Is the Glass-Steagall Act [1], the Depression-era law that blocked commercial banks from participating in riskier investment banking, set for a revival? That’s what a new piece of legislation [2], introduced yesterday by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), would do, forcing major changes to financial titans like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America.
But first, here’s McCain [3] on the new legislation on CNBC:
Reestablishing the firewall between commercial and investment banking poses a dilemma for banks such as JPMorgan Chase, which snapped up Bear Stearns’ trading operations earlier this year, and massive Citigroup, which includes [4] more staid consumer banking branches as well as riskier trading operations. The already controversial, shotgun-wedded [5] Bank of America and Merrill Lynch relationship [6] wouldn’t survive if Glass-Steagall was revived, either. And you can throw Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo into that mix, too. The McCain-Cantwell legislation would give such institutions a year to break up their different banking arms.
UPDATED: Alaskan reporter Shannyn Moore offers The BRAD BLOG hints about reasons for Alaska Gov’s resignation
FURTHER UPDATE: Sources say embezzlement scandal, federal indictments may soon break concerning use of Wasilla Sport Complex building materials for Palin’s home…
[See update below for exclusive source details from Alaska...FURTHER UPDATE now added below: AK sources say 'embezzlement' scandal, federal indictments may be in offing. See below...]
Palin resigns. She was to have been in office until 2010. Something else is going on here above and beyond what she’s saying, though I don’t know what yet. Josh Marshall seems to agree, noting in his “first signs of what happened” coverage:
[T]his clearly happened so quickly that Palin hasn’t even had a chance to come up with a coherent cover story for her resignation. … Remember that based on the public record, Palin is a wildly unethical public official, guilty at a minimum of numerous instances of abusing her authority as governor. And a lot of very damaging information has come out about her in the last few days — though mainly embarrassing information about her character rather than new evidence of bad acts. I would not be surprised if this latest round of revelations shook something else loose that we haven’t heard about yet.”
I’d expect another shoe to drop very soon here…Looking into it…More shortly here…
UPDATE: Alaskan Sarah Palin authority (and occasional BRAD BLOG guest blogger) Shannyn Moore, who broke the news at HuffPo today, tells me she believes, with good reason, that there is an “iceberg scandal that’s about to break. She’s doing damage control.”
She says Palin is “resigning as part of damage control” due to a scandal that is “not of a family nature.” …
“The governor would not be able to continue her job when it comes out,” she told me on the phone just now, before adding: “Why would Mark Sanford not resign, but Sarah Palin did? Her family didn’t even know about the resignation until they were standing with her by the lake” when she made her announcement.
Yes. It seems another shoe, apparently a big one, will indeed be dropping, likely within the next week or so. Perhaps earlier now that everyone will be poking around up there.
FURTHER UPDATE: Okay, I’ve now been able to get independent information from multiple sources that all of this precedes what are said to be possible federal indictments against Palin, concerning an embezzlement scandal related to the building of Palin’s house and the Wasilla Sports Complex built during her tenure as Mayor. Both structures, it is said, feature the “same windows, same wood, same products.” Federal investigators have been looking into this for some time, and indictments could be imminent, according to the Alaska sources.
The BRAD BLOG has not been able to receive confirm from any federal sources on this. Our information comes from local Alaskans who follow Palin, and who have been keeping an eye on this for some time, while keeping it quiet at the request of federal investigators.
