Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

The Whole Dirty, Ugly $7.77 Trillion Truth is Now Revealed

The secret actions of the US government to keep the US banking system from complete collapse are now available. You can now read the gory details of how the US government "on behalf of the taxpayers gave away $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008 and, when you add up all the "free money" the banks got, it totals $7.77 trillion.

From a Bloomberg News article:

Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

...

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

...

The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.

The Fed funds also benefited firms by allowing them to avoid selling assets to pay investors and depositors who pulled their money. So the assets stayed on the banks’ books, earning interest.

Banks report the difference between what they earn on loans and investments and their borrowing expenses. The figure, known as net interest margin, provides a clue to how much profit the firms turned on their Fed loans, the costs of which were included in those expenses. To calculate how much banks stood to make, Bloomberg multiplied their tax-adjusted net interest margins by their average Fed debt during reporting periods in which they took emergency loans.

...

The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.

The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.

“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”

In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.

They take full effect in 2019.

Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”

There is a lot more detail. Go read the whole article.

Freedom of the press is essential to a democracy. The fact that Bush and Obama administrations fought bitterly to prevent the electorate from knowing what sweetheart deals they gave the banks should be fully understood by American citizens. The US government is deeply corrupted by the banking system.

The fact that nobody has gone to jail for the multiple trillion dollar fraud committed by banks, mortgage brokers, assessors, ratings companies, and the big Wall Street banks that "financialized" junk debt into AAA bonds that quickly went bankrupt cries out for justice. The US government is fighting this tooth-and-nail. Heads must roll. The corruption must be rooted out.

The Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements both agree on this one fact: the US political system has been corrupted by the banks.

Worst of all, the ultra-rich show complete contempt for the bottom 99%, the ordinary taxpayers and working stiffs, who don't get tax cuts and "special deals" from the government:

You Have "Rights" But Just Not Here

Here is an attempt to hold an "assembly to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on the steps of the Supreme Court. But you get arrested there despite what the US First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So... the Constitution says you have a right to petition, but the "laws of the land" say not here, not there, and not over there. You have a right, but if you try to exercise that right, you get arrested! Here was an attempt to exercise a Constitutional right and it got the protesters arrested:



The joke is:

The Constitution gave no "rights" to corporations, but the Supreme Court has empowered things to be "people" by giving corporations more rights than people have. Corporations don't need to petition their government because they simply buy the politicians they need.

The reason why the founders of the US put in the First Amendment was that they knew that people would not have the power individually and had to have a mechanism to get the attention of their government. But the government, through laws and legal decisions, has systematically shutdown all access except to those with the money to buy access. The Supreme Court has participated in this farce by twisting the Constitution to ignore facts and make up "new realities" that cater to the very rich in the very process that has corrupted the system!

America's Gift to the World

Americans like to think they bring peace and good government to the world. But as the following points out, they bring death, destruction, and the insistance on the payment of reparations from the victims of US violence.

Here is a post from Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon magazine:

Iraq foots the bill for its own destruction

By Murtaza Hussain

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.

Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s "free Iraq." In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to "liberate" the Iraqi people.

In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.

Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to "pay back" the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.

The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of "liberation" speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.

The invasion of Iraq was a war crime perpetrated under the false claim of "weapons of mass destruction". Bush, and now Obama, had unleashed a torrent of death and destruction on that nation. (From Wikipedia: Lancet estimated the civilian deaths in the range of 392,979-942,636).

To add insult to injury, the US is extracting "reparations" from Iraq?

Worse, the idea of "reparations" has an odious smell to it since it was the hated reparations imposed on Germany after WWI that led to WWII. Who in their right mind is imposing reparations on the victim nation of Iraq? The US is an outrageous barbarous country to first flatten the victim by belting him in the face, then pick his pockets while he is down with the demand that he pay up for "injuring my fist on your face". Nuts!

Michael Burleigh's "Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II"

This was a different kind of history of WWII. Instead of focusing on leaders or battles, it focuses on good and bad acts done in the context of WWII. I found that interesting. Overall I enjoyed the book but at times I felt the focus got fuzzy as he moved from detail to detail without surfacing to give the reader a "lay of the land" overview. This book is not for the neophyte. You do need a sound knowledge of WWII in order to appreciate this book.

Here are some bits that I felt brought out the issue of evil and guilt. First, as a Canadian, I find it important that Burleigh notes that all sides had their own crimes in this war:

Canadian troops routinely killed German captives after D-Day, partly because there had been instances of atrocities, but mainly because they were viewed as an encumbrance to advancing troops. That then developed into a grudge match between the Canadians and the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, whose commander Meyer was found to have murdered 134 Canadians.

But Burleigh is not into the game of "moral equivalence". He notes that the evil of the Nazis was orders of magnitude greater than the Allies. They were more evil than the Soviets, but the Soviets had many, many crimes that he identifies in this book.

