Stop Deportations Of Haitians From US

Ezili Dantò Note: Please folks, kindly call the White House Comment Line and Ask for a stop to all deportations to Haiti and a grant of work permits.

The White House is paying attention. Your call will make a DIFFERENCE. White House Comment line: 202-456-1111; FAX: 202-456-2461 (If you also fax, see sample TPS letter below) and comments@whitehouse.gov.

A legislative "solution" - that is a comprehensive immigration reform - will not get on the Congressional agenda for at least a year. Tell President Obama Haitians need the US to stop exacerbating Haiti's crisis now and that granting TPS of Defered Enforced Departure (DED) is the least that can be done RIGHT NOW. Please call the white house comment line (202-456-1111) and leave a message asking that President Obama grant TPS or DED to Haitians immediately. This concern of the Administration that an exodus from Haiti will follow is not only silly but discriminatory as others granted TPS have not had to deal with such excuses. It's a silly concern because how will this exodus happen when if Haiti had enough trees to make boats it would also have had enough trees to stop the ravages of last fall's storm floods!!!. Haiti has practically zero forest cover. So, no wood to make enough boats for such an EXODUS to occur! The few Haitian boats that do make it on the high seas are routinely intercepted by the US Coast Guard. Moreover, when President Clinton granted Haitians deferred enforced departure (DED) there was no exodus from Haiti. At the stroke of a
pen, President Obama may begin to stop exacerbating Haiti's suffering by formally stopping all deportations to Haiti, provide work permits and release all qualified deportees from ICE detention.

The White House is paying attention to the public's concern on this and the TPS issue is on their watch list and tallying sheets. Please increase our chances on this. Advocate directly to the Obama Administration by calling the White House Comment Line. Your call will make a DIFFERENCE.

White House Comment line: 202-456-1111

FAX: 202-456-2461 (See HLLN sample letter below);

e-mail-
comments@whitehouse.gov.


Sample Letter - (See also TPS Update: U.S. Resumes Deportation flights to Haiti).

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Phone: 202 456-1111
Fax: 202-456-2461 | comments@whitehouse.gov

The Honorable Janet Napolitano
Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
2001 Independence Ave, SW
Washington, DC 20528
Phone: 202-282-8000
Fax: 202-282-8401
Homeland Security Comment Line: 202 282 8495

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton
U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
Phone: 202-647-4000

DATE: ____, 2009


Dear President Barack Obama/ Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton / Secretary Janet Napolitano

Please designate the country of Haiti for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for a period of 18 months with specifications to stop all deportations to Haiti.

In 2008, hurricanes and storms devastated Haiti, and presidential candidate Barack Obama stated:“I also urge the United States to work in partnership with President Rene Preval and the new Haitian government … to immediately assemble a task force on reconstruction and recovery to begin work as soon as the storms pass…Together, we can help Haiti recover from this terrible series of storms and renew efforts to bring hope and opportunity to the people of Haiti.”

Today, deportations to storm-ravage Haiti continue. When the US deports an income earner to storm-ravaged Haiti, this decreases remittances and further impoverishes family members. Diaspora remittances are the most effective and direct aid to the Haitian poor in Haiti.

In 2002 TPS was renewed for Nicaraguan and Honduran immigrants because of continuing difficulties caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. At this point, Haiti is in much worse shape than Central Americans were at the time. Haitians in the United States should receive equal treatment and protection. Haiti qualifies for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and should be granted this disaster relief.

Four tropical storms and hurricanes battered Haiti during last year's harvest season, killing almost 1,000 people nationwide, decimating Haiti's agriculture and causing $1 billion in damage to irrigation, bridges and roads. Mudslides still cover entire towns. Houses are flooded. Schools have collapsed on children and people are starving. It's inhumane to deport Haitian back to Haiti under these devastating conditions, where they will find no home, no employment, no food, no personal safety and security.

TPS was established to provide protection to people who are temporarily unable to return to their homelands. Please help the people in Haiti by permitting their friends and relatives in the United States to remain here and to continue to send support to a nation in severe crisis. Please affirm the United States tradition of caring for and protecting persons in vulnerable situations by granting TPS and/or stopping all deportations through Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) or any equivalent administrative or executive ruling, with a specification to stop ALL deportations and provide work permits to Haitian nationals.