A bit more now follows the video below…
* * *With all of the above in mind, her rather manic, rather rambling, rather bizarre announcement (as seen below, via RAW STORY, text transcript here), seems to make a bit more sense, I’d say…
* * *LATE UPDATE: It appears that the questions about Palin’s house and the sports complex made their way through the media and blogosphere during the campaign last October. “Glic” over at DailyKos has collected some of the notable coverage from back then, including these details from the Village Voice on 10/8/08…
THE $12.5 MILLION sports complex and hockey rink that is the lasting monument to Palin’s two terms as Wasilla mayor is also a monument to the kind of insider politics that dismays Americans of both parties. Six months before Palin stepped down as mayor in October 2002, the city awarded nearly a half-million-dollar contract to design the biggest project in Wasilla history to Kumin Associates. Blase Burkhart was the Kumin architect on the job-the son of Roy Burkhart, who is frequently described as a “mentor” of Palin and was head of the local Republican Party (his wife, June, who also advised Palin, is the national committeewoman). Asked if the contract was a favor, Roy Burkhart, who contributed to her campaign in the same time frame that his son got the contract, said: “I really don’t know.” Palin then named Blase Burkhart to a seven-member builder-selection committee that picked Howdie Inc., a mostly residential contractor owned at the time by Howard Nugent. Formally awarded the contract a couple of weeks after Palin left office, Nugent has donated $4,000 to Palin campaigns. Two competitors protested the process that led to Nugent’s contract.
The pattern is inescapable: she takes disagreements personally, and swiftly deals vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.
Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.
The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009. Like Richard M. Nixon, who chose the coalfield town of Hyden, Kentucky, for his first post-resignation public appearance, Palin has come to a place where she is guaranteed a hero’s reception. She is not only a staunch foe of abortion but also the mother of a boy, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome just a few months before John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. The souvenir program for this evening’s dinner is full of displays for local politicians and businesses, attesting to their pro-life bona fides. An ad for Hahn Realty Corporation reads, “If you need commercial real estate, call Joe Kiefer! Joe is pro-life and a proud supporter of the Vanderburgh County Right to Life.”
As Palin makes her way slowly across the crowded ballroom—dressed all in black; no red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps tonight—she is stopped every few inches by adoring fans. She passes the press pen, where at least eight television cameras and a passel of reporters and photographers are corralled, and spots a reporter for a local community newspaper getting ready to take a happy snap with his pocket camera. For a split second she stops, pauses, turns her head and shoulders just so, and smiles. She holds the pose until she’s sure the man has his shot and then moves on. A few minutes later, the evening’s nominal keynote speaker, the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, who has been reduced to a footnote in the proceedings, introduces the special guest speaker as “the storm that is the honorable governor of the great state of Alaska, Sarah Palin!”
Just where that storm may be heading is one of the most intriguing issues in American politics today. Palin is at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party. Her appeal to people in the party (and in the country) who share her convictions and resentments is profound. The fascination is viral, and global. Bill McAllister, until recently Palin’s statehouse spokesman, says that he has fielded (and declined) interview requests from France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Bulgaria, “and probably other countries I’ve forgotten about.” (Palin, keeping her distance from most domestic media as well, also declined to talk to V.F.). Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?
As we rebuild America’s aging infrastructure, let’s make sure taxpayer money goes to those who need it and doesn’t line the pockets of those who knew how to play the game.
Spending as much as the additional $150 billion for infrastructure that is included in the new legislation (still well below what is needed for the nation’s aging systems and less than what many economists had hoped for) would still mean a substantial increase in total annual US investment, potentially as much as a one-third hike in activity over the next year. The Congressional Budget Office reports total infrastructure spending as around $400 billion annually.
The bill requires that half the transportation projects be underway within a few months, so any sudden surge in demand for building of that size is going to run up against some serious limitations in the supply of construction services, at least over the short run. While commercial office building and home construction has certainly virtually collapsed, different kinds of builders handle these kinds of projects. When rising demand meets limited supply, the result can be higher prices, higher profits and potentially the very same kind of speculative bubble that served us so poorly in the high-tech and real estate sectors.
We’ve seen it before. In the New York region, a public and private sector construction boom in the years just before the crash drove building prices up by as much as 50 percent over three years. The same phenomenon was seen in markets as far away as Malaysia and China, and as close to home as Atlanta and Seattle before the global economy went into a nosedive.