He is good at explaining the shading of evil and how certain small steps led to later, more organized evil:

Many German officers had a hazy understanding of the rules governing captured enemy troops. In mid-September, General Walter von Brauchitsch issued an order that explicitly associated all Polish POWs with the localised murder of ethnic Germans in Bromberg. This opened the door to systematic mistreatment of prisoners, while the reasoning behind the order set a precedent for the infamous 'Commissar Order' issued two years later in Russia. In a significant number of cases, prisoners were simply not taken. They were shot or herded into barns, which were then torched with pitch and petrol. After an intense fire-fight in a wood near Ciepeilow on 8 September, in which a Wehrmacht captain was shot in the head, the monocle-wearing colonel commanding a motorised infantry unit ordered three hundred Polish soldiers to remove their uniforms and then machine-gunned them as insurgents. Prisoners of war were corralled in primitive circumstances, often in fields ringed with barbed-wire. Food and sanitation were inadequate. At night the Poles were ordered to remain seated on the ground as their mass was swept with searchlights. Inevitably some stood up, or moved when a fight or panic broke out, which at Zambrow on 11 September resulted in two hundred killed by machine-gun fire and a hundred wounded, who were left untreated. Another violation of the laws of war involved the separation of some fifty thousand Jews from the mass of Polish prisoners of war by means of interrogations, or based on circumcision or names. They were held in separate ghetto POW camps and used for forced labour. By early 1940, half of them, or twenty-five thousand presumably fit young men, had perished.

And:

Individual army commanders issued orders that were plainly illegal under treaties to which Germany was a signatory. On 4 September, Eighth Army decreed that civilians who were suspected of having shot at German troops, or who were inside buildings from which fire had come, or who had weapons at home, were to be summarily shot without any legal proceedings. Walter von Reichenau, the commander of Tenth Army issued similar orders the same day, augmented by instructions to shoot three hostages for every German soldier killed. On 10 September Fedor von Bock decreed that, in the event of his troops taking fire from a house, it was to be burned down. If no specific house could be located, then the entire village should be burned down. Further orders lowered the age at which captured resisters could be shot to cover those younger than eighteen, although in practice such orders were academic, as the entire campaign was characterised by massive violence that only firm and repeated intervention by officers at all levels could have stopped.

The cruel treatment of the millions of Russian POWs has always disturbed me. Burleigh treats the subject but I would have appreciated more:

By 1 February 1942, the Germans had captured 3,350,000 men. Of these 1,400,000 died between June and November 1941, and a further 600,000 in the winter months of December and Junauary. By the end of the war, some 3,300,000 Red Army prisoners were dead. ...

Assuming they were not simply mown down at the point of capture, the initial ordeal was the march to the first stockades. On Hitler's express instructions, prisoners were robbed of any serviceable winter kit such as fur hats, scarves, gloves, and felt boots, with which the Russians were generally well equipped. If they were lucky, they might be marched through fields that had not been picked clean by German troops or harvested for the Reich, where food from Russia was regarded as essential to maintaining popular morale. Drinking water was what rain could be captured in some improvised device or one's bare hands. Those who fell exhausted by the wayside were routinely shot by their guards, as there was no medical provision. The shooting was done by regular German troops seconded to guard them. For example, the 113th Infantry Division guarded two hundred thousand prisoners during a march to the rear in October 1941 and shot one thousand en route. The 137th Infantry Division left Vyazma for Smolensk with nine thousand prisoners, and arrived with only 3,480, having shot the rest along the way. Those who were transported by rail fared no better as the freight wagons were sometimes uncovered and always unheated so that, after a journey of three weeks in sub-zero temperatures, between 25 and 70 per cent of each rail transport might have perished.

In the camps, daily rations of 150-200 grams of bread ensured staggering death rates of up to 2 per cent a day, with hundreds of corpses dumped into hastily excavated mass graves each morning. Even the permanent camps in Austria or the General Government merely consisted of fenced-off areas situated on former military training grounds. The POWs were expected to build their own huts, but in practice they dug holes in the ground, since they were given no building materials.

And finally, here is a bit where he discusses the moral ambiguity of the "war crimes" trials:

A War Crimes Group accompanied the US army into German, which by March 1947 disposed of a staff of 1,165 investigators. If their initial remit concerned the lynching or shooting of downed Allied airmen, it quickly expanded to the surviving personnel of Dachau (the Americans had shot some of them already) and other major concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. Availing themselves of twelve and a half tons of evidence, an America military court tried 1,672 people at hearings held with Dachau, transformed in the interim into a giant internment camp for former Nazis. Of these accused, some 1,416 were found guilty and 426 sentenced to death, although only 268 of these sentences were eventually carried out within the main prison for war criminals at Landsberg. Those convicted included those who had murdered Allied airmen as well as seventy-three SS men accused of the Malmedy massacres in the Ardennes offensive. A striking forty-three death sentences were passed in the Malmedy trial, a figure reduced to twelve after the court seemed to accept that some of these defendants had been beaten into confessing. In the event, none of the Malmedy murderers was excuted, after the intercession from afar of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had many German constituents.

