Heerden's computer (no kidding). But they couldn't take away his voice. He began to speak out. University officials do not deny they told him to shut up, to stop speaking to the press about his concerns. They were worried, they told van Heerden, that his statements jeopardized their government funding.

Van Heerden's revelations were, indeed, damning. He revealed that the Bush White House knew, the night Katrina came ashore, that the levees were breaking up, but withheld this crucial information from the state's emergency response center. As a result, the state slowed evacuation and stranded residents were left to drown. [See Big Easy to Big Empty.]

A class action lawsuit has been filed against the Army Corp of Engineers on behalf of all the people of the city who lost homes and loved ones because the Corp-designed levees had failed. Anyone with a TV and two eyes could see that. But the Bush Administration flat out denied it knew its system was flawed and refused any responsibility for the disaster.

Van Heerden, who had warned Washington, long before the flood, that the levees were 18 inches too short, would have been a devastating expert witness for the public. But the university ordered him not to testify, a relief for the Corps. (A verdict is expected soon in the non-jury case.)

The Army Corp and its contractors can feel safer now that van Heerden has been booted. His Hurricane Center will be downsized and instead, the University will expand its "Wetland" program, with Chevron's checkbook.

Joining Chevron and Shell on the LSU board of "wetland" experts will be the Shaw Group, a huge Army Corp contractor.

If you've read John Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, you would know about Shaw Group, or at least the subsidiary for whom Perkins did his dirty work: an engineering outfit that used flim-flam, intimidation and fraud to turn a buck. (I once directed a government racketeering investigation of one of their projects before Shaw bought them up. In the 1988 case, a jury found the company was co-conspirator in a multi-billion-dollar fraud, charges the company settled with a civil payment.)

Shaw Group is also a sponsor of "America's Wetland." So is electricity giant Entergy Corporation. That's the company that shut off the power in New Orleans during the flood, then sold the loose juice elsewhere, pocketing a multi-million-dollar windfall.

Yes, America's Wetland does have a green cover, Environmental Defense, exposed in the Guardian UK in 1999 for its icky habit of licking the sugar off corporate candy canes. We caught them trying to set up a lucrative financial operation with the very polluters they were supposed to be challenging. [See Fill your lungs it's only borrowed grime]

I spoke with the Chairman of American Wetland, King Milling. Milling's just a local good ol' boy, a sincere guy, not a front for Big Oil. But he naively let his group be used to buy the debate over the environment and ice out un-bought experts like van Heerden.

Flood Warning

With LSU deep in the pocket of the corporate powers and under Army Corp pressure, van Heerden didn't stand a chance. For doing nothing more than trying to save a few thousand lives, he has paid quite a price. As he told me this week from his home, "No good turn goes unpunished."

That's van Heerden's fate. But what about the city's? Is New Orleans ready for another Katrina?

His answer is not comforting: "No, definitely not. If anything, it's worse than when Katrina hit. We've lost a lot of wetlands protection. It's not very safe ... A section of the flood wall itself has sunk about 9 inches, a result of [Hurricane] Gustav."

Is anyone listening?

"The [Army] Corp won't talk to me," says van Heerden. "Like everybody else, they are crossing their fingers and hoping we don't have a storm."

Well, don't say we didn't warn you.

Donkeyphant :: Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT! - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT! - Palast
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 12:09 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT!
by Greg Palast

January 29, 2009

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last? We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofusses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new President's ... a Democrat!

******
Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at www.GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Please subscribe to our reports at www.GregPalast.com.

Donkeyphant :: Bill Richardson - Kissinger-American - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Bill Richardson - Kissinger-American - Palast
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 5:20 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Bill Richardson - Kissinger-American
by Greg Palast

excerpted from Armed Madhouse

January 5, 2009

Bill Richardson is out: Caught with his hand, if not exactly in the cookie jar, at least you could say his sticky finger were near it. I'm not surprised.

For years I've been investigating the second-most corrupt state in the USA (after Alaska). I like to check in on the enchanted state with my bud Santiago Ju�rez.

I knew it was not a polite question, but it was really bugging me, so I asked him, �Exactly how does a Mexican get the name William Richardson?�

Governor Richardson�s dad, Santiago explained, was a Citibank executive assigned to Mexico City. There he met Governor Bill�s mom, and-milagro!-a Mexican-American was born. Richardson gets big mileage out of his mother�s heritage, and that makes him, legitimately, a Mexican-American, a politically useful designation. But it�s just as legitimate to say that Richardson is a Citibank-American.

But Governor Richardson is more than that. Between leaving Bill Clinton�s cabinet where he was Secretary of Energy and grabbing a Hispanic-district seat in Congress, Richardson became a partner in (Henry) Kissinger and Associates. That would make Richardson a Kissinger-American as well.

In 2004, John Kerry won New Mexico-if you counted the votes. But they didn't - and George Bush won the state and the presidency by just 5,000 ballots. Everyone was talking about the theft of Ohio by Republicans, but few noted that New Mexico was stolen as well. But one fact drove me straight nuts: In the end, this state and its damaged elections were in the hands of Richardson, A Democrat and a Mexican-American one at that.

In New Mexico the issue of uncounted votes is more than skin deep. Lots of Mexican-American votes don�t tally, but Citibank-American votes never get lost. Kissinger American votes always count. The story of America�s failed elections is not about undervotes. It�s about underclass. Disenfranchisement is class warfare by other means. It just happens that in New Mexico, the colors of the underclass are, for the most part, brown and red.

Class War by Other Means

As community organizer Santiago told me:

You take away people�s health insurance and you take their right to union pay scales and you take away their pensions-taking away their vote�s just one more on the list.

Some New Mexico Democrats have no trouble at the voting booth. In Santa Fe, you find trust-fund refugees from Los Angeles wearing Navajo turquoise jewelry and �casual� clothes that cost more than my car. Each one has a personal healer, an unfinished film script and a tan so deep you�d think they�re bred for their leather. They�re Democrats and their votes count. Voting-or at least voting that gets tabulated - is a class privilege. The effect is racial and partisan, but the engine is economic.

The second- and third-highest undervotes in New Mexico were recorded in McKinley and Cibola counties-85% and 72% Hispanic and Native. But the undervote champ is nearly the whitest county in New Mexico: DeBaca, which mangled and lost 8.4% of ballots cast. White DeBaca, whose average income hovers at the national poverty level, is poorer than Hispanic Cibola. No question, disenfranchisement gives off an ugly racial smell, but income is the real predictor of vote loss.

And what about those Bernalillo ghost voters for Bush? Those spirits are, it turns out, quite well-to-do, haunting the mesas west of Albuquerque where the real estate provides unobstructed views of Georgia O�Keeffe sunsets.

This was my third investigation in New Mexico in twenty years. The first time, the state�s Attorney General brought me in to go over the account books of Public Service of New Mexico (PNM), a racketeering enterprise masquerading as an electric company. Too young to understand what I wasn�t supposed to know, I proudly mapped out the sewerage lines of deceit connecting the gas drillers, water lords and political elite of New Mexico. The AG�s office handed me a nice check - which I took not as a reward, but as a payment to leave the state. After a decade away, I returned as a reporter, to look into prisons-for-pro?t out?t Wackenhut Inc. In September 1999, a company insider told me, Wackenhut was cutting costs at its New Mexico jails by sending guards alone into the cell blocks. Ralph Garcia of Santa Rosa, who�d lost his ranch to drought, took the $7.95-an-hour job guarding homicidal neo-Nazis and Mexican mafia thugs in the local Wackenhut lock-up. Inexperienced, untrained and alone, he was stabbed to death by inmates just two weeks after the insider�s warning. So that�s how Garcia became one more impoverished Chicano who lost his vote. No question, that�s not your typical case of voter disenfranchisement, but that�s the reality of the �Land of Enchantment.� New Mexico is the New America, where growing income inequality is creating a feudal divide between the prison-owning class and the prisoner-and-guard class.

Vote spoilage is the owning class�s weapon of choice.

Whose flag does Bill Richardson carry in the nouvelle class war? When I was checking out the New Mexico vote in 2005, my old friends Public Service of New Mexico hit the front page, sued by the State of California for conspiring with Enron to rig the California power market. It is still in court. It was a scam called �Ricochet.� Enron and PNM say it was not illegal. It played out about the time Garcia was walking the cell block. Where was Richardson? He was in Washington, Clinton�s Secretary of Energy, playing chubby cheerleader for PNM�s plan for �deregulation� of the energy market. Deregulation made PNM�s games possible-and Richardson�s employment by Kissinger inevitable.

Richardson, Ready for Takeoff

What about all those suspect spoiled votes in Hispanic and Indian precincts stuck inside the machines? Why didn�t this Mexican-American Democrat ask for a recount? It didn�t just slip Richardson�s little mind: He actively did everything in his power to stop a recount. I was told that it was Richardson himself who encouraged Secretary of State Vigil-Giron to reject the $114,000 payment from pissed-off Democrats and the Green Party. The Governor was too busy to speak with me about this.

Halting the 2004 recount wasn�t enough for Governor Bill, however. He demanded the legislature pass a �reform� law that would require anyone wanting a recount of a suspicious vote to put up a bond of over one million dollars. As a result, �free and fair elections� are now effectively outlawed in New Mexico. You can have a choice of a �free� election or a �fair� election, but not both. Want fair? Then you have to pay a million to recheck the ballots. In other words, it�s against the law to buy votes, but in New Mexico not against the law to buy the vote count.

On his phony reform law, Richardson was called out by a fellow Democrat, State Senator Linda Lopez-an act of indiscreet defiance that would not be forgotten by the Governor�s circle.

The centerpiece of the law signed by the Governor: Ms. Fox-Young�s proposal to require photo ID for new voters. Maybe the former Cabinet Secretary and United Nations Ambassador Richardson couldn�t imagine that photo IDs would be a problem for some voters. After all, Mexican-Americans in Little Texas may have trouble producing acceptable IDs, but it�s no problem at all for a Kissinger-American like Governor Richardson. The Governor and Jimmy Carter both have passports, they have credit cards and they have chauffeurs who will vouch for them.

Richardson wouldn�t speak with me about the 2004 vote fiasco. Instead, he busied himself with his space program. He announced the state would chip in $200 million to build a �spaceport� to land private rocket ships that will be launched beginning in 2009 by Richard Branson, the British billionaire. Passengers have already bought tickets for $200,000 each (round trip, they hope).

**************
Read the rest of this story by picking up Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse at Amazon.com or support his investigations by getting an autographed copy of the book at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org Subscribe to Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com

Donkeyphant :: Vote for him - because he's Black - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Vote for him - because he's Black - Palast
Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2008 5:38 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Vote for him - because he's Black
by Greg Palast

No question, Mr. Bruce was my favorite teacher in junior high.

I went to this Loser-ville school in the San Fernando Valley. It was all Chicano kids and working class white losers like me. Everyone had to take 'metal shop' so we could work the bottom-end jobs in the Chevy plant.

My brain was dying - until Mr. Bruce showed up, the new science teacher. DOCTOR Bruce, actually - the only Ph.d teacher in the place.

At lunch hour, instead of hanging out in the teachers' lunchroom, Mr. Bruce would invite me and my friends into his classroom. Over coffee made on a Bunsen burner, he would talk about topics from Einstein to Buddha while munching on this strange stuff called "organic" food.

He was simply like no adult I'd ever met - an exceptional guy who could make us dull-brained students sizzle.

My parents had him over for Sunday brunch and he talked about his work as a 'honey-dipper' in the Deep South where he grew up. The honey-dipper was the guy who hunted for lost glasses and whatever else was dropped in outhouse cesspools. Dr. Bruce said he enjoyed the work because it taught him pleasures of quiet grace, of dignified acceptance.

The kids were crazy about him, but not all the parents. Some called to complain about the school hiring him.

So he left. Months later, Mr. Bruce mailed me a letter from Japan where he'd taken a university post.

It's odd, but it was only this year that I put it all together: his exclusion by the other teachers, his job as a honey-dipper, his need to escape America.

Dr. Bruce, of course, is Black.

So, I'm going to do something that Dr. Bruce would think little of. I'm going to vote for the Black man. Because he's Black.

The truth is, I'm wary of Barack Obama. His cozy relations with the sub-prime loan sharks who funded his early campaign; his vote, at the behest of his big donor ADM corporation, for the horrific Bush energy bill.

But there's one thing that overshadows policy positions, one thing he cannot change once in office: the color of his skin. The same as Mr. Bruce's.

I'm going to say something that I know the Obama campaign will just hate; but that many others are feeling but won't say out loud. We must vote for Barack Obama because he's Black.

For four centuries, our nation has poisoned itself with the corrosive venom of racism. From the slave trade, to our still-segregated schools, to the Bush family stealing the White House by cynically, and sinfully, calling Florida Black voters felons; to the exile of a brilliant science teacher four decades ago.

The time has come to cleanse the wound that will not heal.

********
Greg Palast's investigative reports appear on BBC Television and in Rolling Stone Magazine. Palast is the co-author, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of "Steal Back Your Vote," the investigative comic book available for no charge at StealBackYourVote.org and www.GregPalast.com

Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.

Donkeyphant :: US Voting Registration Deadline Now - Michael Moore

Author: donkey
Subject: US Voting Registration Deadline Now - Michael Moore
Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 4:08 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Friends,

Our attention has been consumed with Wall Street drama and the comedy event of the season -- tonight's vice-presidential debate -- but many people don't realize that in most states if you're not registered to vote by Monday, you cannot vote for president in November. In some states, the deadline is as early as this Saturday!

Will you do me a favor? Beginning right now, will you start asking everyone you know if they are registered to vote? Before you say hello, will you ask, "Hey, are you registered to vote here in (name of town)? 'Cause the deadline is Monday, and you have to be registered where you live." (Click here to find out what the deadline is in your state and click here to find out what the procedures are to sign up and vote. If you are a college student and want to find out where your vote counts most, click here.)