The potential impact of a demand-driven surge gets pretty big pretty quickly. Unless we think hard about this, the sudden increase in demand for building will almost certainly begin to raise prices in the particular sectors involved with these kinds of projects. After all, there is no reason to believe there is enough idle capacity lying around to raise US infrastructure spending by one-third within a year. Total US unemployment is still under 8 percent–a figure likely underestimated through the exclusion of many who have given up even looking or who are under-employed. Not many of those out of a job are skilled construction trades people who work on projects like these. Even if this increase in demand were to drive up prices by just 10 percent–and we have experienced spurts in construction demand doing much more than that–as much as $15 billion could be at stake, an amount that used to pass for a big number.
Publicly funded infrastructure projects are executed by private contractors; the larger the project, the more often they are run by large corporations, not all of them even based in the United States. Like other firms, these public works enterprises use the proceeds from the sale of their services to governments to pay their own workers, buy their materials and create profits for their owners and investors. When there is a surge in demand, these firms will certainly be able to raise their prices. The question is, where does the money go?
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan bookend two decades of economic missteps. Photo illustration by Darrow.
Behind the debate over remaking US financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes – under Reagan, Clinton and Bush II – and one national delusion.
There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history – a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.
What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road – we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.
This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year’s race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP’s nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. “I don’t think the Democrats get it,” says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. “All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”
Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome — good government,” said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
In 2007, Palin entertained top conservative pundits at the governor’s mansion.
“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”
In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”
Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.
The argument over the health of financial markets has careened across the economic tarmac like a car driven by a drunk. The shouting and wailing reached a fever pitch after two of the five big investment houses—Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch—collapsed in a span of only two days, and before anyone could catch his breath, insurance giant AIG had to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Something had to be done, and quickly.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and his advisers crafted a $700-billion bailout plan by the end of the week, and on Monday, Sept. 29, the U.S. House of Representatives told them to get stuffed. In response, the stock market abruptly tanked, falling by 778 points. Then, the House leadership promptly changed direction again by playing Monty Hall and hammering out a bailout deal, spiced with $150 billion in pork, that passed on the following Friday. Everyone breathed a big sigh of relief and thought that all was well in Mudville.
Not so.
Wall Street swerved wildly once again on Monday, Oct. 6, shedding about 800 points at one point, before rebounding to close at 9,962.03, or down 3.5 percent for the day. The rest of the week followed the same pattern: up, down, up, down … but mostly down. By the end of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had settled in at 8451.19.
Clearly, traders have yet to feel confident. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.
The Dow is surging! No, it’s plunging! No, it’s surging! No, it’s …
Nevermind. While the manic-depressive stock market is dominating the headlines, the more important story is the grim news coming in about the real economy. It’s now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the nonfinancial economy is also in desperate need of help.
And to provide that help, we’re going to have to put some prejudices aside. It’s politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.
Before I get there, let’s talk about the economic situation.
Just this week, we learned that retail sales have fallen off a cliff, and so has industrial production. Unemployment claims are at steep-recession levels, and the Philadelphia Fed’s manufacturing index is falling at the fastest pace in almost 20 years. All signs point to an economic slump that will be nasty, brutish — and long.
How nasty? The unemployment rate is already above 6 percent (and broader measures of underemployment are in double digits). It’s now virtually certain that the unemployment rate will go above 7 percent, and quite possibly above 8 percent, making this the worst recession in a quarter-century.
As public anxiety about the teetering economy deepens, author Naomi Klein is gaining listeners with her pronouncements on the failings of American-style capitalism.
“We’ve been living in a fairy tale” that deregulation and privatization serve the common good, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” said Thursday.
Naomi Klein in this undated file photo. Speaking at Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium on Thursday evening as part of the Aurora Forum, Klein minced no words. She insists that deregulating the financial system has created bubbles and busts, and she called the current $700 billion bailout, or rescue plan, a “stickup.”
Klein’s book paints a dark, troubling picture of a form of capitalism that lets people in power cash in on chaos, catastrophes, wars and financial crises and snatch up lucrative contracts.