The UK's The Telegraph has a review of the book:

Burleigh takes strong stances on almost every controversy of the war, writing of 'the central role of Emperor Hirohito’ and 'the false SS-Army dichotomy’. One sub-chapter about the United States Army Air Force’s bombing of Japan is entitled 'Had to be Done’. Only once does he write 'The author neither approves or disapproves of this development’, and that is apropos the way that in postwar conflicts, human rights lawyers and the media have effectively become an independent non-combatant arm. Yet even there it isn’t hard to discern actual disapproval.

It is a thoughtful book well worth the read.

Journalism and Politics

Here is a key bit from a post by the economist Tim Harford on his blog:

If price is not the issue, then what we are really concerned about is that newspaper readers get access to informative news about the key issues of the day – the kind of thing upon which our democracy depends. But it is foolish to expect this from competition alone. Sadly, we do not value information about how to vote nearly as much as information about which car to buy. We probably value shots of celebs in swimwear more than either.

True, competition can encourage certain kinds of quality journalism. For instance, the economists Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow have pointed out that certain stories – of abuses by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, for instance – are promoted by media pluralism. CBS had the story and sat on it at the request of the US government (the story was said to be dangerous to US hostages) before broadcasting after it became clear that the story would emerge in The New Yorker.

But competition also promotes gutter journalism and it probably promotes opinionated journalism, too. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s hugely influential TV news channel, seems to have become popular by staking out ground as the source of right-wing rabble-rousing, and MSNBC has gained ground as it has moved to the left. Competitive markets give people what they want rather than what is good for them.

Gentzkow and Shapiro have studied this question in the US. Using an objective (if imperfect) measure of bias, they found that newspapers closely match the political biases of their potential readers, as measured by votes cast in the 2004 presidential election, and by the source of campaign contributions to each party. No doubt the causation runs both ways, but one striking result is that the proprietor’s identity seems to make no difference to the bias. The media barons tell us what we wish to hear.

The most disturbing aspect of the phone-hacking scandal, it seems to me, is the reluctance of politicians to challenge Murdoch’s empire, and in particular its cosy relationship with the police. If more competition dispels that sense of fear in future, it will be all to the good. But don’t expect every journalist to suddenly start working on the next Watergate.

I worry most about the media acting as a microphone for fanatics. Seems to me the 1920s & 30s were an era where fanatics came to power through their control of the media. That led to WWII and a huge loss of life and a real setback for civilization. Currently we are 20 years into a war of "ideas" from fanatical fundamentalist Muslim terrorists (and on a smaller scale, but still very deadly, from fundamentalist Christian terrorists, witness Norway's mass killings).

I don't have any solutions, but I was thinking this morning of how we now put warning labels on cigarette packages along with graphic pictures to shock people. I'm thinking we probably should require by law that similar signs be put up on religious buildings warning people that the ideas propagated by the religious -- especially the fundamentalists -- can be very hazardous to their health, but even more hazardous to the innocent victims of their cruel "religious" acts.

OK, I know that 99% of religious people are reasonable, gentle, moral people, but there is something crazy at the heart of religion and it needs to be tamed. I don't know how, but we should at least talk about it. Ultimately you can't stop the determined crazy person, but we should find techniques to limit their ability to spew hate-filled speech. The media is a good place to start. I find Fox "News" to be offensive. I can't link any killings to their crazy distortion of reality, but I worry that they are spreading the seeds of fanaticism.

Again, I have no answers. Maybe the only answer is for civilization to stagger on hoping to get to happier times when the fanatics thin out and the wider population can relax and stop worrying about madmen attacking from out of the blue over some crazed idea of "injustice" or "mandate of heaven" or whatever.

Krugman Lambasts Obama for his Economic Policy

Here is yet another attempt, one in a very long line of attempts, to point out to Obama the economic mistakes he is making. From his NY Times blog:

...since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying.

The question then is why. As I’ve tried to show many times, the facts overwhelmingly refute the anti-Keynes talking points. Neither the invisible bond vigilantes nor the confidence fairy have made an appearance. So why is Obama talking up those talking points?

OK, here’s an unprofessional speculation: maybe it’s personal. Maybe the president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterintuitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployment is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administration or are leaving soon.

And what’s left, I’m afraid, are the Very Serious People. It looks as if those are the people the president feels comfortable with. And that, of course, is a tragedy.

It is well past the point of thinking that Obama just isn't aware of the Keynesian argument. It is clear that Obama sides with the right wing nuts in thinking that the financial crash was a sign of moral weakness and that a decade of austerity (a recession close to depression) is necessary pennance to wring out the sinfulness of the previous financial excesses. Obama has been channeling Andrew Mellon:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

Yet More Police Brutality

I don't have the longer video clip that shows a driver ignore a police barricade and ended up stopped by the police who then surround the car and unleash a barrage of gunfire that killed the poor innocent driver.

But this video is of a witness to the police killing. And if you watch the whole video, you can see this couple nearly get shot as well when the police notice they have a camera phone and demand that they give the police the phone (presumably to suppress evidence of the killing):



Here is a write-up in the Miami Beach Herald on this incident:

A West Palm Beach couple who filmed Monday morning’s deadly officer-involved shooting on South Beach has accused officers of intimidation, destroying evidence and twisting the facts in the chaos surrounding the Memorial Day shootings – a charge that police officials say they know nothing about.