Sincerely,

Your name and contact information



_________________________________

*************

cc: Marguerite Laurent, Esq.
President, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
Phone: (203) 829-7210
P. O. Box 3573
Stamford, CT 06905
e-mail: ezilidanto@yahoo.com
www.ezilidanto.com

(William Primrose, viola)

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones -- not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an every day, all-year-round activity.

Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our world.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the "capabilities" of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes.

Lesson 1

Threatened Glasgow schools occupied by parents

Submitted by afraser on Apr 3 2009

Parents have seized control of the closure threatened Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford in the Maryhill area of Glasgow.

School occupations of Wyndford Primary and St. Gregory's Primary Wyndford both now running through the night.

Both schools are threatened with closure by Glasgow City Council.

An originally tense situation with police - who had threatened to storm the buildings around 6pm - has been resolved through negotiation, and the peaceful protests are being allowed to continue unharmed.

A rally in support of both schools to be held outside the school buildings (which adjoin each other) at 12 noon on Saturday 4th April.

Messages supporting the parents have been coming in from across Europe, including from the Dundee workers carrying out the Prisme Packaging factory occupation.

Heres some background from Resistance:

Plans hatched by Glasgow City Council to close 25 primary schools and nurseries have been met with fury by both parents and the wider Glasgow community. Reaction to these plans have seen thousands-strong demonstrations, roof top occupations and lock-ins as parents and the community make their anger heard.

Despite the city council, over recent years, selling off its social housing stock and passing common good property such as libraries, museums and sports facilities to private concerns, they still seem to have managed to spend £6,000,000 over-budget. Due to the council displaying the financial acumen of a jakey on giro day* they now claim that it's the city's children, and by extension its future, that has to suffer.

...

*The Anarchist Federation would like to apologise to Glasgow's colourful street drinking community for implying association with the city cooncil.

President Obama: “I will say this, that I believe that peace in the Middle East is possible. I think it will be based on two states, side by side, a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.”

From its typically conservative stance, the Department of Finance has moved to embrace a very pessimistic outlook projecting an unemployment rate of 15.5% in 2010 – up on a current level of over 11% and a projected figure of 12.6% in 2009. These figures are shocking. How many of the unemployed are at risk of becoming unemployable after years of being out of work? What about families dependent on social welfare with nobody in paid employment for prolonged periods and without the escape valve – for the foreseeable future – of emigration to the UK or the US?

The projected drop in GDP is now set at 7.7% for this year. The projected decline in GDP is increasing at a steady rate since last Autumn in each successive update of the figures. Have we seen the end of this upward slide? I think not, unfortunately. This is probably going to be the biggest (and fastest) drop in output of any advanced industrial country since World War 2. The implications for social well-being, social partnership, the state of public services, health, crime, civil unrest are profound. We should not panic but the scale of this downturn, its speed and its likely gathering impact on peoples' lives is shocking.

We are about to learn more hard lessons about the legacy of free-riding capitalism and its domestic application to Ireland in the last quarter century.

Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments.

I was starting to come to the conclusion that the plan would simply fizzle — that even though participating players would get a large put along with their free toaster, it wouldn’t be enough to raise the price they’re willing to pay to a level banks would be willing to sell at, rather than keep assets on the books at far above their true value. But once you take into account the possibility of insider deals, that all changes.

"At the heart of ancient tragedy lies individual isolation. The individual is alienated from his kin and the gods by violence and conflict. It is not a coincidence - this is what money does to you."

In the New York Times last week Ban Ki Moon noted: "Yes, Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last year's devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign dictatorship. Yet we can report what President René Préval told us: 'Haiti is at a turning point.' It can slide backwards into darkness and deeper misery, sacrificing all the country's progress and hard work with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future."

Last August the secretary general was full of hope: "The time has come to rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed by years of neglect, corruption and violence, to strengthen them so that the State is able to deliver the services that the people need."

In his latest visit Ban said: "It is easy to visit Haiti and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity. "My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and policies to create those jobs with particular emphasis on the country's traditional strengths - the garment industry and agriculture. creating the sort of industrial 'clusters' that have come to dominate global trade.