For the next couple of days, each of us has to do whatever we can to get people registered. Especially people who have recently moved, or students who are at college (students can vote where they go to school). Obama's two strongest bases -- young people and African Americans -- are traditionally the two groups who have the lowest voter registration and the lowest voter turnout. For Obama to win, this must change -- and it has to change today or tomorrow, not next week.

So send an email to everyone in your address book and attach this link so they know how to register and what the deadline is. Call the local Obama headquarters or the NAACP or black pastors or student Dems and offer your time to register people this weekend. It's called "the ground game," and it's where we always lose to the Republicans. Each of us need to commit to doing something in the next 48 hours to get the unregistered registered.

The more enlightened states allow you to register the day you vote. But in most places the deadline to register is this Monday, October 6th at 5pm.

Thanks for taking the time to make sure everyone you know is registered, and for helping them out if they're not.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Tonight, the Senate passed an even worse "bailout" bill than the one the House defeated on Monday night. Only 25 Senators (and most of them for the wrong reasons) voted "No." It now moves to the House for a vote, possibly on Friday. Why did Obama and Biden vote for it? I think we all know the answer. Let's keep our eye on the ball of removing the Republicans from the White House, but let tonight be our first reminder that our work is not finished on November 4th when Obama wins. The struggle between what is best for the people and what is best in order to line the pockets of Wall Street will continue. 150 million Americans combined can't even match the wealth of the richest 400 Americans. All we have is our vote. And there will always be more of us than them. We will all need to become more politically active if we are going to get our democracy back.

P.P.S. Bill Maher's new film, "Religulous," opens tomorrow. It's hilarious and it raises some important and controversial questions. Go see it if you have a chance. It's directed by Larry Charles, the director of "Borat."

Donkeyphant :: The Bailout and What�s Next - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: The Bailout and What�s Next - Kucinich
Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 10:01 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Dear Friend,

Yesterday marked a day that will go down in history, when Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike took on full responsibility to protect the interests of taxpaying Americans, and defeated the deceptive bail out bill, defying the dictates of the Administration, the House Majority Leadership, the House Minority Leadership and the special interests on Wall Street.

Obviously Congress must consider quickly another course. There are immediate issues which demand attention and responsible action by the Congress so that the taxpayers, their assets, and their futures are protected.

We MUST do something to protect millions of Americans whose homes, bank deposits, investments, and pensions are at risk in a financial system that has become seriously corrupted. We are told that we must stabilize markets in order for the people to be protected. I think we need to protect peoples� homes, bank deposits, investments, and pensions, to order to stabilize the market.

We cannot delay taking action. But the action must benefit all Americans, not just a privileged few. Otherwise, more plans will fail, and the financial security of everyone will be at risk.

The $700 billion bailout would have added to our existing unbearable load of national debt, trade deficits, and the cost of paying for the war. It would have been a disaster for the American public and the government for decades and maybe even centuries to come.

To be sure, there are many different reasons why people voted against the bailout. The legislation did not regard in any meaningful way the plight of millions of Americans who are about to lose their homes. It did nothing to strengthen existing regulatory structures or impose new ones at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve in order to protect investors. There were no direct protections for bank depositors. There was nothing to stop further speculation, which is what brought us into this mess in the first place.

This was a bailout for some firms (and investors) on Wall Street, with the idea that in doing so there would be certain, unspecified, general benefits to the economy.

This is a perfect time to open a broader discussion about our financial system, especially our monetary system. Such a discussion is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and then, upon finding it, discussing its qualities at great length. Let me briefly describe the haystack instead.

Here is a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:

The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.

Confused?

This is the system. This is the standard mechanism used to expand the money supply on a daily basis not a special one designed only for the �$700 billion� transaction. People will explain this to you in many different ways, but this is what it comes down to.

The banks needed Congress� approval. Of course in this topsy turvy world, it is the banks which set the terms of the money they are borrowing from the taxpayers. And what do we get for this transaction? Long term debt enslavement of our country. We get to pay back to the banks trillions of dollars ($700 billion with compounded interest) and the banks give us their bad debt which they cull from everywhere in the world.

Who could turn down a deal like this? I did.

The globalization of the debt puts the United States in the position that in order to repay the money that we borrow from the banks (for the banks) we could be forced to accept International Monetary Fund dictates which involve cutting health, social security benefits and all other social spending in addition to reducing wages and exploiting our natural resources. This inevitably leads to a loss of economic, social and political freedom.

Under the failed $700 billion bailout plan, Wall Street�s profits are Wall Street�s profits and Wall Street�s losses are the taxpayers� losses. Profits are capitalized. Losses are socialized.

We are at a teachable moment on matters of money and finance. In the coming days and weeks, I will share with you thoughts about what can be done to take us not just in a new direction, but in a new direction which is just.

Thank you,

Dennis
www.Kucinich.us
216-252-9000 877-933-6647

PS Watch the 47 minute 'Money as Debt' animated documentary in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

Donkeyphant :: Bush Laden: "Kill the canary!"

Author: donkey
Subject: Bush Laden: "Kill the canary!"
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008 4:58 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Spitzer Feb 2008 writes "Predatory lenders' partner in crime."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html

3 weeks later, he's gone.

6 months later, American taxpayers get a $1 trillion bill.

Donkeyphant :: Bailing out the rich

Author: donkey
Subject: Bailing out the rich
Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:34 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Many gambled. Some profited. Most - predominantly the naive poor and middle class - lost.

That's the nature of predatory capitalism.

Once the bailout happens, guess what? There won't be any money for healthcare or FEMA. Funny how that happens.

What are we getting in return? A lot of overpriced real estate. If it is ever sold at a profit (vandalism will be a big problem), who will get the money?

Answer: China and our other creditors.

Nearly every non-millionaire family around the world is at the point where they can no longer afford to work and live, much less feed, clothe, and educate their children. Housing is unaffordable especially when one considers garbage pickup, water, electricity, gas, heating oil, and property taxes.

The consequence? Violence. Crime. Murder.

What will really happen to those who default on their loans?

We already know. Not a single dollar of the estimated trillion dollar bailout has been set aside to buy blankets for the houseless generation.

http://ping.fm/gv8ls

Donkeyphant :: Fundamentally Fucked

Author: donkey
Subject: Fundamentally Fucked
Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 5:19 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

When faced with the misogyny of religious fundamentalism, whether claimed to be Christian or Muslim, it's sometimes difficult to decide which is worse.

When a human is not allowed to drive because she has a vagina, that is clearly worse than when a woman is called a whore for being unmarried and wanting an abortion.

Clearly, when a human is not allowed to leave the home without a male blood-relative escort (yes, a 10-year-old will do), that is worse than calling your wife a cunt.

But how much more will we tolerate from the Religious Righteous in the US? Who will stop them from descending to the depths of Saudi Arabia's insane tribal elders?

What should we do about foreign fundamentalism? We must first clean out our own house. Then we'll be justified to consider the oppressed throughout the world. After all, the (mostly) white Christian fundamentalists in the US empower the brutal regime in Iran by their example. Those Christians are led by forces who they do not fully comprehend: the insatiable cravings of a small number of powerful families including Rove, Cheney, and Bush.

Furthermore, if we stopped sending the Saudis our money for their oil, we could at least stop funding their terrorism.

Regarding the c- and f-bombs, we have been conditioned to react to words instead of the violence carried out by the rich white man's Pentagon. RIP George Carlin. Both words have been used in public by McSame and Vampire Cheney. I'm taking the dictionary back from the FCC (aka the Fuckin Cunt Cocksuckers). As for misspelling words like f*ck, fing, friggin, frick, feck, they are still conjuring an alternative form of fuck, an expression in wide use that has nothing to do with the human body. It's one thing to restrict the vocabulary of children - because they don't know how to express themselves yet - but it's an entirely different thing for adults to censor themselves. Actions speak louder than words.

The first order of business in authoritarianism is to control expression, to define who is right (us) and who is wrong (them).

What I do, I do for you. True freedom isn't free or office-approved.

Donkeyphant :: Exxon, GM, and DuPont's lead poisoning of America

Author: donkey
Subject: Exxon, GM, and DuPont's lead poisoning of America
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 10:33 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/ethylwar/overview.html

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20000404.atc.13.ram

Donkeyphant :: You are the everything

Author: donkey
Subject: You are the everything
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:45 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The truth doesn't need you to believe, so don't believe in anything.

Forgive me. Forgive others. Forgive television. Forgive yourself. Forgive your blunders. Forgive the government. Forgive time.

Love yourself.

No matter what you do for someone, it doesn't count if your heart isn't in it.

We were born to play.

I have all the love I need in my own heart.

Donkeyphant :: Fear falling

Author: donkey
Subject: Fear falling
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:41 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Only the present is real.
Do whatever you need to be happy.
Do what you like with your
time, body, and heart,
with whomever you wish.
I'm pro-me.
I'm not anti-you.
The only one who needs your worship
is you.
The love I need comes from me.
Open yourself.
Love yourself. Let go.
Watch the fear fall away.
Open your eyes and see me smiling.
Some day.

Donkeyphant :: Religious non-scientistism

Author: donkey
Subject: Religious non-scientistism
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:15 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

If you don't believe in certain science like evolution, please explain one thing.

Why do you have parents?

Donkeyphant :: Missing

Author: donkey
Subject: Missing
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 8:14 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

i miss you, i do.
i miss your laugh.
i miss your smile.
it's been a long while.

Donkeyphant :: Desire, Strength, and Peace

Author: donkey
Subject: Desire, Strength, and Peace
Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:36 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The things that tug at our hearts are powerful and relentless. We are bashed against the rocks if we resist.

Souls need mommies. As people - especially men - are unreliable, you can not wait for someone. I don't have to tell you that there are options.

More often than not, desire results in the thing wanted. Which then results in a mountain of duty no matter whether there are abnormalities. Maybe you get karma points for doing the work. But it is a minute to minute (and year to year and decade to decade!) struggle to be a loving parent while butting heads against the will of a child. There's payback for getting what you want.

The experience forced me to seek out another path. In doing so, it brought me internal peace and strength. I found a way to control my mind that I didn't think I would ever achieve.

If I had the wisdom to begin with, of course I would not be in my current situation. But one could not come without the other, so I am grateful - oh God - I am grateful, to be young enough to enjoy it.

And I would not have met you.

You will never fade from my memory. I don't think we can sustain happiness while living in our bodies. Peace is the best we can hope for.

Peace and love to you, always.

Donkeyphant :: Republicans: Stay at home this time - Moore

Author: donkey
Subject: Republicans: Stay at home this time - Moore
Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2008 3:53 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Friends,

I'm am speechless after listening to Barack Obama's speech last night. So I'm sending you something I wrote to you two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. It remains every bit as relevant today, on Katrina's 3rd anniversary, as when I wrote it on September 11, 2005. Please give it another look. Here it is in full:

A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush... from Michael Moore

Dear Friends,

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that, the man you re-elected to lead us AFTER we were attacked, went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that, after the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have... zero experience in emergency preparedness (!), do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military, and have never seen young men die in battle, send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?!

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him at some fundraiser with John McCain. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a "flyover" in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2,500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com
MMFlint@aol.com

(And my idea now, some three years later, is that they seek forgiveness and redemption by voting for Barack Obama -- or just stay home on November 4.)

P.S. An excellent film on Katrina, "Trouble the Water," is currently playing around the country. Go see it!

Donkeyphant :: Bush at the Olympics - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Bush at the Olympics - Palast
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 1:38 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Bush at the Olympics
By Greg Palast

For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

18 August 2008

Lhasa, Tibet - China's secret police are just terrible at keeping themselves secret.

The detective, dressed in her business suit and pumps appropriate to urban Lhasa, did not expect to be trailing my wife and me up the steep hillside to a monastery 15,000 feet up an ice-crusted ridge. Even at 200 yards behind us, I could see her shivering in the thin, frozen air, trying, absurdly, to look like just another hiker on the barren slope.

But then, she really wasn't trying to hide. Her presence was meant to send a message of fear and intimidation. I got the point earlier when a photographer we'd helped sneak into Tibet was arrested, her film of protesting Tibetans seized and her camera smashed as she was hustled onto the first plane leaving the country.

When my police shadow looked away, I snapped a photo of the long boxes below me, roofs of the prison complex. It housed more Buddhist monks than any monastery.

At a hermitage carved into the summit rock I found my host sitting cross-legged under an ancient tapestry depicting a monster ready to devour quiet souls.

The holy man had questions for us:

Does Christianity have a god? (Answer: "Sometimes.")

What is a �President'?

It was 1993. I told the monk the new President, Bill Clinton, had met the Dalai Lama

This Clinton must be a very holy and very good man, yes? ("Sometimes.")

It's not that the priest avoided worldly newspapers, but he'd just gotten out of prison after 27 years and he didn't get much news there. Not that you could get any real news in Tibet. No journalists are allowed there. (Not to be impolite to their Chinese minders - or lose their lucrative Olympics deals - The New York Times and NBC cover Tibet from Beijing and Delhi. Just check the by-lines.)

I assured him that Clinton, though not quite holy, would, at the least, help Tibetans.

That seemed easy enough as they didn't want very much, these mountain folk. They didn't demand independence from China but, ironically, just the opposite: an opportunity to become Chinese, that is, have full access to schooling, university positions afforded their ethnic Han comrades; and to have a share of the jobs and wealth created by the uranium and other resources of their plateau nation.

And maybe something a little un-Chinese: freedom of expression, of movement, of culture, of religion. I assured the monk that this new President would help them obtain just a bit of autonomy in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region," as China calls it.

The lama smiled. It was not cynicism but a friendly disbelief in change happening in this coming year. He measured change in lifetimes.