...

On Thursday, The Miami Herald spoke to the couple that saw the end of the 4 a.m. police chase on Collins Avenue, then watched and filmed from just a few feet away as a dozen officers fired their guns repeatedly into Raymond Herisse’s blue Hyundai. They say the only reason they were able to show the video to a reporter is because they hid a memory card after police allegedly pointed guns at their heads, threw them to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video.

The three-minute video captured on Narces Benoit’s HTC EVO phone begins as officers crowd around the east side of Herisse’s car with guns drawn. Roughly 15 seconds into the video, officers open fire.
Benoit filmed the incident from the sidewalk on the northeast corner of 13th Street and Collins Avenue, close enough to see some officers’ faces and individual muzzle flashes.

Shortly after the gunfire ends, an officer points at Benoit and police can be heard yelling for him to turn off the camera. The voices are muffled at times. The 35-year-old car stereo technician drops his hand with the camera and hurries back to his Ford Expedition parked further east on 13th Street.

The video shows Benoit get into the car, where his girlfriend, Ericka Davis, sat in the driver’s seat. He raises his camera and an officer is seen appearing on the driver’s side with his gun drawn, pointed at them.

The video ends as more officers are heard yelling expletives, telling the couple to turn the video off and get out of the car.
“They put guns to our heads and threw us on the ground,” Davis said.

Benoit said a Miami Beach officer grabbed his cell phone, said “You want to be [expletive] Paparazzi?” and stomped on his phone before placing him in handcuffs and shoving the crunched phone in Benoit’s back pocket. He said the couple joined other witnesses already in cuffs and being watched by officers, who were on the lookout for two passengers who, police believe at the time, had bailed out of Herisse’s car. It is still not known whether any passengers were in the car.

Four bystanders were shot in the gunfire and three officers suffered minor injuries.

Benoit and Davis said officers smashed several other cell phones in the ensuing chaos.

There are just too many instances where the police threaten, beat up, and confiscate evidence of police crimes. These cops need to be arrested, prosecuted, and thrown off the police force. The above article does not make it clear, but Raymond Herisse was innocent of anything except failing to heed a police blockade. For this he was killed. Worse... four bystanders and three police were injured by the insane fusillade that killed Raymond Herisse who had stopped and was apparently trying to obey police orders when the cops went amok and killed him point blank in a fusillade of bullets.

This reminds me of the most infamous recent case in this area, the killing of an immigrant, Robert Dziekański, at the Vancouver airport. The poor guy couldn't speak English. The mother was waiting outside the "secure" area and talked to officials telling them her son was supposed to have arrived but hadn't shown. The officials did nothing to connect the two, so after nine and a half hours he become unruly from frustration, and of course the police kill him. Now, over two years later the police finally issue an "apology" after fighting in court claiming "justified homicide" until their stories fell apart (because there is a video taken by a third party that makes it utterly clear that this was an unnecessary killing).

Moral Puritanism is Alive and Well in the US

They don't put your in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at you like in the "good old days", but in the US they still have a strange idea of moral turpitude and they will punish you for crimes like "sitting in a park to eat a donut without an accompanying minor". Seriously.

Here's a bit from the Gothamist:

The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like...eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this weekend the police gave two young women in Bed-Stuy summonses for eating doughnuts in a playground while unaccompanied by a minor.

Tickets for being an adult in or around a playground have been popping up fairly frequently lately—see the Inwood chess players—but instead of giving the offending citizens a warning and urging them to leave, the NYPD's M.O. appears to be to hand out a ticket. Here's how our reader, an anthropology graduate student, describes her experience this weekend.

Go read the whole article.

I'm waiting for the police to arrest you for have "unclean thoughts". And I'm trying to think up an appropriate punishment for such a deviant. Maybe incarcerate you like the Magdalene asylums in Ireland that imprisoned unwed mothers and abused girls forcing them into slave-like drudgery in their infamous "Magdalene launderies".

Everybody knows that clean and tidy parks are next to Godliness. And there is no better way to keep them clean and tidy than to ban people from the parks. Keep them pristine. Wall them off. Put up restrictions like "a person can only enter this park while carrying an infant in the left arm on a Tuesday while have 'pure thoughts' about God and his graciousness". That will keep the park clean and wholesome!

Doctors are Now Copyrighting Your Thoughts

The horrors of George Orwell's 1984 are arriving a tad late, 2011 instead of 1984, but they are definitely here. Here is a bit from a story on Ars Technica about a dentist demanding that you sign away rights to any opinions about the service he provides -- he is copyrighting your thoughts as "his property"!!! -- before he will agree to treat you:

When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was looking for cleaner teeth, not material for an Ars Technica story. I needed a new dentist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadelphia area. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a "mutual privacy agreement" that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Surprised and a little outraged by this, I got into a lengthy discussion with Dr. Cirka's office manager that ended in me refusing to sign and her showing me the door.