Speaking at Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium on Thursday evening as part of the Aurora Forum, Klein minced no words. She insists that deregulating the financial system has created bubbles and busts, and she called the current $700 billion bailout, or rescue plan, a “stickup.”
This financial crisis and the Iraq war are examples of how economic shocks and global disasters are used to boost the profits of the elite, she said.
“The president goes on TV and dangles a plan to Congress, saying if we don’t get it we’re going down, and banks are going to close in your neighborhood,” she said. “That’s deeply crazy if you look at it. Especially about a plan that almost all economists said couldn’t fix the problem.”
Klein said the Bush administration’s plan was reckless. She bristled at the “comfort level” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush have exhibited with the crisis.
“It’s like they’re saying, ‘Hey, stuff happens,’”‰” she said. “And then a week later the whole idea of buying toxic debt they were pushing died.”
Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed. And those who predicted that the old brand, the unfettered, American-promoted system, was a danger to the world, are being vindicated. They include Karl Marx, whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days.
By Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed. And those who predicted that the old brand, the unfettered, American-promoted system, was a danger to the world, are being vindicated. They include Karl Marx, whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days.
The credit crisis that began in August last year and turned into near-catastrophe this month is not over, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars that governments are spending to save banks in the United States and Europe from collapse and thereby prevent a global depression. But there is an emerging consensus that capitalism needs a 21st century overhaul, not just emergency rescues, to save it from itself.
When that will happen is not clear. “What we are seeing right now looks like a very slow train wreck,” says James Boughton, the historian of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested an international meeting on the pattern of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that resulted in the post-World War II financial order and created the IMF and the World Bank. That system was dominated by Washington.
The United States, from where the credit crisis spread like a virulent epidemic, is not likely to play as large a role in whatever new “financial architecture” world leaders construct. As Peer Steinbrueck, the German finance minister, put it: “One thing seems probable … The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.”
How did the actions of subprime mortgage borrowers in the US affect global financial markets and lead to the ongoing liquidity crisis – and will the resulting fallout hurt the wider economy? Gillian Tett, capital markets editor, narrates FT.com’s interactive feature explaining the credit squeeze.
He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib… No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist’. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington
by Rachel Cooke
Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. ‘Brad Pitt loved this place,’ says Hersh with a wolfish grin. ‘It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter’s den!’ When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated – the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It’s not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers. By the time I look at Hersh again – the full panorama takes a moment or two – he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.
American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo
And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their scoop, they describe him – the competition. He was unlike any reporter they’d ever seen: ‘Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.’ Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and – thanks to a tennis injury – he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and – unless you concentrate very hard – seemingly unconnected. ‘Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,’ he says, with faux remorse. ‘There’s a huge difference between writing and thinking.’ Not that he has much time for those who put cosy pontification over the graft of reporting: ‘I think… My colleagues! I watch ‘em on TV, and every sentence begins with the words: “I think.” They could write a book called I Think.’
But we must backtrack a little. Before the office, there is the breakfast joint. Hersh and I meet at the Tabard Inn, a Washington hangout so gloomily lit I could do with a torch. He has poached eggs and coffee and ‘none of that other stuff, thanks’. (I think he means that he doesn’t want potatoes with his eggs). Like everyone in America just now, he is on tenterhooks. A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might ‘jinx it’. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.” So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’ He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won’t change anything – ‘They’ve got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves’ – it will reveal how the White House ’set out to sabotage the system… It wasn’t that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.’
During today’s press briefing, White House press secretary Dana Perino suggested the Bush administration would oppose any effort to extend jobless benefits — a stance the White House has taken before. She explained their position by saying, “we want people to be able to return to the workplace as soon as possible.” The suggestion was that extending benefits somehow prevents people from returning to work.