He asked a student monk to pull down a small painted statue of the Buddha - which the elder man then chopped apart with a knife. He then gestured to his acolyte to give us each a piece of the icon - to eat.

Swallowing the body of his Lord was not meant to make us holy but to solve a more immediate problem - lunch. The painted god, I discovered with relief, was made out of barley, beer, rancid butter and honey.

I could see that my Tibetan translator was chomping at the bit to show the old man messages we'd brought from the Dalai Lama's Secretariat in India. But that would have been suicide. The young translator's brother (I certainly won't use their names), a cook at a nearby temple, joined a demonstration of monks against Chinese rule and was shot dead. I admonished our translator that his mother couldn't afford to lose her last remaining child.

Instead, we gave the lama a postcard printed with the image of the multi-armed god Chenrezig. The priest would know, but the Chinese wouldn't, that Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, is a reincarnation of this god.

"Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa," I said in my ridiculous Tibetan. The Dalai Lama will return.

We all return, he indicated, though not necessarily in this body.

The shivering "tourist" policewoman waited for us to leave before she entered the sanctuary. I can only imagine the questions she'd asked.

Ta la'i bla ma tshur log pa. The point of our heading deep into Tibet's wastelands was to spread the word that the Dalai Lama hadn't abandoned his people as the Chinese propagandists told them on radio, on loudspeakers, and through their local quislings. (My favorite notice was a warning by Chinese authorities that they must "approve all re-incarnations." That was meant to avoid the Dalai Lama locating the new child containing the soul of the Panchen Lama, the Dalai Lama's missing, and obviously murdered, number two man.)

On to another monastery with the postcard and the message. The old nuns would put the postcard over their eyes and forehead and turn to bow into the sun's rays, the symbol of Free Tibet.

One monastery was quiet. In a land where you see the clouds below you, not above, sunlight is brutally harsh. Every image stands out in painful, unforgettable clarity. This emptied place had been smashed into ruins by the Red Guards. They'd arrested all the monks they hadn't gunned down, some of the 200,000 Tibetans killed by the Chinese in their ethnic "re-education" campaign.

But the troops had left standing a wall of painted Buddhas, dozens and dozens of them. The Chinese cadres were certain the magic powers of these religious images were bunkum. Nevertheless, just in case, they'd put a bullet hole in each Buddha's forehead.

Back down in the city, another plainclothesman, a grinning Chinese man, greeted me in the parking lot of the Lhasa Sheraton - in English, "Glad to see you again!"

Again?

"Oh, don't you remember me? I was standing outside the Dalai Lama's in Delhi."

"Um, I was there to, you know, get some maps and, uh, some postcards."

O.K. This is my warning. Say something, Palast. I tried this:

"That's nice!" He stepped closer and grinned harder. "I have some books for you about Tibet" - some propaganda about Tibetans as cannibals (really). He paused, grinned even harder, then added, "I left them in your room."

In my room? Another warning.

I wasn't worried about the bed search. The envelope the Dalai Lama's Secretariat had given us had already been delivered to persons whose identities we made certain not to know.

*

In his fleeting moment as President, Bill Clinton didn't have time to remember Tibet. More pressing to him was free trade - with Mexico via NAFTA - and free trade with China, to which he granted Most Favored Nation status.

*

That May, we left just as the streets were filling with Tibetans demonstrating for freedom. They would never be seen on US TV. Not then, not now. NBC will interrupt the Beijing Summer Olympics only to broadcast its millionth ad for McDonald's.

George Bush is there; says he was thrilled that the Chinese dictator, Hu Jintao, invited him and Laura and the kids to lunch. I doubt if they dined on a barley Buddha.

In the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, Americans knew that the competition was as much over our national souls as our physical prowess. When Jesse Owens, a Black man, left Hitler's Aryan runners eating his dust, America jumped to its feet and cheered - not just for what he did, but for who we are: for liberty and justice for all.

Now, our Olympic Committee cravenly demands our athletes remain silent about Tibet. But they shouldn't bother: Bush has already won the gold medal in the Cowardly Silence competition.

*

On the way to the Lhasa airport, leaving those occupied territories, I thought I could see, looking into the harsh glare, the Buddhist hermitage just below the Himalayan crest. I asked my guide if he'd heard from the old monk. I was told that, days after our visit, he raised the Tibetan sun-flag and was arrested.

The foolish Chinese undoubtedly would have sentenced him to only one life in prison.

He would return.

******************
Greg Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. Palast, author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. All photos including home page image copyright Greg Palast and Linda Levy. See more of Greg and Linda's photos here.

Sign up for updates on Palast�s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.

Donkeyphant :: The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut - Palast
Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 6:12 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut
By Greg Palast
Thursday, August 7, 2008. North Shore, Long Island

I�m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain�s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain�s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson�s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a �safe, efficient [and] inexpensive� alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren�t �period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I�m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion � or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say �supposed to,� it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We�re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, �This time it will be different.� Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don�t. Maybe that�s because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant�s builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can�t blame them.) KBR has built many nukes �not one within a mile of its promised cost.

But that doesn�t bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I�m looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain�s got quite some team.)

Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph:

While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George Bush�s energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear energy, legislation which diss�es and dismisses conservation. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as the �Senator from Commonwealth Edison,� the Chicago company which is the nation�s largest operator of nuclear plants � and whose executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign.

So, we�ve got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference.

McCain�s ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the new plants� radioactive waste.

That�s not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about �inexpensive� nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion � nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste�s cost. �Can we deal with the expense?� he said on Meet the Press.

McCain�s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who rise above their parties - only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy plan.

But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question, doesn�t have to take off his shoes to add up the facts.

***********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Sign up for updates on Palast�s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com - as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast's RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.

Donkeyphant :: Obama Doesn't Sweat. He should. - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Obama Doesn't Sweat. He should. - Palast
Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 5:53 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Obama Doesn't Sweat. He should.
by Greg Palast

In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color. In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives - overwhelming Black voters.

In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.

In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

My investigations partner spoke directly to Barack Obama about it. (When your partner is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidates take your phone call.) The cool, cool Senator Obama told Kennedy he was "concerned" about the integrity of the vote in the Southwest in particular.

He's concerned. I'm sweating.

It's time SOMEBODY raised the alarm about these missing voters; not to save Obama's candidacy � journalists should stay the heck away from partisan endorsements - but raise the alarm to save our sick democracy.

And that somebody is YOU. Joining with US, the Palast investigative team. Here's how:

We have been offered an astonishing opportunity to place the Kennedy-Palast investigative findings on a national, prime-time, major-network television broadcast. Plus, separately, we have an extraordinary offer to create a series of reports for national network radio.

But guess what? The networks will NOT PAY for our public service reports. We have to raise the start-up funds in the next two weeks to film it, record it and get it on the airwaves.

WE need YOU to fund the reports, DISSEMINATE the findings as we post the print, audio and video on the web� and ACT on it.

So, for only the second time this year, I am asking each one of you to make a tax deductible donation to the non-profit, non-partisan Palast Investigative Fund of $500, $150 or $100.

Progressives have complained for years of no opportunity to get the hard, cold sweaty truth on the air. Well, put your money where your heart and soul is.

Donate at least $500, I'll send you every book I've written and every film, signed. Send $150 and I'll send you as a gift, a copy of John Ennis' film Free For All, Armed Madhouse, The Election Files and a copy of Live from the Armed Madhouse all signed. Donate $100, and I�ll send you 3 copies, one signed to you, of "The Elections Files," (Watch the trailer here) the best of our BBC/Democracy Now films � including special never-broadcast interviews with Kennedy(Watch a clip) and fired prosecutor David Iglesias (Watch a clip).

I know you�re ponying up for your favorite candidates. But what�s the point of winning folks' votes IF NO ONE COUNTS THEM?

Please make your donation � today. No corporation, no big foundation, is going to take on this emergency in our democracy. The election�s about to be stolen � for a third time. SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Donate today (for $1,000 minimum, we�ll list you as a Producer of our next DVD, in gratitude). Why? Because the only way to get the vote-chewing cockroaches out of the voting machinery is to turn on the lights � tell the truth on them. On prime time.

After our team busted the story of Katherine Harris' attack on innocent Black voters as "felons," the NAACP sued and won back their rights. The truth CAN make the difference. Yes, we can. Indeed, we HAVE.

Think all votes should be counted in America? Then YOU stand up and be counted. Don�t expect networks or commercial sponsors to pay for your democracy. Feed the truth, donate $100 right now and pass on a copy of the Elections Files to your dippy cousin who thinks Kerry lost fair and square.

Donations from our prior and only request already paid for some of our filming in the Southwest. Don't let this story be swept under the border.

If you want more information, go to GregPalast.com, or write me directly at GregPalast.com � and hit the button, "contact Greg."

Donkeyphant :: The House I Live In - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: The House I Live In - Palast
Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:44 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The House I Live In
Greg Palast

America is a nation of losers. It�s the best thing about us. We're the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.

John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That�s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that�s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lied.

Winston Churchill didn�t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we�ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.

Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you�ll find the same thing: America's music, America's freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly �the light unto the nations.� Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes I find that weird, but it�s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.

We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It�s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.

America is indeed exceptional. That's not a boast, that�s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that defiantly walked out of the first �world trade organization,� known as the British Empire, announcing, �We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.�

Now, think about that. These rights don�t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free-and �we� are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are �INALIENABLE�: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre- or post- Saddam.

Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That�s why two U.S. military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guant�namo prison camp. They wouldn�t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. ("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Iran, these two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in America could that happen.

No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? China�s torture standard? Britain�s Secrecy Act as a standard? Switzerland�s Nazi-money-protection standard?

Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids' right to attend class. You don�t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I�ll admit), �We love Americans.�

They don�t love Bush. That�s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn�t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Clinton was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represented that American sense of giving- a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of America�s Manifest Destiny.

Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little offices in New York and London is to expose these motherfuckers.

Ronald Reagan said, "America is the shining city on the hill." And he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the helpless. And when that didn�t work, George II tried to drown us in the Mississippi.

Go back to Taos, New Mexico, Voting Precinct 13. What you�ll find there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the flag every day and will fight and die for it knowing full well that the fight must also be taken to the pueblo�s racially biased voting booths.

Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children."

Damn right, they do. That�s what Jefferson meant by "inalienable."

And they won�t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama's Caliphate of oil states or China�s money-crazed "Communism" nor half of Africa�s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Iraq by George Bush.

Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn�t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don't take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.

You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I�d go further: he�s UN-AMERICAN.

And that�s why he lost the election. TWICE.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans � Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild from which this is excerpted. Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com

Donkeyphant :: The truths we hold to be self-evident

Author: donkey
Subject: The truths we hold to be self-evident
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 7:02 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

1. The objective of the wars in and around Iraq - all of them, dating back to World War I - is to keep the oil beneath the sand, in order for multinational corporations' oil brokers, refineries, and everyone else up and down the food chain to maximize profits.

2. The preparation for and execution of war, as conducted by the United States, transfers vast amounts of wealth from the US treasury (in other words, the US citizenry) to the shareholders of various multinational corporations such as the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel, General Electric, Boeing, SAIC, and Lockheed Martin.

3. The goals of the majority shareholders of multinational corporations are: (1) to profit globally unrivaled, free from regulatory interference, and (2) to avoid paying taxes to any government. Their first target was the Soviet Union (check). Their second target is the United States (as of 9/11 - check). Their third target is China.

4. In order to defeat the mighty middle class of the United States (along with their quaint beliefs in the rule of law), the first objective of multinational corporations' majority shareholders was to de-fund the public education system, to ensure that only the rich could lead (check). Their second goal was to dismantle the social safety net (thank you Bill Clinton). Their third goal was to privatize the military (check), so that civilians would be defenseless while believing the Second Amendment and shotguns provide adequate protection from Apache helicopters (see how well that theory works in the Palestinian territories). Their fourth goal (yet unrealized) is to privatize the Social Security system. Their fifth goal is to privatize (in other words, eliminate) Medicare.

There is little doubt that the majority shareholders will prevail, especially given Americans' masterfully orchestrated economic woes. But the struggle is still far from over. Let us hope for the best while expecting the worst. There is always the chance, however slight, that another Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is, at this very moment, studying the sorrowful tales of class warfare on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Donkeyphant.com

Donkeyphant :: Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill - Palast
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 5:05 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill
by Greg Palast
Chicago Tribune (revised)

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it's oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here's the unreported story, the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.

The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can't happen again. They promise.

Donkeyphant :: Obama: Yes, you did. But no. You won't.

Author: donkey
Subject: Obama: Yes, you did. But no. You won't.
Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 5:53 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Senator Obama,

Congratulations on selling your soul. Yes, you did. I hope it works out for you.

Allow me to explain.

It would be fantastic if your future administration sent the ringleaders of racist, predatory subprime lenders to prison.

There seems to be a slight problem.

The law firms on your "donors" list � the ones who penned the prospectuses that manipulated the securities investors � well, it seems they employ registered lobbyists. Didn't you say, Sir, that you haven't taken a dime from K Street lobbyists?

Why lie? Perhaps you plan to let the guilty go scot-free while shining Hope in America's eyes, bloodshot from $4.25 / gallon gas.

These are the same people who pumped and dumped tech securities. The same guys who Bush naturally passed over. After all, there was that Huge Distraction on 9/11 that provided effective cover for yacht-owning, brat-bankrolling scumbags - er, I mean Kerry, Bush, Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Giuliani "supporters."

Winning is a bitch. We all understand why you took their money. It would be nice if you told us straight. We're adults here. We know that the campaign system is corrupt and rigged. Maybe you can pay penance by raising the taxes of oil companies and their board members.

Yes, you can put the hands that feed you behind bars. You must.

But let's face it: you won't.

Bush's nickname for Enron's mastermind - and master RNC fundraiser - was "Kenny Boy."

