Patrick’s Notebook

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com – 10 August 2009

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

Continue reading ‘Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama’ »

By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY — 15 February 2009

– The economy is in tatters. Oil prices are plunging. So why are gasoline prices closing in on $2 a gallon again?

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $1.97 Sunday, according to the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) and AAA. That’s up 22% since pump prices hit a five-year low of $1.61 on Dec. 30.

Oil prices, despite a Friday rally, have fallen about 16% over the same period.

A big reason for the disparity: refiners. Beset by weak consumer demand and losses on gasoline sales, oil refiners have scaled back production since late December. The average utilization rate at U.S. refineries was 81.5% as of Feb. 6, the lowest in 17 years, not including hurricane-related slowdowns, according to the Energy Information Administration. As recently as early December, refineries were running at 87.4% of capacity.

Refineries typically shut some units for maintenance this time of year. But many are trimming output because demand is anemic. That tends to rile consumers who view low gas prices as a small silver lining in a dismal economy. But go easy on the poor refiner, analysts say.

“If you’re losing money on something and you’re producing at 90%, you’re going to cut back,” says OPIS chief oil analyst Tom Kloza.

Continue reading ‘Low oil prices are not translating into low gas prices’ »

By Robert Parry, Consortium News — 19 December 2008

Over the years, Washington has evolved into a city of deceptions where semantics cloud reality and where a hazy mix of lies, half-truths and mythology can combine to unleash the devastating military might of the United States for no good reason.

Indeed, if there were to be a serious effort to “change the mindset” that got the United States into the Iraq War – as Barack Obama has promised – one place to start would be to force Official Washington to take a long hard look in the mirror.

During George W. Bush’s presidency alone, language has been routinely twisted to justify everything from aggressive war to torture. Those two international crimes were turned into “preventive war” and “alternative interrogation techniques.”

But “preventive war” is nothing but a grotesque Orwellian euphemism, since it makes no sense to claim that you’re preventing a war by starting a war.

The accurate phrase, especially in the context of the Iraq invasion, would be “aggressive war.” That phrase, however, would force an uncomfortable judgment that President Bush and many well-dressed neocons at Georgetown dinner parties were “war criminals” deserving of hanging.

Under the legal standards applied to the Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Tribunals, “aggressive war” was deemed the “supreme international crime” because it sets loose all the atrocities of warfare.

Continue reading ‘Obama v. Washington Mythmaking’ »

By Ron Paul, The Big Money — 13 October 2008

– One of the burning questions regarding the recently passed bailout, and the one that almost no one has bothered to answer, is how the government intends to pay for it. Governments have three main methods by which they can raise funds: taxation, printing new money, and debt. As our $10 trillion national debt shows, the federal government has always enjoyed raising money by issuing new debt. Money is gained upfront, while the cost of repaying that debt is pushed onto future generations.

This method is especially favored today, since imposing $700 billion worth of taxes would lead to widespread public dissatisfaction. When the cost of all the recent bailouts plus the cost of all the new lending facilities the Federal Reserve has initiated are added together, we quickly reach a figure in the trillions of dollars. Even with the debt ceiling being raised to $11.3 trillion, the issuance of debt alone cannot begin to cover the cost of all the bailouts in which the government is engaged. Every indication is that the government will use both debt and inflation in its attempt to keep the economy running at full speed.

Debt financing has begun in earnest, as the national debt has increased $600 billion over the past three weeks, and most of that increase came even before the $700 billion bailout bill was passed. I fully expect that trend to continue in the near future and would not be surprised if we see another debt-limit increase slipped into another economic stimulus package that might be passed before the new year. Now that our foreign creditors are less willing to purchase our debt, what debt we cannot sell to foreigners will be monetized through the Federal Reserve, resulting in increased inflation.

In fact, money supply data for the narrowest measure, the adjusted monetary base, show an unprecedented increase, far higher than when Chairman Alan Greenspan attempted to reflate us out of trouble after the dot-com stock bubble burst. That intervention on Greenspan’s part, pumping in liquidity and driving interest rates down, led to the real estate bubble, and Chairman Ben Bernanke unfortunately seems to be following the same script as his predecessor in resorting to credit creation and low interest rates. Even were this effort to succeed, it would only delay the inevitable. In order for the economy to return to normal, the Federal Reserve must cease the creation of new credit, overvalued assets must be allowed to fall in price, and malinvested resources must be allowed to liquidate and be put to use in more productive sectors.

Continue reading ‘Sickness Unto Debt’ »

The chorus demanding George Bush be prosecuted for torture and other constitutional abuses is getting louder

By Dan Kennedy, guardian.co.uk — 08 July 2008

I had a good laugh when my friend Seth Gitell reported in the New York Sun on a campaign by the dean of the obscure Massachusetts School of Law to put George Bush and other top White House officials on trial for war crimes.

Lawrence Velvel, Gitell notes, wrote last month that his model was the Nuremberg trials held after second world war. Velvel went so far as to say that “we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese.” Oh, my.