". dramatically expanding the country's export zones, so that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth constrained only by the size of the labour pool.

"That may seem ambitious in a country of nine million people, where 80 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day and half of the food is imported." Can anyone really be so ill-informed? Can anyone believe that a country of nine million poverty-stricken people living on less than $2 a day and importing half their food can generate thriving markets for anything but subsistence production? Ban Ki Moon is our new Dr Pangloss: All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Hold on tight to your screams!

“African Americans register at only 71.1 percent on the Equality Index – and slipping.”

Back in March of 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama did a grave disservice to African Americans when he proclaimed that Blacks had already come 90 percent of the way on the road to racial equality. We don’t know where Obama came up with that ridiculous number, but he was way, way off the mark. According to the National Urban League’s State of Black America report, African Americans register at only 71.1 percent on the Equality Index – and slipping. Blacks fell almost half a percent further behind whites on the Equality Index between 2008 and 2009.

The Index measures Black progress, or regression, in five areas: economics, education, health, civic engagement and social justice. In only one of these categories – health – did Blacks slightly improve their relative status. And that minor blip was the result of the racial gap narrowing between Blacks and whites who share the misfortune of not having health insurance.

The general state of affairs for African Americans remains much as it has been for most of the last 40 years. "Ironically,” says the Urban League report, “even as an African American man holds the highest office in the country, African Americans remain twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated." That’s a very great distance from Barack Obama’s 90 percent-of-the-way nonsense.

A record 32.2 million people -- one in every 10 Americans -- received food stamps at the latest count, the government said on Thursday, a reflection of the recession now in its 16th month.

(via)

Two traders based in an office opposite RBS on Bishopsgate said they had walked across the City "to have a nice lunch and chill out". Sipping coffee after three courses and a few Marlboro Lights, they were angry that the police didn't seem to be making any arrests: "Its kicking off over in Bishopsgate", they said. "The demonstrators are goading the police and hitting them with sticks, but they are just letting them. They aren't arresting anyone."

And these two wanted to see the long arm of the law carting a few protesters away – because they had a financial interest in arrests. "I'll make money if they arrest more than 140", he said. Traders, he explained were putting spread bets on the number of arrests – with the quoted spread on Bloomberg at 130-140. They were also paying out on deaths and if more than 20 demonstrators are injured by horse charges.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moment of Zen - Overseas Contingency Operations Budget
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

GROSS: Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward and revealing things to you about what happened in the Bush administration?

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. And again, because of the problems this administration’s having filling jobs, a lot of people who served in the Bush Cheney government, particularly even in the White House people on most sophisticated staffs are still there. You simply can’t get rid of everybody, you may not even want to. Some are professional people. But Cheney is, I would never call it admiration, but, you know, formidable, yeah, this guy. This guy is the real McCoy.

1. President Barack Obama believes a quick, negotiated bankruptcy is the most likely way for General Motors Corp. to restructure and become a competitive automaker, people familiar with the matter said.

2. ...based on estimates in the CDS market, there are about $1 trillion in CDSs betting on GM and their bonds. Any change in GM's situation, will create a rippling effect in this $1T CDS community of GM.

This week, Guantánamo!!! It was an incredible experience.

We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!

We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.

We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.

We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.

The water in Guantánamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me of Guantánamo Bay :)

I didn’t want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.

“It’s just a crime the way it puts people in limbo. They first off have gone through the grief of losing their house, then they move out and find out that they still own it and have responsibility for it.”

Four wars, a Moon landing and the rebuilding of Europe: all that and more could have been paid for with the cost of the US government's proposals for saving its banking industry.

Last week's instalment of the great bailout - the government's pledge to buy up to $1tn of toxic assets in conjunction with the private sector - brings the total US rescue initiatives to $11.6tn. Only one other event in the past century has cost more than $1tn, after adjusting for inflation, and that was the second world war. Add in the cost of nine other 20th-century initiatives, from the war on terror to the New Deal, and the total is $7.5tn - less than two-thirds of the banking bailout.

The Marshall Plan, intended to rebuild Europe after the devastation of war, cost less than a hundredth of the value of the banking rescue. Add in the price of two other US economic packages - the New Deal and the Savings & Loan bailout of the 80s - and the $887bn cost is still well under a tenth of today's total.