Undoubtedly your powerful new masters call you Boy too.

http://www.counterpunch.org/kasica02132008.html
http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/
http://www.counterpunch.org/martens05062008.html
http://www.therestofus.org/factsheets/kenlay.html

Donkeyphant :: My Vote's for Obama (if I could vote) ...by Michael Moore

Author: donkey
Subject: My Vote's for Obama (if I could vote) ...by Michael Moore
Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:46 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

My Vote's for Obama (if I could vote) ...by Michael Moore
April 21st, 2008
Friends,
I don't get to vote for President this primary season. I live in Michigan. The party leaders (both here and in D.C.) couldn't get their act together, and thus our votes will not be counted.
So, if you live in Pennsylvania, can you do me a favor? Will you please cast my vote -- and yours -- on Tuesday for Senator Barack Obama?
I haven't spoken publicly 'til now as to who I would vote for, primarily for two reasons: 1) Who cares?; and 2) I (and most people I know) don't give a rat's ass whose name is on the ballot in November, as long as there's a picture of JFK and FDR riding a donkey at the top of the ballot, and the word "Democratic" next to the candidate's name.
Seriously, I know so many people who don't care if the name under the Big "D" is Dancer, Prancer, Clinton or Blitzen. It can be Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Barry Obama or the Dalai Lama.
Well, that sounded good last year, but over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I've watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name "Farrakhan" out of nowhere, well that's when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the "F" word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama's pastor does -- AND the "church bulletin" once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin!
This sleazy attempt to smear Obama was brilliantly explained the following night by Stephen Colbert. He pointed out that if Obama is supported by Ted Kennedy, who is Catholic, and the Catholic Church is led by a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth, that can mean only one thing: OBAMA LOVES HITLER!
Yes, Senator Clinton, that's how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can't win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry "Uncle (Tom)" and give it all to you.
But that can't happen. You cast your die when you voted to start this bloody war. When you did that you were like Moses who lost it for a moment and, because of that, was prohibited from entering the Promised Land.
How sad for a country that wanted to see the first woman elected to the White House. That day will come -- but it won't be you. We'll have to wait for the current Democratic governor of Kansas to run in 2016 (you read it here first!).
There are those who say Obama isn't ready, or he's voted wrong on this or that. But that's looking at the trees and not the forest. What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate.
That is not to take anything away from this exceptional man. But what's going on is bigger than him at this point, and that's a good thing for the country. Because, when he wins in November, that Obama Movement is going to have to stay alert and active. Corporate America is not going to give up their hold on our government just because we say so. President Obama is going to need a nation of millions to stand behind him.
I know some of you will say, 'Mike, what have the Democrats done to deserve our vote?' That's a damn good question. In November of '06, the country loudly sent a message that we wanted the war to end. Yet the Democrats have done nothing. So why should we be so eager to line up happily behind them?
I'll tell you why. Because I can't stand one more friggin' minute of this administration and the permanent, irreversible damage it has done to our people and to this world. I'm almost at the point where I don't care if the Democrats don't have a backbone or a kneebone or a thought in their dizzy little heads. Just as long as their name ain't "Bush" and the word "Republican" is not beside theirs on the ballot, then that's good enough for me.
I, like the majority of Americans, have been pummeled senseless for 8 long years. That's why I will join millions of citizens and stagger into the voting booth come November, like a boxer in the 12th round, all bloodied and bruised with one eye swollen shut, looking for the only thing that matters -- that big "D" on the ballot.
Don't get me wrong. I lost my rose-colored glasses a long time ago.
It's foolish to see the Democrats as anything but a nicer version of a party that exists to do the bidding of the corporate elite in this country. Any endorsement of a Democrat must be done with this acknowledgement and a hope that one day we will have a party that'll represent the people first, and laws that allow that party an equal voice.
Finally, I want to say a word about the basic decency I have seen in Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton continues to throw the Rev. Wright up in his face as part of her mission to keep stoking the fears of White America. Every time she does this I shout at the TV, "Say it, Obama! Say that when she and her husband were having marital difficulties regarding Monica Lewinsky, who did she and Bill bring to the White House for 'spiritual counseling?' THE REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT!"
But no, Obama won't throw that at her. It wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be decent. She's been through enough hurt. And so he remains silent and takes the mud she throws in his face.
That's why the crowds who come to see him are so large. That's why he'll take us down a more decent path. That's why I would vote for him if Michigan were allowed to have an election.
But the question I keep hearing is... 'can he win? Can he win in November?' In the distance we hear the siren of the death train called the Straight Talk Express. We know it's possible to hear the words "President McCain" on January 20th. We know there are still many Americans who will never vote for a black man. Hillary knows it, too. She's counting on it.
Pennsylvania, the state that gave birth to this great country, has a chance to set things right. It has not had a moment to shine like this since 1787 when our Constitution was written there. In that Constitution, they wrote that a black man or woman was only "three fifths" human. On Tuesday, the good people of Pennsylvania have a chance for redemption.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com
MMFlint@aol.com

Donkeyphant :: GOD DAMN AMERICA � ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: GOD DAMN AMERICA � ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA - Palast
Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 7:57 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

GOD DAMN AMERICA � ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA
By Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page � the closest thing I�ve got to a religious ritual � then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff�s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that�s what Obama�s spiritual guide would say.

But why? It seems likes He�s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale�s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York � until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.

That leaves Forest City�s one industry, lumbering � which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday�s bombing are, �pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000� � which is true if you don�t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians � or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

�This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.�

Whatever. It�s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It�s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There�s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, �Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.� She�s a, �Single mother of two � Tony and Brandon � and Grandmother of one � Jason.�

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town�s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, �including Food and Beverage� and a �Chinese auction.�

(I�ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here � if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska�s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon�s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon�s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, �You have had some good luck � and you don�t realize it."

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don�t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon�s latest stall on payment. They�ve seen plenty of Sheriff�s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he�s, �feeling just fine.� And we should be glad for him, I suppose.

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, �God bless America.�

So, why hasn�t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn�t He?

***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

Join Palast's Network on MySpace, on FaceBook or on YouTube.

Donkeyphant :: Spitzer: Victim of indiscretion (not only his) - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Spitzer: Victim of indiscretion (not only his) - Palast
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:51 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio�s Clout
Listen to Palast on Clout at www.GregPalast.com

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an �escort� $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush�s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there�s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush�s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke�s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks� mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers� bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer�s lynching and the bankers� enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street�s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn�t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That�s blaming the victim.

Here�s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the �sub-prime� mortgage and it�s variants including loans with teeny �introductory� interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called �Countrywide� became America�s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these �sub-prime.�

Here�s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years.

But in two years, the promise ain�t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the �discount� they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is �sub-prime.� Guess. No peeking. Here�s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren�t stupid � they had no choice. They were �steered� as it�s called in the mortgage sharking business.

�Steering,� sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called �fraudulent conveyance� or �predatory lending� under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy � it was OK now to steer�m, fake�m, charge�m and take�m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush�s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of �federal pre-emption,� Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer�s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush�s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup�s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called �securitization.�

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into �tranches� of bonds which were stamped �AAA� - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide�s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will �earn� a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars � he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide�s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That�s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure � and got to keep the Grinning�s house.

There was no �quid� of a foreclosure moratorium for the �pro quo� of public bail-out. Not one family was saved � but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo�s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company�s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided � what a coinkydink! � the man called, �The Sheriff of Wall Street� was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, �Take him down today!� Naw, that�s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press � one was �Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer� - made clear to Bush�s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn�t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

�Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which he federal government was turning a blind eye.�

Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the �Predator Lenders� Partner in Crime.� The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, �When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.�

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story � of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all � now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

A note on �Prosecutorial Indiscretion.�

Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I�m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor�s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, �Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!�

Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It�s up to something called �prosecutorial discretion.�

Funny thing, this �discretion.� For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.

Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer � rarely done in these cases - was made at the �discretion� of Bush�s Justice Department.

Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'
************
Greg Palast, former investigator of financial fraud, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Hear The Palast Report weekly on Air America Radio�s Clout.
And next Wednesday March 19, join Palast and Clout host Richard Greene on a dinner cruise on the Potomac River. For more information click here.
And this Sunday, at noon, on WABC-TV New York, catch Amy Goodman, Les Payne and Greg Palast on Like It Is with Gil Noble.

Donkeyphant :: $300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC A FAKE - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: $300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC A FAKE - Palast
Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2008 4:44 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

$300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC A FAKE

Here�s the written evidence� and - please say it ain�t so! - Obama and Hillary attack Ecuador

Note: Saturday, Bobby Kennedy hosts Greg Palast on �Ring of Fire� on Air America Radio. Sunday, catch Palast with Amy Goodman on WABC Television (New York), hosted by Gil Noble, Channel 7 at 1 pm(est).

Friday, March 7, 2008 for TomPaine.com/Ourfuture.org
By Greg Palast

Do you believe this?

This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop � and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million � which they�re using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!

That�s what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.

So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war as a to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before?

The US press snorted up this line about Chavez� $300 million to �terrorists� quicker than the young Bush inhaling Colombia�s powdered export.

What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. (Presumably, the FARC leader�s last words were, �Listen, my password is �.�)

I read them. While you can read it all in espa�ol, here is, in translation, the one and only mention of the alleged $300 million from Chavez is this:

�� With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call �dossier,� efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for �cripple�], which I will explain in a separate note. Let�s call the boss �ngel, and the cripple Ernesto.�

Got that? Where is Hugo? Where�s 300 million? And 300 what? Indeed, in context, the note is all about the hostage exchange with the FARC that Chavez was working on at the time (December 23, 2007) at the request of the Colombian government.

Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here�s the next line: �To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of a �humanitarian caravan�; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican)?), Switzerland, European Union, democrats (civil society), Argentina, Red Cross, etc.�

As to the 300, I must note that the FARC�s previous prisoner exchange involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the �300� refers to? �Quien sabe? Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won�t guess or make up a phastasmogoric story about Chavez mailing checks to the jungle.

To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the mysterious �Angel� is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name � Chavez.

Well, so what? This is what.

Colombia�s invasion into Ecuador is a rank violation of international law, condemned by every single Latin member of the Organization of American States. And George Bush just loved it. He called Uribe to back Colombia, against, �the continuing assault by narco-terrorists as well as the provocative maneuvers by the regime in Venezuela.�

Well, our President may have gotten the facts ass-backward, but Bush knows what he�s doing: shoring up his last, faltering ally in South America, Uribe, a desperate man in deep political trouble.

Uribe claims he is going to bring charges against Chavez before the International Criminal Court. If Uribe goes there in person, I suggest he take a toothbrush: it was just discovered that right-wing death squads held murder-planning sessions at Uribe�s ranch. Uribe�s associates have been called before the nation�s Supreme Court and may face prison.

In other words, it�s a good time for a desperate Uribe to use that old politico�s wheeze, the threat of war, to drown out accusations of his own criminality. Furthermore, Uribe�s attack literally killed negotiations with FARC by killing FARC�s negotiator, Raul Reyes. Reyes was in talks with both Ecuador and Chavez about another prisoner exchange. Uribe authorized the negotiations, however, he knew, should those talks have succeeded in obtaining the release of those kidnapped by the FARC, credit would have been heaped on Ecuador and Chavez, and discredit heaped on Uribe.

Luckily for a hemisphere on the verge of flames, the President of Ecuador, Raphael Correa, is one of the most level-headed, thoughtful men I�ve ever encountered.

Correa is now flying from Quito to Brazilia to Caracas to keep the region from blowing sky high. While moving troops to his border � no chief of state can permit foreign tanks on their sovereign soil � Correa also refuses sanctuary to the FARC . Indeed, Ecuador has routed out 47 FARC bases, a better track record than Colombia�s own, corrupt military.

For his cool, peaceable handling of the crisis, I will forgive Correa for apologizing for his calling Bush, �a dimwitted President who has done great damage to his country and the world.� (Watch an excerpt of my interview with Correa here.)

Amateur Hour in Blue

We can trust Correa to keep the peace South of the Border. But can we trust our Presidents-to-be?

The current man in the Oval Office, George Bush, simply can�t help himself: an outlaw invasion by a right-wing death-squad promoter is just fine with him.

But guess who couldn�t wait to parrot the Bush line? Hillary Clinton, still explaining that her vote to invade Iraq was not a vote to invade Iraq, issued a statement nearly identical to Bush�s, blessing the invasion of Ecuador as Colombia�s �right to defend itself.� And she added, �Hugo Ch�vez must stop these provoking actions.� Huh?

I assumed that Obama wouldn�t jump on this landmine � especially after he was blasted as a foreign policy amateur for suggesting he would invade across Pakistan�s border to hunt terrorists.

It�s embarrassing that Barack repeated Hillary�s line nearly verbatim, announcing, �the Colombian government has every right to defend itself.�

(I�m sure Hillary�s position wasn�t influenced by the loan of a campaign jet to her by Frank Giustra. Giustra has given over a hundred million dollars to Bill Clinton projects. Last year, Bill introduced Giustra to Colombia�s Uribe. On the spot, Giustra cut a lucrative deal with Uribe for Colombian oil.)

Then there�s Mr. War Hero. John McCain weighed in with his own idiocies, announcing that, �Hugo Chavez is establish[ing] a dictatorship,� presumably because, unlike George Bush, Chavez counts all the votes in Venezuelan elections.

But now our story gets tricky and icky.

The wise media critic Jeff Cohen told me to watch for the press naming McCain as a foreign policy expert and labeling the Democrats as amateurs.

Sure enough, the New York Times, on the news pages Wednesday, called McCain, �a national security pro.� McCain is the �pro� who said the war in Iraq would cost nearly nothing in lives or treasury dollars.