The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. And although Medical Justice and Dr. Cirka both claim otherwise, it seems pretty obvious that the agreements are designed to help medical professionals censor their patients' reviews.

The legal experts we talked to said that the copyright provisions of these agreements are probably toothless. But the growing use of these agreements is still cause for concern. Patients who sign the agreements may engage in self-censorship in the erroneous belief that the agreements bar them from speaking out. And in any event, the fact that a doctor would try to gag his patients raises serious questions about his judgment.

I love how lawyers bend and twist things into completely cruel and criminal red tape. A person has a right to their own thoughts. A person has a right to express opinion. "Copyright" was never intended as a vehicle to control opinion. It was meant to protect artists from having their works stolen by publishers who refused to pay for the right to profit from another person's work.

Funny... the legal system does nothing to stop torture and abuse of the law. But it enables idiots like the above dentist to tie up court time on frivolous cases where they are trying to suppress the ability of patients to have a free opinion. Nutty!

Matt Taibbi Interview on the Post 2008 Crash Situation

Here is a good interview on RT (Russia Today) that gives Matt Taibbi twelve good minutes to go into details about the financial corruption and where we are at in cleaning up the mess:



I like the point that Taibbi makes when he says that politicians don't understand or feel what the great majority of people are undergoing right now. He doesn't mention it, but they are mostly multi-millionaires and move in social circles that isolates them from the life of the working class and even the middle class.

I completely agree with Taibbi's assessment of Obama.

I like his assessment of the media: it is a nihilistic "for the money" enterprise not really interested in civil society or justice.

Bottom line: I'm not as cynical and pessimistic as Matt Taibbi. I do believe that democracy works. It just works very poorly. As Churchill pointed out, it is the "worst" of all forms of government "except for all the rest", i.e. eventually the public will wake up and throw out the rascals (but then be seduced by a new bunch of rascals). That is sad, but that is the best you can get. It isn't as hopeless as Taibbi paints it, but it is very poor, very ineffective, very slow. But it is the best we have.

Matthew Yglesias on the Power of a Union

Here is a post by Matthew Yglesias on his blog at Think Progress that makes it clear just how a union empowers people:

Harassment Incentives

Penelope Trunk:

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn’t report the harassment on their own. They don’t want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it’s safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a women with nothing to lose.

On the other hand, Steven Greenhouse reports that various kinds of harassment and assault of hotel maids are extremely common. Is it true, after all, that a maid has “nothing to lose”? Perhaps that would be true if the economy operated at a permanent full-employment state. Even if you did get fired, you could find some other hotel to clean in. But when unemployment’s 9 percent it seems to me a low-wage worker has a huge amount to lose. Unless she’s represented by a strong labor union, which was the case for the maid at the Sofitel in question.

The truth is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn's past sexual assaults were covered up not because the women he assaulted "had something to lose" but because the women he assaulted did not belong to a labor union. Think about this as Republicans continue to assault unions in the US. These political ideologues are destroying an institution that gives the powerless one small bit of power to fight back against the immensely powerful.

Maureen Dowd Roughs Up Strauss-Kahn

Here is a bit from an article in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd taking the reprobate Dominique Strauss-Kahn to task for raping "the help" at a high priced hotel:

Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers? Lawyers for the 62-year-old Frenchman, who had been a leading Socialist prospect to run against Nicolas Sarkozy next year, seem ready to rebut any DNA evidence by arguing that sex with the maid who came in to clean his room was consensual.

Will they argue that she wilted with desire once she realized Strauss-Kahn had been at Davos?

Jeffrey Shapiro, the maid’s lawyer, angrily rebutted that there was “nothing, nothing” consensual about the droit du monsieur. (It was not a “come in and see my monetary fund” kind of thing.)

“She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room,” Shapiro told The Times. He called the devout Muslim woman from the Bronx “a very proper, dignified young woman” and said “she did not even know who this guy was” until she saw the news accounts.

Strauss-Kahn’s French defenders are throwing around nutty conspiracy theories, sounding like the Pakistanis about Osama. Some have suggested that he was the victim of a honey-pot arranged by the Sarkozy forces.

Go read the whole article to savour every jibe and jab as she deflates this hyper-inflated ego for his lechery and vicious disregard of the rights and dignity of "the little people". Strauss-Kahn is a symbol of today as the billionaires and millionaires aggrandize power that lets them rise, in their minds, above the long arm of the law. We are their playthings. The are the lords of this new world which has been carefully arranged to give the ultra-rich complete dominance over the rest of us.

Here is the new reality as characterized by Dowd:

In Washington, they have now nicknamed the street that separates the I.M.F. and the World Bank, where Paul Wolfowitz lost his job over financial hanky-panky with his girlfriend, the Boulevard of Bad Behavior.

These are the two institutions that are globally renowned for lecturing the rest of the world on discipline and freedom, when it’s the West that’s guilty of recklessness and improvident behavior. First in finance, then in sex.

People who can’t keep their flies zipped lecturing other people.