Though I found Velvel’s apparently earnest quest as ridiculous as Gitell did, the idea of holding our leaders accountable for the crimes and constitutional violations of the past seven and a half years isn’t ridiculous in the least.

We are less than a decade removed from impeaching a president and nearly relieving him of office because of a lie in a civil deposition about blowjobs. Yet when congressman Dennis Kucinich recently attempted to impeach Bush over torture, extraordinary rendition and other grotesque constitutional abuses, Kucinich’s embarrassed fellow Democrats couldn’t kill the measure quickly enough.

Why? Top Democrats are so complicit in what has happened since 9/11 that my guess is they dare not travel down that road. From voting in favor of the war in Iraq to holding the telecommunications companies guiltless for their role in spying on Americans (Barack Obama infuriated much of his progressive base by voting for immunity), the Democrats have often acted more as enablers than as a true opposition party. From their point of view, no doubt it’s best to move on.

And yet we can’t move on. Everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the demons that have been unleashed in the name of fighting terrorism. We are less democratic and less free than we were before Bush and Dick Cheney entered office following an election that they demonstrably did not win. If we don’t come to terms with what happened, there’s little chance of reversing our slide into authoritarianism.

Continue reading ‘Should Bush be tried for war crimes?’ »

Waterboarding Got White House Nod

By Joby Warrick, Washington Post — 15 October 2008

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.”

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.

Continue reading ‘CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos’ »

By Spengler, Asia Times online — 23 September 2008

– Why should American taxpayers give US Treasury Secretary “Hank” Paulson a blank check to bail out the shareholders of busted banks? Why should the Treasury turn itself into a toxic waste dump for their bad loans? Why not let other banks join the unlamented Brothers Lehman in bankruptcy court, and start a new bank with taxpayers’ money? Or have the Treasury pay interest on delinquent mortgages, and make them whole? Even better, why not let the Chinese, or the Saudis or other foreign investors take control of failed American banks? They’ve got the money, and they gladly would pay a premium for an inside seat at the American table.

None of the above will occur. America will give between US$700-$800 billion to the Treasury to buy any bank assets it wants, on any terms, with no possible legal recourse. It is an invitation to abuse of power unparalleled in American history, in which ill-paid civil servants will set prices on the portfolios of the banking system with no oversight and no threat of legal penalty.

Why are the voices raised in protest so shrill and few? Why will Americans fall on their fountain-pens for their bankers? If America is to adopt socialism, why not have socialism for the poor, rather than for the rich? Why should American households that earn $50,000 a year subsidize Goldman Sachs partners who earn $5 million a year?

Believe it or not, there is a rational explanation, and quite in keeping with America’s national motto, E pluribus hokum. Part of the problem is that Wall Street, like the ethnic godfather in the old joke, has made America an offer it can’t understand. The collapsing the mortgage-backed securities market embodies a degree of complexity that mystifies the average policy wonk. But that is a lesser, superficial side of the story.

Continue reading ‘E pluribus hokum or When the gamblers bail out the casino’ »

The Pentagon’s Expansion Will Be Bush’s Lasting Legacy

By Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch.com — 27 May 2008

A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics — a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon’s massive bulk-up these last seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. “The Pentagon” is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War about what role U.S. military power should play in a “unipolar” world? Was U.S. supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic “peace dividend” thrown into the bargain)? Or was the U.S. to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of “humanitarian interventions”? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world’s sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 decisively ended that debate. The Bush administration promptly declared total war on every front — against peoples, ideologies, and, above all, “terrorism” (a tactic of the weak). That very September, administration officials proudly leaked the information that they were ready to “target” up to 60 other nations and the terrorist movements within them.

Continue reading ‘Entrenched, Embedded, and Here to Stay’ »

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig.com — 9 September 2008

– Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation’s mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain’s excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent—but she at least may not know any better.

Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the “bridge to nowhere,” which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject.

Referring to the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers,” displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments.

The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the “swap” business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure?

Continue reading ‘She’s Clueless, He’s Worse’ »

Majority of people surveyed in 17 different countries have doubts about official story

By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet — 10 September 2008

A new global poll conducted across 17 countries has found that less than half of those surveyed believe Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks, with a full 15 per cent believing that the terrorist outrage was directly perpetrated by the U.S. government.

On the eve of the 7th anniversary of 9/11, the poll underscores how a majority of people still do not buy the official story, despite numerous attempts to reinforce the explanation that 19 hijackers at the behest of Osama bin Laden were the culprits behind the plot.

“The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001,” reports Reuters.

Overall, 46 per cent of those surveyed believed the attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda, 25 per cent do not know who carried out the attacks, 15 per cent state the U.S. government was behind the attacks, 7 per cent blame Israel and a further 7 per cent blame other perpetrators.

The poll, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, reveals that people in Mexico lay the blame on the U.S. government (30 per cent) in numbers just 3 per cent less than Al-Qaeda (33 per cent).

Continue reading ‘Global Poll: Less Than Half Believe Al-Qaeda Behind 9/11’ »

By Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera —

If selecting a running mate is a real test of a presidential candidate’s judgment, then John McCain’s decision to name Sarah Palin as his choice reveals a poor sense of astuteness and serves to underline his desperate political expediency.