But, on the Colombian invasion of Ecuador, McCain said, �I hope that tensions will be relaxed, President Chavez will remove those troops from the borders - as well as the Ecuadorians - and relations continue to improve between the two.�

It�s not quite English, but it�s definitely not Bush. And weirdly, it�s definitely not Obama and Clinton cheerleading Colombia�s war on Ecuador.

Democrats, are you listening? The only thing worse than the media attacking Obama and Clinton as amateurs is the Democratic candidates� frightening desire to prove them right.

******************
Watch Greg Palast�s reports from Venezuela and Ecuador for BBC Television Newsnight and Democracy Now! Compiled on the DVD, �The Assassination of Hugo Chavez.�

http://www.GregPalast.com

Reprinted with permission from Mr. Palast.

Donkeyphant :: Exxon suxx. McCain duxx - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Exxon suxx. McCain duxx - Palast
Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 4:01 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Exxon suxx. McCain duxx

By Greg Palast
27 February 2008.

Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I�m sorry if you don�t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I�m in no mood to nicey-nice words.

Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon�s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega�s food supply.

While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they�d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company�s lawyers argued that they shouldn�t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.

They can�t pay Paul anyway. He�s dead.

That was part of Exxon�s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon�s response was, �We can hold out in court until you�re all dead.�
Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren�t they?

But Exxon didn�t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named �Dubya.� Exxon was the largest contributor to George W. Bush�s political career after Enron. They were a team, Exxon and Enron. The Chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent Natives, consumers and defrauded stockholders from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

When George went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, as the court heard Exxon�s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon�s behavior in Alaska, �What more can a corporation do?�

The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.

For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon Valdez smacked into Bligh Reef, the Raycas radar system was turned off. Exxon shipping honchos decided it was too expensive to maintain it and train their navigators to use it. So, the inexperienced third mate at the wheel was driving the supertanker by eyeball, Christopher Columbus style. I kid you not.

Here�s what else this poor �widdle corporation could do: stop lying.

On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not even supposed to leave harbor.

If a tanker busts open, that doesn�t have to mean a thousand miles of shoreline gets slimed � so long as oil-slick containment equipment is in place.
On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not supposed have left port. No tanker can unless a spill containment barge is operating nearby. That night, the barge was in dry-dock, locked under ice. Exxon kept that fact hidden, concealing the truth even after the tanker grounded. An Exxon official radioed the emergency crew, �Barge is on its way.�

Paul�s gone � buried with Exxon�s promises. But the oil�s still there. Go out to Chenega lands today. At Sleepy Bay, kick over some gravel and it will smell like a gas station.

What the heck does this have to do with John McCain? The Senator is what I�d call a �Tort Tart.� Ken Lay�s �Law Suit Reform� posse was one of the fronts used by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists waging war on your day in court. Their rallying cry is �Tort Reform,� by which they mean they want to take away the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child�s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil.

Now, all of the Democratic candidates have seen through this �tort reform� con � and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party in 2000 for what one lobbyists� website called McCain�s, �his go-it-alone moralism.�

So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. For example, in 2001, he said of Bush�s tax cuts, �I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.� Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.
On �Tort Reform,� the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff�s suit out of federal court.

In 2003, McCain voted against Bush�s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. But this week, following Exxon�s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings last year, the largest profit haul in planetary history, McCain failed to join Clinton, Obama, most Democrats and some Republicans on a bill to require a teeny sliver of industry profit go to alternative energy sources. On oil independence, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.
Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.

I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, fishermen, bankrupted, utterly ruined � Kompkoff�s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the court � floated their soon-to-be repossessed boats into the tanker lanes with banners reading, �EXXON SUXX.� To which they could now add, about a one-time stand-up Senator: �McCain duxx.�
******************
Hear Greg Palast with Rosanne Barr on Air America�s Clout! Rosanne is sitting in for host Richard Greene who carries the weekly Palast Report. Look for the podcast on www.GregPalast.com tomorrow

Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com.

Support our investigations- become a monthly giver- donate to the Palast Investigative Fund.

Donkeyphant :: The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN - Palast
Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 8:49 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
South Carolina Primary Colors: Black and White?

by Greg Palast

South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.

South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our President, or at least the Democrat's idea of a President. According to CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black population vote their pride (for Obama) or for "experience" (Hillary)? In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.

But maybe there's more to South Carolina's story than Black and White.

Let's re-wind the tape of the 2000 battle between cops and Black men. It was early that morning on the 19th of January when members of International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 "shaped up" to unload a container ship which had just pulled into port. It was hard work for good pay. An experienced union man could earn above $60,000 a year.

In this last hold-out of the Confederacy, it was one of the few places a Black man could get decent pay. Or any man.

That day, the stevedoring contractor handling the unloading decided it would hire the beggars down the dock, without experience or skills - and without union cards - willing to work for just one-third of union scale.

That night, union workers - Black, White, Whatever - fought for their lives and livelihoods.

At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 then, was not so much Black versus White, but union versus non-union. It was a battle between those looking for a good day's pay versus those looking for a way not to pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict between the movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.

The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.

The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a "most favored nation" in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to "make change our friend."

But "change," apparently, wasn't in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.

South Carolina, then, is the story of globalization left out of Thomas Friedman's wonders-of-the-free-market fantasies.

This week, while US media broadcasts cute-sy photo-ops from Black churches and replay the forgettable spats between candidates, the real issues of South Carolina are, thankfully, laid out in a book released today: On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger.

Erem and Durrenberger portray the case of the Charleston Five dockworkers as an exemplary, desperate act of economic resistance.

Thomas Friedman's bestseller, The World is Flat, begins with his uplifting game of golf with a tycoon in India. Erem and Durrenberger never put on golf shoes: their book is globalization stripped down to its dirty underpants.

While Friedman made the point that he flew business class to Bangalore on his way to the greens to meet his millionaire, Global Waterfront's authors go steerage class. And the people they write about don't go anywhere at all. These are the stevedores who move the containers of Wal-Mart T-shirts from Guatemala to sell to customers in Virginia who can't afford health insurance because they lost their job in the textile mill.

And the book talks about (cover the children's ears!) - labor unions.

South Carolina is union country. And union-busting country. But who gives a flying fart about labor unions today? Only 7%, one in fourteen US workers belongs to one. That's less than the number of Americans who believe that Elvis killed John Kennedy.

Think "longshoremen" and what comes to mind is On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, the good guy, beating up the evil union boss. The union bosses were the thugs, mobbed-up bullies, the dockworkers' enemies. The movie's director, Stanley Kramer, perfectly picked up the anti-union red-baiting Joe McCarthy zeitgeist of that era of - which could go down well today.

Elected labor leaders are, in our media, always "union bosses." But the real bosses, the CEOs, the guys who shutter factories and ship them to China � they're never "bosses," they're "entrepreneurs."

Indeed, the late and lionized King of Union Busters, Sam Walton, would be proud today, were he alive, to learn that the woman he called, "my little lady," Hillary Clinton, whom he placed on Wal-Mart's Board of Directors, is front-runner for the presidency. She could well become America's "Greeter," posted at our nation's door, to welcome the Saudis and Chinese who are buying America at a guaranteed low price.

So what happened those five union men charged felonious reioting in 2000? Through an international union campaign, they won back their freedom - and their union jobs - after the dockworkers of Spain, the true heroes of globalization, refused to unload the South Carolina scab cargoes.

Erem and Durrenberger ask themselves why they were so drawn to a story of five Carolina cargo-handlers put in prison a decade ago. Maybe it's because the Charleston Five show how courage and heart and solidarity can lead to victory in the midst of a mad march into globalization that threatens to turn us all into the Wal-Mart Five Billion.

**************
See video of the dockworkers' uprising and read more from the book, On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger (introduction by Greg Palast) at http://www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org/.

Note: Palast will be speaking this Saturday at UCLA on "White Sheets and Black Votes: Race, Politics and Disenfranchisement." Free but RSVP required.

Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel (Link).

Donkeyphant :: MLK - the legacy remembered - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: MLK - the legacy remembered - Kucinich
Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 10:45 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
the legacy remembered,
the message that should not be forgotten

The homage that Americans pay today to the inspiring life and lasting legacy of Dr. King is a fitting tribute to this leader who spoke so eloquently of peace, of social justice, and of equal rights under the law and under the moral covenant that established and guides this great nation. But, as we survey the grim realities of today, across this country and around the world, that rightful homage also has the somber ring of a faint and distant eulogy for a man and a message from another time.
That other time that we remember and honor was then. But, more than ever, it is also now.

In his speech at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King spoke of one war that was destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War resulted in the deaths of 4 million Vietnamese civilians in a nation of about 40 million - 10% of the total population of Vietnam. Americans lost 58,202 soldiers in that war. And in hard, cold numbers, the Vietnam War cost the United States the equivalent of $662 billion in today's dollars.

So far, today, this no-end-in-sight war against Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million innocent Iraqis in a nation of 25 million. Four thousand of our best and bravest have died, and nearly 29,000 have been wounded. In hard, cold numbers, the Iraq War will cost the United States more than $2 trillion.

What would Dr. King say today? What would his message be to the President, to the U.S. Congress, and to the American people? It would be, I deeply believe, the same as it was more than 30 years ago: Iraq is a war that is destroying the aspirations of the people of two nations - the people of the United States and the people of Iraq.

And, it was only two years ago that the leadership of the Democratic Party, without invoking Dr. King but aligning itself with the powerful principles that he espoused, promised an end to the abuse of political power and an end to the war that was devastating the people of two nations. And Americans, believing that promise that we would �be free at last� from the policies that morally and economically enslaved this nation and unrepentantly took control of another, elected a new Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.

Tragically, in the two years since, nothing has changed. The policies of this President persist and prevail. The Congress yields and subjugates itself time and time again. And the powerful, righteous, and universal message of Dr. King has been forgotten.

Dr. King's concluding remarks in his Riverside Church speech called for an end to the disintegration of humanity brought about by war: "Somehow this madness must end," he implored.

It is not in our power to bring Dr. King back, but it is within our power to resurrect his spirit in our daily lives and in the policies of the government that we elect to represent and lead us. He demonstrated throughout his entire life that social and economic justice are achieved not through compromising what we believe, but rather, committing to what we believe � whatever the odds.

In this crucial year for the future of our nation and the future of our world, today is the day to remember Dr. King's words, embrace his spirit, and fortify ourselves with the message that he left for us.

It is time, once again, to ask what we can do to forge ahead � in our votes, in our support, and in everything we do -- to reach that place where his words, his strength, and his optimism become more than a legacy. They become the policy and mission of this nation: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."

Dennis Kucinich

Donkeyphant :: George of Arabia - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: George of Arabia - Palast
Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 2:35 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

George of Arabia:
Better Kiss Your Abe 'Goodbye'

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe �goodbye.� The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.
Those bills in your billfold aren�t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.
It�s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah�s camel.
Let�s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain�t there to promote �Democracy� nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn�t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.
What�s really behind Bush�s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.
Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That�s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.
Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah�s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.
Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can�t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.
The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America�s private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah�s nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government�s Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It�s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah�s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.
Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai�s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi�s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.
So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn�t matter a twit whether it�s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi�s past Chairman.
It�s the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that�s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors� interest burden quintupled in just two years.
As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:
�The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. � It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity�. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. � There is no America. There is no �democracy.� The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.�
In 2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars ($252 billion) for oil - and the USA received back 100% of it - and then some ($311 billion) via Gulf nations� investment in US Treasury bills and purchases of US businesses and property. Bush�s trip to Abdullah�s tent is all about this vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.
The Bush Administration, rather than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back to us - so the party never has to stop.
It has been reported that the President�s Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts: Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas tanks.

Donkeyphant :: Welcome to the United States of Disney - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: Welcome to the United States of Disney - Kucinich
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 4:06 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

On Saturday night we officially became the United States of Disney. While Republican candidates railed about the threat of Islam-fascists, Americans were oblivious that in fact, the greatest treat to our freedom was transpiring right before them - corporate-controlled media, a key component of fascism, used their power to exclude the one candidate from the debates who dares to stand up to them. To "cover" their coup, they ran a silly fluff piece prior to the debate about people who are running for president with no organization behind them and questioned why they would do such a thing other than to massage their own egos.
But the candidate Disney/ABC arbitrarily excluded from the debate is a viable candidate who has hundreds of thousands of supporters and a solid organization in every state. Dennis Kucinich has been campaigning non-stop for over a year with his wife, Elizabeth. He's on the ballot in almost every state. This isn't some vanity campaign that the Corporate-controlled media has deliberately tried to make disappear - this is the one candidate who is running for all the right reasons - because he wants to save our country from the takeover of special interests.
While John Edwards, during the debate, eloquently and passionately decried the stranglehold special interests have on our nation, he never once mentioned that Disney/ABC had excluded one of his fellow candidates from the debate. How disingenuous! He also failed to mention the fortune he has invested in a hedge fund that makes him as vested in these special interests as anyone.
I watched the entire debate on Saturday night, and have to admit that compared to the Republicans, any of the Democratic candidates sounded like a good bet. But here's the catch - while they debated who was the more likely to bring about change and who had more experience actually initiating change, not one of them has ever proved they have the courage to stand up to the status-quo that will do whatever it takes to prevent change. If they had, ABC would have kept them off that stage too. So while just about everything spoken by the four Democratic candidates sounded good, I couldn't help thinking that this was just another Disney performance. Put any of them in the White House and you'll get the same disappointment we're experiencing with the Democratic Congress we elected in '06. We worked our tails off to get them elected and they conveniently forgot why we did it.
Here are some words you didn't hear uttered during the debate - words that Dennis Kucinich would have said if he had been given his place at the table. Words the American people deserve to hear:
Impeach - The majority of Americans want to see Bush and Cheney held accountable for the lies and corruption that have driven our country to the brink of moral, financial and military bankruptcy. Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill to impeach Dick Cheney last November. The Democratic leadership moved to table it. It was only because REPUBLICANS voted against tabling it that the bill didn't die immediately on the floor and instead now languishes in the Judicial Committee.
Not for Profit Health Care - Don't let them fool you - the insurance companies are the problem because they only make a killing when they deny patients health care. Keep them in the mix and you will never have healthcare for all.
End NAFTA and get out of the TWO - Although Edwards briefly alluded to the problems our trade agreements have caused to working-class Americans, no Democratic candidate is ever going to criticize a trade policy that was put through by President Bill Clinton - even if it is the cause of not only job loss, but the surge in illegal immigration from Mexico. No candidate, that is, except the one we can count on to always speak the truth - Dennis Kucinich.
The corporate-controlled, censored media has carefully orchestrated the obliteration of Dennis Kucinich. This is the third debate he's been kept from. They are also distorting his politically strategic move in the Iowa caucuses to suggest supporters cast their second vote for Osama, as a indication that Dennis has quit the race and is throwing his support behind Osama. Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, Bill Richardson did the exact same thing as Kucinich and he still got to be in the debate last night!
Is it too late? Has corporate-controlled media become so powerful that they can decide who our candidates are, and delude us into thinking we are actually electing our leaders? There's one way to find out. Let's make this a real democracy where people talk to people. Let's spend the next weeks before our state primary contacting voters and telling them about the one candidate who hasn't just been talking about change; his entire political career has been the embodiment of change.
What you do over the next few weeks might mean the difference between waking up this time next year in a Disneyland where the majority of Americans will be grateful for the most menial jobs, while the wealthy few get a free ride, or taking our country back from the military/industrial/insurance/media fascists. Please go to www.California4Kucinich.com now and sign up to be on a DK Team. We are currently organizing to reach out to voters by phone and in person and your local DK Team Leader will contact you to see the best way you can get involved.
In peace & hope,

Donkeyphant :: ...