She concluded by saying that “the best way to help” the economy and unemployed people is for unemployed people to simply “get back to work.” Watch it:
It is both insulting and naive to suggest that people aren’t working because jobless benefits are somehow too generous and they’re too lazy to look for work again. People aren’t working because Bushonomics have hemorrhaged jobs and slashed the safety nets for laid off workers:
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin’s political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. “Her door was open,” says Chryson — and still is.
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
The Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in New York City was serving 1,100 meals a day in April 2008. In July the number of meals increased to 1,353 a day and by September they had increased their output 22 percent over last September. (Photo: Getty Images)
New York – Wall Street may be in the throes of agony, but business is booming at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen a bit farther north in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Chelsea.
And that’s not particularly good news.
Just ask Ishmael, a young man who has been eating his meals at Holy Apostles for about three months now. “I come here in order to save money,” he told IPS. “I do have a job, but still cannot afford to buy food every day.”
Ishmael also lives in a homeless shelter because renting an apartment is beyond his means – perhaps not surprising in a place that boasts the highest housing costs in the United States, with an average rent of 2,400 dollars per month, according to the real estate data firm Reis Client Services.
Across the city, New York’s social services are troubled. Even as the weak economy drives more and more people to seek help in soup kitchens or shelters, advocates worry that the private donations they rely on will simultaneously begin to dry up.
Rev. Elizabeth Maxwell, interim executive director of Holy Apostles, is unsure how the church will cope with an inevitable surge in clientele in the months and years ahead.
All day the mainstream news has been reporting the so-called Voter Fraud on the part of ACORN that has registered over 1.2 million people to vote in low income areas of the country.
THE FACTS: – all people who do voter registration are REQUIRED BY LAW to turn in the forms that they receive, whether they are valid or not.
What ACORN does when they register someone to vote is then turn around and verify that the person is who they say they are. When the person can’t be found ACORN then flags them as suspicious. When they turn them into boards of elections (which again they are require to do) those suspicious ones are flagged so BOE’s can deal with them accordingly.
Where the controversy comes in is that this is all a grand voter suppression tactic being used to scare those same low income voters that have been registered by ACORN from voting because they think that their registration might not be valid. If you notice… these are being contested in very close swing states as part of a Republican ploy to slow down the process and scare low income voters.
The Facts: If Donald Duck did in fact register to vote – and by some miracle showed up on the voter rolls, the only way he would be able to vote as a newly registered voter is by showing up on election day and showing valid ID to verify he is who he say he is and lives at the address he lives at. Conducting this kind of “fraud” on a large scale would be impossible.
In Ohio the county is a rich republican leaning county where it is Republicans who are the ones raising the issue
William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.
The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.
During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.
Timmons’ activities occurred in the years following the first Gulf War, when Washington considered Iraq to be a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism. His dealings on behalf of the deceased Iraqi leader stand in stark contrast to the views his current employer held at the time.
John McCain strongly supported the 1991 military action against Iraq, and as recently as Sunday described Saddam Hussein as a one-time menace to the region who had “stated categorically that he would acquire weapons of mass destruction, and he would use them wherever he could.”
Timmons declined to comment for this story. An office manager who works for him said that he has made it his practice during his public career to never speak to the press. Timmons previously told investigators that he did not know that either Vincent or Park were acting as unregistered agents of Iraq. He also insisted that he did not fully understand just how closely the two men were tied to Saddam’s regime while they collaborated.
But testimony and records made public during Park’s criminal trial, as well as other information uncovered during a United Nations investigation, suggest just the opposite. Virtually everything Timmons did while working on the lobbying campaign was within days conveyed by Vincent to either one or both of Saddam Hussein’s top aides, Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon. Vincent also testified that he almost always relayed input from the Iraqi aides back to Timmons.
[See update below for exclusive source details from Alaska...FURTHER UPDATE now added below: AK sources say 'embezzlement' scandal, federal indictments may be in offing. See below...]
![[American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/hersh1019.jpg "hersh1019.jpg")
William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.