Here she points out that the rise to dominance of the ultra-rich has led them to ultra-outrageous behaviour:

Another famous European with a disturbing pattern of sexual aggression got in trouble over the help this week: The ex-governor of California, who got elected after his wife, Maria Shriver, defended him so eloquently against groping charges.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was also guilty of the raw assertion of male power. More than mere infidelity, The Sperminator was caught on lying and piggishness, having a son with a staffer around the same time Maria had their youngest son, who is now 13. He kept the staffer on the payroll and sometimes even brought the son Maria didn’t know about into the house. No wonder Maria fled to a Beverly Hills hotel.

We’re always fascinated with the contradiction that cosmopolitan, high-powered, multilingual people can behave in such primitive ways. But civilization and morality have nothing to do with sophistication and social status.

I'm hoping that "the little people" get tired of being kicked around by the Leona Helmsley's of this world, famous for her quote:

We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes...

Which was an outcome of this sordid crime:

Following allegations by unpaid contractors that work done on her home had been charged to her company, she was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion and other crimes in 1989. Although having initially received a sentence of 16 years, Helmsley was required to serve only 19 months in prison and two months under house arrest. Helmsley's fate was sealed when a former housekeeper testified during the trial that she had heard Helmsley say: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes...", a saying that became notorious and was identified with her for the rest of her life.

Rape "the help", refuse to pay "the help", demand that the "little people" keep lowering taxes on the rich, allow the rich to buy politicians and ignore the law, etc. This is the brave new world that the "Reagan revolution" has unleashed on the world. A new Gilded Age with the ultra-rich rampant, aggressive, mean, and uncontrolled.

Update 2011jul3: There is a very nice follow-up article by Maureen Dowd entitled "When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator" that looks at the state of this case once the lies of the accuser became public.

Wall Street Corruption: Taibbi vs McArdle

Here is a CNN interview with Matt Taibbi whose investigative reporting has helped uncover the criminality of Goldman Sachs. Megan McArdle is a right wing journalist who tries to justify the Goldman Sachs crimes:



I get a chuckle out of McArdle defending Goldman Sachs while admitting she hasn't read "all" the documents. Love it. Go on a news show and put your credibility on the line by defending criminals without doing your homework. It just shows how deep her ideological commitment to the story of right wing story of "trust the banks". I love the fact that she ends with arguing that Enron wasn't really doing criminal stuff. Love it. She is a true blue died deeply in the wool right wing nut who thinks the world is full of rubes to be ripped off and she loves the big boys with the balls to do it.

Go read Taibbi's article The People vs. Goldman Sachs and judge for yourself.

And you can watch Taibbi being interviewed by Max Keiser in the following video clip. Advance to 12:55 to get the start of the interview and ignore the extraneous other stuff. Listen very carefully to 22:50 when Taibbi explains how & why the criminals on Wall Street are getting away with it:



Here is the article which Keiser and Taibbi are talking about: The Real Housewives of Wall Street.

And here is the Congressional report which Keiser and Taibbi are talking about: Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.

I read somewhere that this muckraking journalism of Matt Taibbi isn't carried by the mainstream media because they are supported by advertising by these "big name" corporate criminals. So it ends up that an independent magazine like Rolling Stone which isn't dependent on advertising (and has a daring and independent-minded owner) becomes the "journal of record" for the crime wave sweeping America and directed from the corporate boardrooms and complicitly permitted by both Republican and Democratic politicians.

Update: Here is an interesting interview on CNN of both Eliot Spitzer and Matt Taibbi:



Sorry about the crappy clipping of the video. To see the full screen go here.

Only in America

There is something bizarrely wrong with American "justice" when the law gets interpreted in this screwball and unfair way. From the Crooks and Liars blog:

The Supreme Court this week refused to hear the case of a teenage girl who was kicked off her cheerleading team after refusing to cheer for the boy who sexually assaulted her.

As a result, she now owes the school $45,000 in legal fees.

Go read the whole post to really appreciate the depth of depravity of a legal system that holds the victim accountable but gives the victimizer a pass.

The original news account is in the UK's Indendent newspaper, a reputable source. This is no hoax.

That judges in the US can make the case that you have a higher responsibility to an institution than to your own dignity and honour is just plain bizarre. Under this "interpretation" of the law, there is no point in have individual "rights". You belong to the state and you have not rights. All you have is responsibilities to institutions and your "betters" no matter how much they step on your neck and crush your face in the mud.

I see the Reagan revolutions (which stuffed the courts with right wing nuts) has reached its fruition. I pity the bottom 90% of Americans. They are being turned into serfs in their own land while the rising new aristocracy gets more and more tax cuts and exemptions and special prerogatives. The bottom 90% find out they have no right to unions, no social safety net, etc.

The above story reminds me of "the good old days" when there were two laws. One for the peasants (no rights) and one for the aristocrats (their sons could rape and loot as they pleased so long as they restricted their avarice and lust to the lower classes). Brave new world.

Goldman Sachs is Evil

Here is the headline and first bit from an excellent article in Foreign Policy magazine:

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street's at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there's another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.

It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

...