Author: donkey
Subject: ...
Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2008 4:44 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

What you don't realize - is that your pain is mine.

That the realization of your life unlived
is mine - that I am not living with you.

And I want to, I want to.

I want to.

Donkeyphant :: Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth - Palast
Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2007 12:35 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

December 24th, 2007

[Quito] I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.�

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.�

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.�

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said �We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. � Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I'd met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?" Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela's president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn't done.

I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan's chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it's not just any company he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there's a verdict in favor of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one - NO ONE - has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

"And it�s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?" Rodrigo Perez, Texaco's top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that Chevron-Texaco caused their kids' deaths. "If there is somebody with cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude � which is absolutely impossible.� He laughed again. You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, "No one has ever proved scientifically the connection between cancer and crude oil." Really? You could swim in the stuff and you'd be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron's Texaco unit came to their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi's men had told me that crude oil doesn�t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I'm no expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude oil production - benzene, toluene, and xylene, "are well-known carcinogens." Kennedy told me he's seen Chevron-Texaco's ugly open pits in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in the USA.

But it wasn't as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you'd see on country club links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they wouldn't get a dime. "What about the chairs in this office?" I asked. Couldn't the Cofan at least get those? "No," they laughed, the chairs were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa's threat to use the power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush Administration. But to this President, it's all about justice, fairness. "You [Americans] wouldn't do this to your own people," he told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska's Natives.

Correa's not unique. He's the latest of a new breed in Latin America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All "Leftists," as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, "the monkey." Chavez told me proudly, "I am negro e indio" - Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to endure many jeers of "monkey." Now, all over Latin America, the "monkeys" are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil - but every time he lost his money or his investors' money, his daddy, another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who's been good and who's been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofan's drinking water.

Or maybe we'll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage done by Exxon's oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega's beaches. It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff on the island's shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as "smart" bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, "Well, I guess we're all Natives now."

Well, maybe we are. But we don't have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa. And I can assure his daughter that she didn't have to worry that her dad would forget about "the poor children who are cold" on the streets of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

*****

Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and Little Indians, on BBC Television Newsnight, now on-line via www.GregPalast.com - and Thursday's US broadcast of Democracy Now.

For a copy of Palast's prior reports from Venezuela for BBC and Democracy Now, get "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez," on DVD, filmed by award-winning videographer Richard Rowley.

Donkeyphant :: BURN BABY BURN - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: BURN BABY BURN - Palast
Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 9:50 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

BURN BABY BURN � The California Celebrity Fires
The �Boo ain�t no N.O.
Plus: George Bush, Flame Retard
By Greg Palast

What color is your disaster? It makes a difference. A life and death difference.

Dig:

Population of San Diego fire evacuation zone: 500,000
Population of the New Orleans flood evacuation zone: 500,000

White folk as a % of evacuees, San Diego: 66%
Black folk as % of evacuees, New Orleans: 67%

Size counts, too. Size of your wallet, that is:

Evacuees in San Diego, in poverty: 9%
Evacuees in New Orleans, in poverty: 27%

The numbers would be even uglier, though more revealing, if I included evacuees of the celebrity fire in Malibu.

The President didn�t do a photo-strafing of the scene from 1700 feet this time. Instead, we have the photo op of George, feet on the ground, hanging with Arnold the Action Man. (However, I�m informed that the President was a bit disappointed that he didn�t get to wear one of those neat fireman hats like Rudi G got at Ground Zero.)

In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy. �We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn�t do it, but God did,� he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter much coveted by speculators.

But as this week�s flames spread, no Republican Congressman cried, �Burn baby burn!� to praise the Lord for cleaning up the �Boo, the sin-and-surf playground of Hollywood luvvies.

In New Orleans, God�s covenant with real estate developers has been very profitable. Over 70,000 families remain, two years after the waters receded, in mobile home concentration centers far away from the N.O. re-building boom. Let�s see how long it takes to get Tom Hanks back on his beach towel.

Standing next to Governor Schwarzenegger, a smug little Bush said, �It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead� � a snide attack on the former Democratic Governor of Louisiana on whom the White House successfully dumped the blame for the horror show in New Orleans.

Mr. Bush never mentioned � and the media would never give away his secret � that 15 hours before the levees broke, the White House and FEMA knew the flood barriers were cracking, yet failed to inform the Governor and state police. Nor did Mr. Bush mention that his Department of Homeland Security�s FEMA trolls took away evacuation planning from the state and gave it to a crew of crony contractors who, for a million bucks, came up with a plan that came down to, �If a hurricane comes, get in your car and drive like hell.�

In California, plans were in place, money poured down with the flame retardant, and no one is suggesting that Mel Gibson move his swastika collection to a FEMA trailer.

Not comparable, the �Boo and the N.O.? You can say that again. But as a kid who grew up in the ass end of Los Angeles, I can tell you that disaster apartheid applies on the local scale as well. Look at the tarry filth of Compton and Long Beach shores versus the panicked reaction when a bit of garbage or oil sheen hits Malibu sands. (I remember, standing on the crude-covered shore of an Alaska Native village in March, 1991, the day Exxon announced it would end the clean-up from the Exxon Valdez spill. That same day, the papers showed the careful scouring that week of every pebble on Malibu beaches hit by dinky spill incident.)

Please don�t get the idea I�m slap-happy about the California inferno. My parents live in San Diego - and one of my favorite Air America hosts had to evacuate from her Del Mar hot tub, poor dear. (I�ve heard, however, that billionaires well done taste just like chicken.)

What I�m saying is: Besides the flames, there�s a class war raging in America. Or, should I say, Class Massacre. Because only one side is taking all the bullets. Malibu, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica are �incorporated communities� � islands of privilege politically fenced off from the riff-raff sea of Los Angeles. These self-incorporated Bantustans of the wealthy have their own fire departments and schools. The money islands are relieved of having to pay for the schools and hospitals of the city where their gardeners live. (I can�t tell which is the worst disaster that can befall an Angelino � a fire, an earthquake or the LA public school system.)

Now, it�s easy to say it�s just George Bush who�s the class clown of the class war. But it�s an old story. When a flood took out the tony homes at Westhampton Dunes, the Clinton Administration picked up the full tab for rebuilding these summer hideaways of investment bankers. While today, death-by-poison stalks the environment of Black townships of Louisiana (the FEMA �guests� are parked in a zone called Cancer Ally), Al Gore can�t be found. But when speaking of rising sea levels that can take out the homes of his buddies in �Boo or the Hamptons, Gore goes ga-ga.

The one thing I�ll say in favor of that vile little Louisiana Republican cheering the drowning of public housing residents, at least he's honest about how the system works. He�s not afraid to remind us of the gods�-honest truth: disaster response is class war by other means.

So let me not forget to report the war�s body count:

New Orleans flood deaths: 1,577.
California celebrity fire deaths: 5.

Tonight and this weekend, listen to �The Fire Next Time,� on the Palast Report, aired each week on Air America�s Clout with Richard Greene, on the Nova M network with Cynthia Black (from KPHX), on the Solution Zone with Christiane Brown (KJFK) � and live, in Chicago, this weekend, for Buzzflash.com, The Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and WCPT, Chicago�s Progressive Talk � and, on this Sunday morning on the Bree Show, KTLK Los Angeles, with host/evacuee Bree Walker, slightly charred (or is that a tan?) but undaunted.

Greg Palast is the author the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.

Sign up for Palast�s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com

Donkeyphant :: RE: Matrix Revolutions Review

Author: donkey
Subject: Vacation Home Exchange
Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:08 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 17

http://www.swapyourvacationhome.com

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Donkeyphant :: AARP vs Health Care - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: AARP vs Health Care - Kucinich
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:25 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

AARP will profit over
4.4 Billion Dollars while
America's Seniors Suffer!

On September 21st, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) sponsored a Presidential forum in Iowa focused on health care reform. I was conveniently left out of the debate. Why? Because I am the only candidate in this race proposing a national not-for-profit, single-payer health insurance plan. My plan would eliminate the obscene profit of 4.4 billion dollars AARP alone stands to gain over the next 7 years at the expense of the senior citizens they claim to represent.

AARP's strategic partnership with healthcare giants United Health Care and Aetna are embraced by Senators Clinton, Obama, and former Senator Edwards who are pushing plans to keep the for-profit private insurers in business and in control of your life!

This is an outrage and you should be outraged!

It is clear they don't want me to upset their multi-billion dollar windfall. The health care plans of the invited candidates preserve and promote the interests of for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of tens of millions of everyday Americans while the corporate media keeps America drugged with misinformation so you can't make an informed decision.

I have the prescription for a better healthcare system for America.

Under my plan, HR 676, every American would be covered! No premiums, no deductibles, and no co-payments. No one would be denied coverage and no one will be denied services and you choose your own physicians. It's the healthcare plan America deserves and it's the only plan that reduces expenses and puts your money back in your pocket. Just think for a moment what you could you do with the money that you are now paying in deductibles or other health expenses ... save for retirement � save for education � save for a vacation. The choice really is yours! It's a healthy windfall for the people ... not the corporations.

I need your help ... let your voice be heard!

Join me in bringing a healthy future for all of us. Together we can let the special interests and the other presidential candidates know that we will not be silenced and will not accept business as usual.

Donkeyphant :: TASED AND CONFUSED - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: TASED AND CONFUSED - Palast
Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:37 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSED
The Still-Unreported Story of "Top Gun" George Bush

Monday September 24, 2007

New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush's approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.

But CBS caved. So did Dan.

That's according to Rather's written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was "enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration." Viacom then set out to, "divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush's service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House�."

Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord's voice, admits he then "refrained from defending" the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that "his contract would be extended."

Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.

Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn't live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that's what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.

The Story Still Not Reported

By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of 'Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.

No, I won't give you his name. I don't expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That's another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.

And there's more. More that Dan didn't report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state's Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.

This is a devastating accusation. And one that's more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid's vile use of daddy's connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.

US Reporting: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn't stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):

�It�s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people�s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It�s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I�m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.�

This is what's so frustrating about Dan Rather. He's two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only "narrated" the draft dodge story. For shame.

But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn't alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, "Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?"

[For the record, BBC did ask for the President's denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan's CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan's story, "ignored information that cast doubt" on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan's story false. He never produced it.]

The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew's impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.

Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: "Wear a grounding wire.") But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don't want to hear when they don't want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.

Seeing Andrew's arrest and Dan's complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don't.

Donkeyphant :: Marriage and children

Author: donkey
Subject: Marriage and children
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 5:42 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

There's no better way to be trapped than to marry and have a child.

Many young women do indeed look good. However, their cultivated lusciousness isn't intended for their future husbands. It's for their future children.

Donkeyphant :: l one l iness

Author: donkey
Subject: l one l iness
Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 5:30 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

i can't fix this

i'm not

having fun

stimulated

listening to the same thing over and over

accepting unhappiness

any more

Donkeyphant :: The "others" in America - Emily L. Hauser

Author: donkey
Subject: The "others" in America - Emily L. Hauser
Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:18 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Feeling way too white
Talking with my black neighbors can be agonizingly awkward.
By Emily L. Hauser

Oak Park, Ill.
On a recent beautiful Sunday, I undertook an unusual experiment: I crossed a street.

I'm white and live in Oak Park, Ill., a surprisingly multicultural, upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. The street I crossed separates my town from the city neighborhood of Austin, an almost entirely black part of Chicago. Though I often traverse it by car, I never have on foot. One day, I thought: Huh. Why not?

In fact, after last month's Supreme Court ruling forbidding the use of racial classifications to foster integration in public schools, we could all be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the races had integrated while we weren't looking.

Yet as I stepped over the curb, I became excruciatingly aware of my skin color, and my heart pounded with social anxiety. In going around a single block, I got stares. Mine was the only white face around, and for five minutes, five blocks from my home, I was a stranger in a strange land.

Of course, I'm that kind of white American for whom this shouldn't be true. I grew up in the 1970s, singing "We Shall Overcome" at school assemblies. I've had black bosses, written about Kwanzaa, and know what Juneteenth is I even have a black cousin!