I have yet to see a culture where truly shared values were proclaimed by fiat from above rather than forged by struggle and through consensus from below, let alone one where the primary responsibilty for tolerance rests with the most impoverished minority group that faces the most intolerance.

Phrase of the Day

Via Greenwald,

Newsweek's Evan Thomas in the magazine's cover story:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he's wrong, and you sense he's being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in "Lords of Finance," his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, "The Best and the Brightest." Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial system or the devotion of Obama's team to preserving it. But what if he's right, or part right?

In 2003, thousands of American soldiers were unexpectedly uprooted from Afghanistan and sent off to fight in a long and bloody war overseas. After serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq, the vast majority of these troops said they couldn't wait to get back and have their lives return to normal.

Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.

Two hundred schoolchildren in Britain, some as young as 13, have been identified as potential terrorists by a police scheme that aims to spot youngsters who are "vulnerable" to Islamic radicalisation.

People living in the world's poorest communities are eating less frequently and consuming worse food as a result of the global financial crisis, according to a study of the impact of the recession in five developing nations published today.

"There is a sort of very pure democracy and self-governance at play. People are making up the rules of their cluster of tents, deciding what's permitted, just as in any sort of community," she said. "You don't want to romanticise this - it isn't camping - but there is a community, and there is a sense of helping others. We've had a series of storms here recently, and if there's somebody new who doesn't have a tent, people will take them in. It's that understanding that, you know, there's somebody worse off than I am."

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.

Greenwald

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns.

For those without a decoder ring, "everyone" being a fiscal hawk means that due to the current financial disaster, they'll soon be coming after Social Security and Medicare...

Three windows at the front of his £2m detached sandstone villa were smashed and the rear window of a black Mercedes S600, parked in the driveway, was destroyed. No one was hurt. Goodwin and his family were not at home at the time and are thought to be living abroad. The former RBS chief was said to be "shaken" by news of the attack while his friends reportedly said the people who vandalised his property had "gone too far".

I have been asking "if the toxic sludge is so under-priced, why isn't Warren Buffet buying it ?" Turns out that Mr Buffet had a better idea, get the US Treasury to pay him to buy it -- he's one of the inventors of the Geithner plan.

The U.S. government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said.

"Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people..."

Buying toxic assets is "nice" for banks, but solves nothing. Bailing out AIG, oddly enough, could be seen at least as a step in the right direction - the problem of course being that if you're going to take care of all potential liabilities, the total bill might be in tens of trillions, rather than mere trillions - with a lot of that money going to the smart hedge funds that bet on things going badly in various markets and for various institutions (cf Pauslon above).

Given all that, we have several routes:

* one that gives a lot of money to banks that do not deserve it to solve their asset problem, but still do not make them creditworthy (the current Geithner plan), which gives stock markets a temporary boost, taxpayers permanent pain, and solves nothing;

* one that does help them get rid of their real problem (huge contingent liabilities on bets that are turning sour), but is vastly more expensive than the mind-numbing numbers we're throwing around already, and gives all the money to hedgies: the AIG route, multiplied ten or hundred-fold;

* one that acknowledges that the issue is liabilities rather than assets, and that focuses on the fact that a lot of these liabilities are wholy unrelated to any economic or financial activity, and are contingent rather than actual - ie nobody loses anything if they are cancelled. If a 100:1 bet you made is cancelled, your actual loss is not 100, it is 1 - something that could be paid back to you.

So far, the second route has been used when an emergency beckoned (AIG et al); the first route has been used massively but the Treasury does not seem tired of it yet, and the third one seems anathema.

From the comments

It sounds like you can easily get a generous Geithner Gift. Just pay a million for toxic waste worth a thousand.

Find a friend who has has toxic waste worth a thousand. Give him $150,000 of your own money and a $850,000 Geithner Gift (uh, sorry, loan).

Strangely enough, the waste isn’t worth a million. What a surprise. The government cruelly seizes the waste. How sad. But you and your friend can find consolation in the $849,000.

Please tell me I’ve misunderstood the plan.

"This certainly appears to be a case of TARP funds being recycled into campaign contributions"

Goldman Sachs vs. AIG

US federal regulators have warned of a “rampant Ponzimonium” as they disclosed they are investigating “hundreds” of possible scams in the aftermath of the $50bn fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.