But Goldman's index perverted the symmetry of this system. The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was "long only," which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy. At the bottom of this "long-only" strategy lay an intent to transform an investment in commodities (previously the purview of specialists) into something that looked a great deal like an investment in a stock -- the kind of asset class wherein anyone could park their money and let it accrue for decades (along the lines of General Electric or Apple). Once the commodity market had been made to look more like the stock market, bankers could expect new influxes of ready cash. But the long-only strategy possessed a flaw, at least for those of us who eat. The GSCI did not include a mechanism to sell or "short" a commodity.

This imbalance undermined the innate structure of the commodities markets, requiring bankers to buy and keep buying -- no matter what the price. Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to "roll" their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line. And since the deflationary impact of shorting a position simply wasn't part of the GSCI, professional grain traders could make a killing by anticipating the market fluctuations these "rolls" would inevitably cause. "I make a living off the dumb money," commodity trader Emil van Essen told Businessweek last year. Commodity traders employed by the banks that had created the commodity index funds in the first place rode the tides of profit.

...

Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index funds. To put the phenomenon in real terms: In 2003, the commodities futures market still totaled a sleepy $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

Go read the rest of the article.

It is one thing for speculators to bid up the price of art or luxury cars or beach houses. It is another they their greed pushes up the costs for average people through higher fuel costs, higher food expenses, and busted housing dreams. Obama needs to quit playing footsie with these evil financiers and start enforcing anti-monopoly and anti-speculation laws against these insatiably greedy Wall Street types.

NATO Incompetence and Intransigence

When you make a mistake, apologize. It is the easiest thing in the world. It is only words. To be a prig and say you "regret" something but refuse to "apologize" and then aid insult to injury by blaming the victim seems to be the "standard operating procedure" for NATO. Ridiculous!



From CNN, here is a bit about this insane situation:

British Royal Navy Rear Adm. Russell Harding said NATO forces may have hit rebel tanks near the eastern oil town of al-Brega on Thursday.

...

It was the second time NATO has been blamed for civilian deaths, Last week, opposition leaders said NATO airstrikes killed 13 civilians in the al-Brega area. NATO is investigating that strike as well.

"I'm not apologizing," Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said of the latest incident. "The situation on the ground is fluid, and we had no information the opposition forces were using tanks."
Harding said NATO had only recently learned that opposition forces had tanks. In the past, it was Gadhafi's tanks that had taken aim at civilians, he said.
"There's a lot of vehicles going back and forth," he said. "It is very difficult to distinguish who is operating the vehicles."
The airstrikes also injured 14 people, and an additional six are missing, said Gen. Abdul Fattah Yunis, a commander of the rebel forces.

...

After the aerial attack Thursday morning, Gadhafi's troops pushed the rebels back, retaking territory and moving the front line farther east, Yunis said.
He said the rebels notified NATO of their tank movement and of their presence.

"There is no tension between us and NATO; this is a war situation, and we understand that mistakes are made," Yunis said.

Let me see how this NATO stance works...

You find out that kids playing road hockey were run over by a driver. The driver said "There were a lot of kids on the street one day, off the street the next day, besides, nobody told me that these were local kids playing road hockey. I wasn't properly informed. So I simply floored the car and flattened them. Just like NATO! And I'm really 'sorry' about killing those kids, but I'm not going to apologize."

A criminal in for sentencing told the judge "You guys arrest me once in a while when I commit a crime, but there are lots of times when you don't arrest me. Nobody has told me when your cops are going to be out arresting, so I just broke in and raped and robbed because nobody informed me. Just like NATO! Sure I'm sorry that I got arrested, but I'm not going to apologize because how was I supposed to know that this time you would catch me?"

I just don't get the "attitude" of NATO. Are they trying hard to be hated more by the eastern rebels than is Gaddafi? Just why puff up and make this idiotic statement about "sorry, but no apology"? NATO made a mistake. They should have said "we apologize and we will work harder to coordinate with the eastern rebels so this doesn't happen again!" Instead, they get all puffy and prideful and want to blame the victims for "confusing" the trigger happy pilots.

I bet the rebels would have been happier to overlook this killing, but NATO has been very slow to shoot at Gadaffi's forces and seems more than trigger happy to shoot at the rebels. If I were a rebel I would wonder just whose "side" NATO is on. There is night-and-day difference between the aggressive help the US gave, and this tepid, reluctant to bomb Gadaffi, but quick to bomb the rebels NATO "mission". This just plain stinks! Whoever is heading the NATO mission should be canned. He is more of a problem than a help.

CBS Uncovers Massive US Mortgage Fraud

Nobody has gone to jail, but billions have been stolen. This is not an "accident". This theft was coldly calculated by Wall Street banks and big banks across the US. And nobody has gone to jail for these massive crimes!

You will be thrown in the slammer if your steal $20 from the corner store, but steal a billion or two and the legal system has no interest in you. Instead you get legislators fawning over you, asking you just which new "legislation" you want passed to facilitate their "entrepreneurial impulses". You get to shake the President's hand and appointed to his blue ribbon commissions.