And yet, the line down the middle of that road might have been a wall. Created by fear, classism, or ignorance, I don't know. Am I conflating race with poverty, poverty with danger, the unknown with, well, the unknown?

I do know, vaguely, that Austin is one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods, and by extension, a dangerous one. There's an unfortunately well-attended soup kitchen there, and Austin families often visit my neighborhood to play in its parks or go trick-or-treating.

But the block I walked reflects none of this. The stares I got were from a woman in a high-end SUV and a man on a high-end motorcycle. No matter our class status, I was out of place

Moreover, and more to the point, there are black folks where I live, and I can't say that I know them any better than I do those in Austin. At parties or school functions, we chat and trade news; occasionally, we reference comedian Chris Rock or presidential candidate Barack Obama.

And at that very moment, that Chris Rock/Barack Obama moment, I become painfully, agonizingly, white. Beset by white liberal discomfort and mortified that I might appear to be trying too hard, I quickly change the subject, to something not identifiably black ? teachers or taxes.

I wish I could ask the questions I would pose to anyone from a culture that is foreign to me. What do you think of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice? Does the church's place in your community make it hard for atheists? What does white society ? what do I ? get wrong about you every day? I would ask these things of a German or a Pakistani. But I've never even asked my cousin.

We're not integrated. We're strangers.

What America needs is neither Supreme Court-sanctioned race-blindness, nor the Pollyanna "conversation on race," cited as a countermeasure when celebrities spout racist insults or Fox News mistakes black members of Congress. What it needs is to acknowledge the sheer distance between the races, and to make a real effort to bridge it.

I do not doubt that old-school racism remains a defining characteristic of American life, but I believe the kind of soft racism of which I'm guilty is part of the problem. So sure that my very whiteness puts me on a wrong foot, I won't admit our differences. So afraid of looking the fool, I learn nothing.

I hope that when my children read this 20 years from now, they'll marvel at my backwardness. That their experience in a truly integrated school system in which cultural diversity is a value both taught and lived will mean that my mental walls don't survive to their generation.

In the meantime, I believe I should try to get over myself.

? Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer.

Donkeyphant :: RE: We will not be silenced - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:59 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 1

Ironically, by Hillary's definition, Edwards isn't "serious" either.

By "serious" she means "rich."

Donkeyphant :: We will not be silenced - Kucinich

Author: donkey
Subject: We will not be silenced - Kucinich
Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 6:47 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 1

We will not be silenced

Can you believe it! I know you are as outraged as we are about the recent plot between Hillary and John Edwards. Let me assure you � Dennis Kucinich will not be silenced! Dennis will continue to spread his message of strength through peace, because he knows it's the only possibility for a better America.

According to AP, Fox News picked up Clinton and Edwards on stage with their open mikes expressing their mutual desire to limit future presidential forums by excluding other candidates.

John Edwards whispered, "We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group." Hillary Clinton agreed, "We've got to cut the number ... They're not serious.''

It's ironic that they challenge the seriousness of Dennis's message.

Dennis Kucinich knows the seriousness of the war in Iraq.

Dennis knows the thousands of lives lost.

Dennis knows about the billions of dollars spent.

Dennis knows about our credibility to the world.

Dennis is the only candidate that has stood up against this war from the beginning and throughout.

Dennis was not however seen in the back of the Senate Chamber last month waiting to see who voted before casting their vote.

Dennis is not the one who refuses to take responsibility for their vote to go to war, and then continues to authorize it.

Playing politics when people are dying is a little less than serious, and we need your help to send a message loud and clear that we are serious - and we will not be silenced.

Dennis responded to the statements by saying, "Candidates - no matter how important or influential they perceive themselves to be - do not have and should not have the power to determine who is allowed to speak to the American public and who is not."

Best Regards,

Mike Klein
Campaign Manager

Donkeyphant :: Blue Cross Responds internally to SiCKO - Moore

Author: donkey
Subject: Blue Cross Responds internally to SiCKO - Moore
Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:36 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

BlueCross Secret Memo Re: 'Sicko' ... "You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie..."

July 6th, 2007

Friends,

An employee who works at Capital BlueCross has sent us a confidential memo written and circulated by its Vice President of Corporate Communications, Barclay Fitzpatrick. His job, it seems, was to go and watch "Sicko," observe the audience's reaction, and then suggest a plan of action for how to deal with the movie.

The memo, which I am releasing publicly in this email, is a fascinating look at how one health care company views "Sicko" -- and what it fears its larger impact will be on the public. The industry's only hope, the memo seems to indicate, is if the movie "flops."

Mr. Fitzpatrick writes: "In typical Moore fashion, Government and business leaders are behind a conspiracy to keep the little guy down and dominated while getting rich."

No. You don't say! That can't be!

BlueCross V.P. Fitzpatrick seems downright depressed about the movie he just saw. "You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie," he writes. "Sicko" leaves audiences feeling "ashamed to be...a capitalist, and part of a 'me' society instead of a 'we' society."

He walks out of the theater only to witness an unusual sight: people -- strangers -- mingling and talking to each other. "'I didn't know they (the insurers) did that!' was a common exclamation followed by a discussion of the example," according to Fitzpatrick.

He then assesses the film's impact: "[T]he impact on small business decision makers, our members, the community, and our employees could be significant. Ignoring its impact might be a successful strategy only if it flops, but that has not been the history of Moore's films ... If popular, the movie will have a negative impact on our image in this community."

The BlueCross memo then suggests a strategy in dealing with "Sicko" and offers the BCBS "talking points" to be used in discounting the film.

My heartfelt thanks to the employee who sent this to me.

And now a word from me to Capital BlueCross:

How 'bout a debate? No more secret memos and hand wringing about the millions seeing "Sicko." Just me and your CEO openly debating the merits of a system that kills thousands of innocent Americans every year.

In the meantime, I hope you don't mind me sharing your thoughts and impressions in your well-written memo. And if the rest of your executive team hasn't seen "Sicko," it opens in an additional 100 cities tonight for a total of over 700 screens across North America. Attendance went up a whopping 56% on the 4th of July, higher than any other film in the theaters right now. But don't be scared, and certainly don't be ashamed to be a capitalist. Greed is good! Especially good for you. There's nothing like having the pre-existing condition of being rich, should you ever get sick and need help.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

P.S. Join me at noon EST, today, when I'll be chatting with U.S. Steelworkers, the California Nurses Association, and whoever stops by to talk about "Sicko" and the industry's attempt to stop this movement. Check my website for details.

[The following memo was written by Barclay Fitzpatrick, VP of Corporate Communications for Capital BlueCross]

I was able to see Sicko last night in Lancaster. There were about 30 other viewers in the theatre covering all age groups. I have attached the well-written memo from one of our partners, which describes cases used in the movie, to the end of my memo. Also attached are the latest talking points from BCBSA. I will focus on impact to our brands, issues, and suggested strategies in this memo.

The Movie
You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie, he is an effective storyteller. In Sicko Moore presents a collage of injustices by selecting stories, no matter how exceptional to the norm, that present the health insurance industry as a set of organizations and people dedicated to denying claims in the name of profit. Denial for treatments that are considered "experimental" is a common story, along with denial for previous conditions, and denial for application errors or omissions. Individual employees from Humana and other insurers are interviewed who claim to have actively pursued claim denial as an institutionalized goal in the name of profit.

While Humana and Kaiser Permanente are demonized, the BlueCross and BlueShield brands appear, separately and together, visually and verbally, with such frequency that there should be no doubt that whatever visceral reaction his movie stirs will spill over onto the Blues brands in every market. Here are some examples:

* Horizon BlueCross/BlueShield is picked out early in the film in a collage of stories citing bad treatment of members.
* BCBSA is cited for rejecting a woman for coverage due to a high BMI - "too fat" is written across the screen over a copy of her application denial letter, which describes the BMI rejection.
* BlueShield of California denied coverage for a diagnostic test, which the patient later received overseas. Patient sues BS of CA and medical director admits to not 'seeing' the actual denial letter, which was given an electronic signature.
* BlueCross of California denied payment for a major surgery after they discovered a previous yeast infection, then dropped the person for coverage. This is followed by an interview with a person who claims to have been a specialist at finding inaccuracies in applications to enable post-treatment payment denials.
* A BCBSA card is shown while the narrator describes how they (insurers) got wealthy.

In typical Moore fashion, Government and business leaders are behind a conspiracy to keep the little guy down and dominated while getting rich. Nixon Oval Office tapes are used to show how the initial idea of a 'less care = profit' enterprise was supported by the administration and became the HMO paradigm. Legislators are presented as bought stooges for the political agendas of insurers and big Pharma. Insurers are middlemen in the Medicare Modernization Act - which is presented as a trick to charge seniors more for their prescription drugs.

Doctors are barely touched - only in the course of discussing the AMA's work to sink early efforts in the 40's and 50's to start universal health care. He takes efforts to show that doctors live well in other countries despite the existence of universal health care. In follow-up interviews, Moore has stated that he has spoken to and knows many doctors, and "doctors aren't the problem".

In the second half of the movie, Moore walks us through individual stories of the Canadian, British, French, and Cuban health care systems where everything is free and - he reminds us repeatedly - no one is ever denied service because they can't pay. In addition to health care, the government provides free day care, college, and someone to do your laundry. Everybody gets along and takes care of each other and life is beautiful because there is universal health care. As a viewer, you are made to feel ashamed to be an American, a capitalist, and part of a 'me' society instead of a 'we' society - and the lack of universal health care is held up in support of that condemnation.

The Impact
Moore's movies are intentionally intense and his objective in Sicko seems to be to revive the earlier Clinton efforts - not to achieve universal coverage with this movie, but to push the topic to the top of the agenda. He will be just as successful whether proponents mount momentum or discussion entails key stakeholders defending why it won't work.

As a health care industry educated viewer it is easy to pick out where Moore is cultivating misperceptions to further a political agenda, but you will also recognize that 80%+ of the audience will have their perceptions substantially affected. In demonstration of its impact, an informal discussion group ensued outside the theatre after the movie. While some people recognized how one-sided the presentation was, most were incredulous and "I didn't know they (the insurers) did that!" was a common exclamation followed by a discussion of the example.

The unfortunate reality for Capital BlueCross is that as the market leader, we will be affected both in brand and as employees as Moore's efforts in the movie and surrounding PR activity are seen by more of the community. The impact on industry savvy Sales' contacts should be minimal, while the impact on small business decision makers, our members, the community, and our employees could be significant. Ignoring its impact might be a successful strategy only if it flops, but that has not been the history of Moore's films nor the way this one appears to be headed. If popular, the movie will have a negative impact on our image in this community.

There should be no doubt that many of our employees will be asked what they think of the movie by friends, family, and neighbors. We should anticipate that our customer service people will be asked about particular cases from the movie and if we follow similar policies. Word and phrases we have routinely used to date in policy change communications or denial letters, such as "Investigational", will be seen as affirming the film's contentions. The national BCBSA response - while coming out against the film's divisiveness and focusing on the positive work of the Blues - steers media inquiries about policies and denials back to the plans themselves.

There are 4 key areas of misperception cultivated by the movie that we should consider in any messaging strategy:

1. That the industry is all about HMO's. Moore cultivates this further in his interviews. The reality is that HMO's are a minority product and have been for some time.
2. The movie attacks insurers for a profit motive, but makes no distinction among for-profit and non-profit insurers, and in its execution places the Blue Plans together with the for-profit insurers.
3. All plans and employees - from leaders to service representatives - are painted as motivated by profit to deny claims, and only those with crisis of conscience have come forward to confess their sins.
4. Perhaps most damaging of all, Moore completely fails to address the most significant driver of health care costs - our own lifestyle choices - and seeks to focus attention and efforts on the alluring 'quick-fix' of universal health care. It has taken a generation of poor nutrition and exercise to get obesity and related health issues - and subsequent costs - to their current levels, and Moore's movie fails to acknowledge the causal relationship or need to change (he briefly touches the subject in a non-memorable way). Contrast this to the recent Health Care Symposium held in Harrisburg - where a panel of representatives from Government, Insurance, Hospitals, Business, Physicians, and even Lawyers agreed on one thing - that there was no quick fix and that Health and Wellness was the critical area of focus.

Suggestions
I believe the most successful strategy will not be in attacking the movie for its weaknesses or misperceptions, but in distancing ourselves and our brand from the groups and motivations he attacks, demonstrating the good that we do and achieve (aligns with BCBSA strategy), and in articulating our disappointment that he did not address the truly relevant issue of improving our health and wellness. We will convene a team to consider other approaches and work on potential messages for media inquiries, customer service, and employees.

Confidential Memo (from partner)

SiCKO - viewed on 6/26/2007

Takeaways

* The main theme of the movie is that American society needs to focus on the "we" and not the "me" in healthcare.

o This broad message is an overlay for the specific criticisms of the healthcare industry - the movie asks where the morality of the American public lies and contrasts America's approach to health care unfavorably with other nations.

* SiCKO does not go into any depth about how health insurers operate how the health insurance business works - instead it fixates on what it characterizes as the profit incentive to deny care to patients (e.g. examples of barriers to getting health insurance if you are not healthy; examples of people being denied expensive tests or procedures; examples of efforts to deny reimbursement after care has been received.)

* The film draws no distinction between not-for-profit and for-profit insurers - in fact the Blue Cross/Blue Shield brand is intermixed with the for - profit brands as background reference points. o One scene shows a Blue Cross / Blue Shield logo as Michael Moore's voice over begins, "While the healthcare companies get wealthy..."