Beyond the much taunted image of a maverick, his critics argue McCain’s decision has once again exposed his opportunistic tendencies.

They draw an unflattering profile of a spoiled son of a Navy admiral who misused the good name of his political guru and predecessor in the Senate, the late Barry Goldwater, and who callously left his first wife and children to marry into a $100 million fortune.

And this time, by choosing Palin, he betrayed all of that which he preached over the last 18 months – even 18 years.

“Barack Obama can start writing his inauguration speech,” wrote me an informed friend the night McCain held his first appearance with Governor Palin.

I am not sure I would go that far.

But I am no longer sceptical about an Obama victory in light of McCain’s decision to offer the vice presidency to the unknown and inexperienced governor of Alaska merely because she is a conservative woman.

If the McCain-Palin list survives the next two months with no dramatic surprises, the Republican nominee will suffer in the polls because of his hasty decision.

Continue reading ‘What Palin says about McCain’ »

By Klaus Marre — 19 July 2008

– Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has backed the withdrawal plans of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, saying the Illinois senator “is right” when he talks about withdrawing U.S. troops within 16 months.

Maliki also appeared to disagree with Republican presidential candidate John McCain on other issues, such as the importance of the surge in making Iraq more secure and whether troop withdrawal equates surrender, as the Arizona senator has indicated.

Asked in an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel of when he would like to see American forces leave Iraq, Maliki said: “As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned.” He then added that “Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.”

The White House announced Friday that Maliki and President Bush agreed that there should not be any artificial withdrawal timelines and that troop reductions should be tied to situations on the ground. However, while saying that he is not making an endorsement in the U.S. election, the Iraqi prime minister left little doubt that the Iraqi people and its government prefer Obama’s plan.

Continue reading ‘Maliki: ‘Obama is right’ about troop withdrawal’ »

By Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service — 5 May 2008

– Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.

Feith’s book, ‘War and Decision’, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on Sep. 30, 2001 calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing ‘new regimes’ in a series of states by ‘aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism.’

In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase ’some other states’ in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon ‘campaign plan’ document, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes are listed as ’state regimes’ against which ‘plans and operations’ might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out ‘for security reasons’.

Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the Kosovo War, recalls in his 2003 book ‘Winning Modern Wars’ being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.

Continue reading ‘Pentagon Targeted Iran for Regime Change after 9/11’ »

By Tim Franks, BBC News — 8 April 2008

– The next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories has stood by comments comparing Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis.

Speaking to the BBC, Professor Richard Falk said he believed that up to now Israel had been successful in avoiding the criticism that it was due.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

But Israel wants his mandate changed to probe Palestinian actions as well.

Professor Falk said he drew the comparison between the treatment of Palestinians with the Nazi record of collective atrocity, because of what he described as the massive Israeli punishment directed at the entire population of Gaza.

He said he understood that it was a provocative thing to say, but at the time, last summer, he had wanted to shake the American public from its torpor.

“If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison,” he said.

Continue reading ‘UN expert stands by Nazi comments’ »

By Pierre Tristam, Candide’s Notebooks — 8 April 2008

– The apologists of perpetual war in Iraq got lucky last week. The latest catastrophic fiasco over there — the Iraqi government’s face-saving surrender to a truce offered by resurgent Shiite militias — was overshadowed over here by meltdowns in the economy and sectarian battles inside the Democratic Party. From luck to spin. Today, the Bush administration gets to do what it does best: translate defeat at Arabs’ hands into victory with an American accent.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of occupation forces in Iraq and Bush’s Man Friday there, appears before two Senate committees to canonize the 2007 troop escalation no matter how much the Shiite Awakening disagrees. The administration Petraeus is shilling for, like the strategy he’s shelling out in Iraq , never was much concerned with reality, otherwise we wouldn’t still be lurching from calamity to curfew to stand-off while calling it all a success. In the administration’s version of victory, as long as Iraq isn’t in Rwandan-style genocide (and as long as American contractors continue to rake in their billions at taxpayers’ expense), it’s a success. Adding irony to insurgency, all three presidential candidates sit on the two panels Petraeus will be reading his script for — Hillary Clinton and John McCain on the Armed Services Committee, Barack Obama on the Foreign Relations Committee.

McCain has the advantage of sharing Petraeus’ script-writers, to whom facts are inferior to faith. Two weeks ago, in a Middle East trip designed to show off his knowledge of the region, McCain had to be publicly corrected about al-Qaida’s ties to Iran (it doesn’t have any) and to Shiites (it loathes them). The clanger recalled his other visit to Iraq a year ago this week, when McCain, in a bullet-proof vest, said you could “walk freely” through Baghdad . He had to be reminded by NBC News that Baghdadis generally don’t get to stroll to the market with an escort of “100 American soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Or with bullet-proof vests. Which explains the Iraqi civilian casualty rate in the hundreds of thousands and the 4 million refugees, compliments of the occupation’s dislocations.

Continue reading ‘Dog and Petraeus Show’ »