It is incredible...

This is the wet dream of Reagan with his "trickle down" economics. It has all come true. And you can watch the fruits of lobbying and money buying politicians over the last 30 years in this CBS Sixty Minutes report:




I love the careful language. Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC, the guys who are supposed to make sure that the money the bank claims to have they really have. But when she talks about this massive mortgage fraud her language becomes "this became pervasive and it got sloppy" and "cutting corners" and "not having any quality controls". Funny language for a crime. That is like talking about a corner store bandit as "the fellow had a bad haircut and appears strangely nervous". I don't think that is the commentary most people have when they are talking about a thief. They use worlds like "crime", "theft", "stealing". But when you steal billions, the language becomes oh so much more "genteel"!

I think it is funny that Sheila Bair is talking about the fix being the setting up of a "cleanup fund". Why I bet Al Capone would have been delighted to hear Elliot Ness decide to stop busting still and arresting crooks and instead focus on "setting up a cleanup fund" to handle the problem of illegal and deadly home brewed alcohol. In fact, I'm pretty sure the entire prison population of the US would love to be treated by Wall Street execs and big bank execs and be treated to "cleanup funds" instead of hard time in the slammer.

I'm waiting for "perp walks" for the top layer of management for all of the Wall Street banks and all the big banks in America (plus a lot of the big international banks). Until that happens, this isn't justice. This is giving a "get out of jail free" to thiefs who specialize in stealing billions while throwing the book at the thief who steals $20. This isn't "justice". This is a system where the criminals run the "justice system" for their own benefit and have bought and paid for the "government" to get the laws they want.

Click here to read the full CBS Sixty Minutes report on this massive mortgage fraud. Lynn Szymoniak should be given some "citizen's award" for exposing this massive corruption. Why is Szymoniak mostly unknown while the big criminals are still CEOs on Wall Street and in the big banks? Where is the justice?

Update 2011apr06: From The BIg Picture blog, here is a bit about the size of the mortgage problem in the US:

From LPS’ First Look/Mortgage Monitor:

• Total U.S. loan delinquency rate: 8.8%
• Total U.S. foreclosure inventory rate: 4.15%
• Total U.S. non-current inventory: 6,856,000
• States with most non-current loans: Florida, Nevada, Mississippi, New Jersey, Georgia
• States with fewest non-current loans: Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota

The LPS report also noted that “February’s data also showed a 23 percent increase in Option ARM foreclosures over the last six months, far more than any other product type. In terms of absolute numbers, Option ARM foreclosures stand at 18.8 percent, a higher level than Subprime foreclosures ever reached.”

Read that again. There are nearly 6.9 million houses that will be foreclosed in the near future.

Incredible Inconsistency in the "Justice" System

Here is a criminal with a long history of crime, serious crime, who hit a pedestrian, dragged him down a block until he turned the car and that threw the dead body off, then raced to elude citizens in pursuit. He rammed the pursuing cars. Sounds like a bad dude. You would think the system would throw the book at just a callous guy with no regard for human life. Well... think again. In British Columbia courts that kind of behaviour is good for only 4 months in jail!



Counter that with a story of a guy who tied a dog to his car to "exercise" him and dragged the dog about. That guy got many months in jail and a 5 year driving license suspension. (I can't find the video... but if I do, I will post it.)

Does this make sense? Both people are thugs and criminals, but you give a guy more time and more serious consequences for hurting a dog than for killing a doctor? What kind of topsy-turvey legal system is that? That's the BC "justice" system. I figure if you kill over 50 people they give you a heroes parade and a pension for life. But if you spit on the sidewalk you can expect to spend life in the slammer. That's "justice" in British Columbia... go figure!

The US Military is Being Haunted by Pictures Again

Here is a bit from Reuters news agency report about German Der Spiegel article publishing a story with pictures of US soldiers in Afghanistan posing as "trophy hunters" with dead civilians:

Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published photos on Monday of American soldiers posed over the bloodied corpse of an Afghan civilian whose slaying is being prosecuted by the U.S. military as premeditated murder.

...

Morlock and Holmes are among five Stryker Brigade soldiers facing court-martial at Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma, Washington, on charges of premeditated murder stemming from the deaths of three Afghan villagers whose killings were allegedly staged to look like legitimate combat casualties.

It is interesting that one of the killers comes from Wasila, Alaska, the same town as the presidential wannabe and gun-loving Sarah Palin:

One photo shows a soldier identified as Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 23, of Wasilla, Alaska, broadly smiling in sunglasses as he crouches beside the bloodied, prone body of a man whose head he is holding up for the camera by the hair.

The pictures can be seen at Der Spiegel's site.

The sad fact is that war brutalizes people. I've always been struck by the fact that going back to America's civil war when records were first kept, something like one-third of the soldiers never fired their weapon at "the enemy" because it was just so repugnant. This despite the fact that they were being fired upon. The training in military "boot camp" is to break you of your inhibitions by desensitizing you and building up your "loyalty" to your buddies so that in a combat situation you will do anything to defend your "buddies" against the dehumanized "enemy".