* The health insurers that get the most airtime are:

o Kaiser Permanente
o Humana
o CIGNA
o Blue Cross of California
o Aetna

* No Pharma companies are mentioned - but SiCKO suggests in multiple instances that prescription drugs are overpriced

o At a pharmacy in London, prescription drugs are £6.65, no matter how large the dose
o In Cuba, one bankrupt 9/11 worker's inhaler costs 5 cents, instead of $100

Further Notes

* Some of the examples of denial of care highlighted in the film:

o A woman with Kaiser Permanente takes her 18-month daughter to the hospital in an ambulance, only to be told to go to an in-network hospital. By the time they reach the second hospital, her daughter has stopped breathing and dies 30 minutes later in ER.

o A woman with Blue Shield of California has a tumor but is denied requests to get an MRI, or to see a specialist. While on vacation in Japan she is given an MRI, and eventually returns to the U.S. to demand treatment from her insurer.

* In the ensuing court case, a doctor admits to denying her request without having reviewed it.

o Blue Cross of California approves one woman's $7,500 treatment, but the approval is later denied for her failure to report a previous medical incident - a yeast infection.

* "They're just looking for a way out," she says

* Other examples of how health insurers avoid paying for treatment:

o One graph (from Humana) shows that doctors with the highest % of denials get a bonus.

o Michael Moore interviews a former health insurance employee who specialized in denying care to patients retroactively - by finding inconsistencies in their medical records.

o A 5-minute piece in the beginning of the movie .

* The film also focuses on the politicians and the funds they raise from Pharma and other player in the health care industry and alleges that the system has been heavily influenced by lobbyists and contributions.

Barclay Fitzpatrick
Vice President
Corporate Communications
Capital BlueCross
(w) 717-541-7752
(c) 717-329-3648
barclay.fitzpatrick@capbluecross.com

MichaelMooreTalkingPoints61807.doc

Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association
Talking Points in Response to Michael Moore's "Sicko"
June 2007

1) The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) and the 39 Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies are committed to improving the U.S. healthcare system for our nearly 100 million members through continuous innovation that reflects the ever-changing healthcare landscape and the needs of the consumer.

2) The Blues recognize the need for improvement of both the coverage and delivery of healthcare. But the divisive tone set forth by Michael Moore and his movie "Sicko" is not helpful. Positive change to our healthcare system can be best achieved through shared responsibility, not recrimination. To ensure Americans have access to the best healthcare that is both timely, efficient, and of high quality, requires the collective contribution of all stakeholders -- consumers, providers, employers and the government.

3) The Blues participation in the Health Coverage Coalition for the Uninsured is a primary example of how the broader healthcare community is working together to reduce the number of uninsured in the United States.

4) The Blues are working on myriad initiatives that ensure Americans have access to quality and affordable healthcare. Each day, Blue Plans across the country are bringing healthcare value to their members in a number of ways such as new advances in health information technology and greater access to cost and quality information. In addition:

o The Blues recently created Blue Health Intelligence a data resource that will shine light on emerging medical trends and treatment options in an unprecedented way. To further the use of evidenced-based medicine, BCBSA has called upon Congress to establish an independent, payer-funded institute that will study the comparative effectiveness of new and existing medical treatments and procedures.

o Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies are at the forefront of healthcare transparency by providing their members with online access to real-time information related to provider quality and the cost of common healthcare services. In addition, the Blues have committed to making personal health records available to their members by 2008.

o We are working to ensure that Medicare is funded appropriately and that seniors continue to have access to comprehensive benefits.

5) The Blues are proud of these efforts and we will continue to work with consumers, providers, employers and the government to provide Americans with the healthcare services and information they need to lead full, healthy lives.

---

Donkeyphant :: The Tears of a Clone - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: The Tears of a Clone - Palast
Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 9:25 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The Tears of a Clone
Conyers Closes in on Karl and his Rove-bots ...

By Greg Palast | June 18, 2007
Special to BRAD BLOG

Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin cry.

He cried. Then he lied.

You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right hand (right claw?) man. The GOP's ragin' cagin' man.

Griffin is the Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations team as the man who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging' lists to Republican state chairmen during the 2004 election.

Caging lists, BBC discovered, were used secretly as a basis to challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens - including the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after BBC broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sought our evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a little gift from Karl Rove who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the firing of US prosecutor Bud Cummins.

Last week, our cameras captured Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in Little Rock at the University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service isn't worth it."

True. In the old Jim Crow days in Arkansas, you could get yourself elected by blocking African-Americans. (The voters his caging game targeted are - quelle surprise! - disproportionately Black citizens.)

But today, Griffin can't even get an unemployment check. When he resigned two weeks ago following our broadcast, the cover story was that the voter persecutor-turned-prosecutor had resigned to work for Presidential wannabe Fred Thompson. But when Thompson's staff was asked by a reporter why they would hire the 'cagin' man,' suddenly, the 'Law and Order' star decided associating with Griffin might take the shine off Thompson's badge, even if it is from the props department.

Griffin, instead of saying that public service "isn't worth it," should have said, "Crime doesn't pay." Because, according to experts such as law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'caging,' when used to target Black voters' rights, is a go-to-prison crime.

By resigning, Tim may not avoid the hard questions about caging - or the hard time that might result. When I passed the first set of documents to Conyers (a real film noir moment, in a New York hotel room near midnight), the soft-spoken Congressman said that, resignation or not, "We aren't done with Mr. Griffin yet..."

Tears Not Truth

Back in Little Rock, when asked about caging, Rove's guy linked a few fibs to a few whoppers to some malefactious mendacity. That is, he lied.

"I didn't cage votes. I didn't cage mail," Griffin asserted.

At the risk of making you cry again, Tim, may I point you to an email dated August 26, 2004. It says, "Subject: Re: Caging." And it says, "From: Tim Griffin - Research/Communications" with the email tgriffin@rnchq.org. RNCHQ is the Republican National Committee Headquarters, is it not, Mr. Griffin? Now do you remember caging mail?

If that doesn't ring a bell, please note that at the bottom is this: "ATTACHMENT: Caging-1.xls". And that attachment was a list of voters.

In last week's pathetic farewell, Mr. Griffin averred that the accusation he was involved in caging voters, "Goes back to one guy - whose name I won't mention." (FYI, Mr. Griffin: My mother calls me, "Gregory.")

Yes, I first reported the story for BBC London - back in 2004 which, as Griffin correctly noted, it was ignored by my US press colleagues until, as Tim put it, "I became embroiled in the US Attorney thing." By 'the US Attorney thing,' I assume you are referring to your involvement in firing and smearing honest prosecutors and grabbing one of their salaries for yourself.

You say, Mr. Griffin, that the unmentionable reporter, "Made [it] up out of whole cloth." You flatter me, Mr. Griffin. We could not possibly be so creative at The Beeb as to construct the thousands of names of voters on your caging lists.

And by the way, we don't have just one of your "caging" emails, but scores of them.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for sending them to us - even if that was not your intent. You copied your caging missives to 'bdoster@georgewbush.org.' Mr. Doster was Chairman of the Florida Bush campaign - but that address was not his but John Wooden's pretending to be the Bush campaigners. Wooden then sent your notes to me.

Rove in Range

By the way, Mr. Griffin, if you want an explanation of 'caging voters,' just read an email dated February 5, 2007 by...Tim Griffin.

In that email, Griffin references the Bush campaigns mailing out thousands of letters. The letters returned ('caged') as undeliverable were used as the GOP's supposed evidence that these were "thousands of fraudulent voter registrations." These voters were subject to challenge. However, these caging lists of "fraudulent" addresses, like the 2000 "felon" lists which in fact contained no felons, contained no fraudulent voters. But that wouldn't necessarily save them from the massively successful Republican voter-challenge campaign.

During the appearance he made in Arkansas last week, Griffin said he'd never heard of 'caging.' "I had to look it up," he said. Griffin discovered that "caging" is "a direct mail term."

I don't doubt Griffin's ignorance. Griffin's just a good ol' boy, a former military lawyer, who wouldn't know direct mail terminology from a hole in the ground. Until he went to work for the RNC.

So where did Tim get this direct mail term he used in his emails? Well, before Karl Rove signed on with George W. Bush, he owned Karl Rove & Co ....a direct mail firm. Rove made millions making up lists of voters, doing more 'caging' than a zoo-keeper.

Am I saying caging-expert Rove had something to do with the allegedly illegal caging games of his boy Griffin? Does a bear...?

Mr. Griffin wouldn't answer BBC's requests for comment. So I suggested to an Arkansas local, Luther Lowe, a former army reservist and himself a victim of a challenge to his vote, that at the Little Rock send-off for Griffin, he ask the fallen US Attorney about Rove's involvement in caging. Lowe did so, politely. Griffin wove, ducked, blathered and blubbered. But wouldn't answer.

Maybe a subpoena would encourage a Griffin response. And a grant of immunity from the Conyers committee. That's Rove's nightmare. Because unless Griffin joins Alberto Gonzales in Club Amnesia, Griffin has a lot to tell us about Mr. Rove and targeting Black voters.

Will he? It's not Conyers' style to hunt down Rove. The congressman is not, despite what Republicans say, a partisan hit man. He is, however, one tenacious legislator who told me he would like his committee, "to follow where the evidence leads."

But that's not necessarily going to happen. Conyers told me he sees the evidence in the prosecutor firing investigation leading to the much bigger, nastier issue of voter suppression - in simpler terms, fixing elections.

Unfortunately, many on his committee from both parties see the hearings as limited to the single issue of the firing of prosecutors. They want to scrutinize the elephant's trunk but refuse to acknowledge it's attached to an elephant: election rigging. Racially poisoned, direct-mail driven, computer implemented election rigging.

But Conyers may get there yet, to the issue of elections manipulation. I didn't get that from the Chairman (too circumspect to let his future intensions slip out). I got it from the Big Bubba. When I ran into Ol' Silver Eyes himself at an Air America soiree, Bill Clinton (man, he's gotten thin!) told me, "When we really get going on these prosecutor hearings, when we really dig deep, we're going to get right to the issue of voter suppression."

But what do you mean "we," Bill? Conyers is dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has an abiding concern and painful experience with illegal vote suppression of all types: caging, purging, challenging, lynching. But whether Conyers can convince his committee, mostly members of the Congressional White Caucus, to "dig deep" on vote suppression, is an open question.

In the meantime, Conyers has convinced his committee to drop subpoenas on Harriett Miers (the lady tight with Griffin, Rove and, notably, George W. Bush) and Sara Taylor, Rove's Gal Friday. Conyers, methodically, determinedly, is circling in on Rove, "Bush's Brain," a man known to surrender the corpses of his allies in place of his own (eh, Mr. Libby?). No wonder Griffin's in tears.

So here's a hanky, Mr. Griffin. This unnamable reporter would rather you save your tears for Randall Prausa. The African-American soldier was on active military duty when he ended up on one of your caging lists, what you term a suspected 'fraudulent' voter subject to GOP challenge because he was not home to get his fraudulent, 'Welcome, voter,' letter from the GOP.

Can you guess, Mr. Griffin, why Prausa wasn't at home? Well, unlike Messrs. Rove and Bush, Prausa was serving his country overseas.

And that's what caging is all about. If you're Black, you get shipped to Baghdad and you lose your vote. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Griffin. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Rove.

===

The confidential Griffin e-mail, "Subject: Re: Caging," is reproduced in Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Available at www.GregPalast.com

Also: Catch the film of Randi Rhodes and Greg Palast on "Bush's and Giuliani's favorite vultures," the men with connections to the Bush Administration who have siphoned off the money meant for Africa's poorest. Video online here.

Donkeyphant :: US Attorney Resigns - Palast

Author: donkey
Subject: US Attorney Resigns - Palast
Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 3:13 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

US Attorney Resigns Following Conyers� Request for BBC Documents
by Greg Palast
June 1, 2007

Tim Griffin, formerly right hand man to Karl Rove, resigned Thursday as US Attorney for Arkansas hours after BBC Television �Newsnight� reported that Congressman John Conyers requested the network�s evidence on Griffin�s involvement in �caging voters.� Greg Palast, reporting for BBC Newsnight, obtained a series of confidential emails from the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. In these emails, Griffin, then the GOP Deputy Communications Director, transmitted so-called �caging lists� of voters to state party leaders.

Experts have concluded the caging lists were designed for a mass challenge of voters� right to cast ballots. The caging lists were heavily weighted with minority voters including homeless individuals, students and soldiers sent overseas.

Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firing of US Attorneys, met Thursday evening in New York with Palast. After reviewing key documents, Conyers stated that, despite Griffin�s resignation, �We�re not through with him by any means.�

Conyers indicated to the BBC that he thought it unlikely that Griffin could carry out this massive �caging� operation without the knowledge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove.

Griffin has not responded to requests by BBC to explain this 'caging' operation. However, in emails subpoenaed by Conyers' committee, Griffin complains to Monica Goodling, an assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, about the BBC reporter's reproduction of caging lists in Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse."

In the email dated February 5 of this year, Griffin stated that the purpose of 'caging' was to identify "fraudulent" voters. This contradicts one explanation of the Bush campaign to BBC that the lists were of potential donors and not in any way created to challenge voters.

Griffin confidentially wrote: "The real story is this: There were thousands of reported illegal/fake voter registrations around the country, so some of the Republican State Parties mailed letters welcoming new voters to the newly registered voters. � The Republican State Parties ultimately wanted to show that thousands of fraudulent registrations had been completed."

Last Wednesday, Goodling testified under a grant of immunity before the House Judiciary Committee that Gonzales' Deputy Paul McNulty, "failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote 'caging' during his work on the President's 2004 campaign."

Goodling's testimony prompted Conyers' request to the BBC for the Griffin emails.

Last night Palast showed Conyers a Griffin email from August 2004 indicating that Griffin not only knew of 'caging,' but directed the operation.

And check out this story from Slate: Raging Caging - What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care? Here: http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/pagenum/all/#page_start

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. For information, go to www.GregPalast.com