In the crisis of 2009 the mounting evidence of fraud, conflicts of interest, indifference to suffering, repudiation of responsibility, and systemic absence of individual moral judgment produced an administrative economic massacre of such proportion that it constitutes an economic crime against humanity.

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
...

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly.

Delay is not innocuous. When a bank’s insolvency is ignored, the incentives for normal prudent banking collapse. Management has nothing to lose. It may take big new risks, in volatile markets like commodities, in the hope of salvation before the regulators close in. Or it may loot the institution—nomenklatura privatization, as the Russians would say—through unjustified bonuses, dividends, and options. It will never fully disclose the extent of insolvency on its own.

The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil.

Courage Is The Primary Virtue

March 16th was the sixth anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death. (Seems more recent doesn't it.)

NAIMA SHAYER: [translated] On that last day, she didn’t want to leave our house. She’d get to the door and then rush back to hold and kiss us goodbye again. I asked her, “What’s wrong? Do you think you’re going to die today?” She did this a few times, as if she didn’t want to leave us.


That evening, my niece told me that Rachel Corrie had been killed by an Israeli bulldozer and had watched it on television. I didn’t believe her at first and thought she must have been lying.


All of us in the house were crying. She had stayed with us for over twenty days. I remember, whenever she was late, she’d call and apologize. If she got later than 7:00, she’d let us know. Once she got stuck at a checkpoint and called so we wouldn’t worry. She was just like one of us, a member of our family. She was so good to us.


ABU JAMEEL: [translated] Very few people live up to Rachel’s example. Honestly, even today, I remember her. I can see her: slender, fair, beautiful, wearing a kafia. She was graceful and so courageous, never afraid.


My house was near an Israeli watchtower near the wall. She’d be there with her megaphone, shouting, “Please, don’t fire. There are children here.” She had an open spirit, a pure spirit. She was a great person, irreplaceable. Rachel’s life should be recorded in history.

At the conference on the idea of communism in London three days before, organiser Slavoj Zizek urged his audience:

We must resist the temptation to act. We must refuse being told that children are dying of hunger in Africa or in the slums of India, for this is the philosophy of the present times. They don’t want us to think.

Oh yes that terrible temptation to act, which plagues that audience, stalks it everywhere with its blandishments and meretricious seductions, from which they know not where to hide. But one must be strong, be firm, one mustn't play into their hands, you see. Like Rachel Corrie, the hysterics of Seattle and Genoa, the antiwar protesting puppets of Bush, the shoe hurling journalists of Iraq, Free Gaza, or the millions of French strikers today.

The charismatic theorist's urgent appeal will no doubt be scrupulously obeyed. In fact it was already being obeyed before it was even made. But now, intransigent refusal to act can be self-righteous too, its protagonists can congratulate themselves, how brave and strong we are to resist the temptation to which weaklings and dupes like Corrie succumb.

Eleven of the individuals who received "retention" bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at AIG, including one who received $4.6 million.

In other words, I take this to be a threat: "if you don't give us our bonuses, we'll trigger a default event that will cost AIG the US government tens of billions of dollars." It's just a polite way of saying, "Pay us the $100 million ransom or we start exploding the suicide bomber vests we're wearing."

...the real issue is fraud. Why is no one at Treasury willing to use the F word? Who would it embarrass? There is not reason for NOT pursuing that angle, save that AIG must have the 5x7 glossies on some pretty influential people, or that pursuing fraud at AIG would, via a daisy chain of connections, reveal that fraud was pervasive, and the Treasury is desperate to preserve the false image that the system has integrity.

El Salvador's former rebel group-turned-political party has claimed victory in the country's presidential election.

Jubilant supporters of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) poured into the streets of San Salvador in the early hours of Monday, after Mauricio Funes, the FMLN leader, declared that he had won.

As a lesson in how capitalism works, the strike was invaluable. It showed that the state was not neutral and could easily expand its powers to criminalise labour activity. It laid bare the bias of the media and the strategic impotence of the Labour party leadership, which needed the miners to win to remain viable but felt it could not support them and remain credible.

As a lesson in how socialism might work it was edifying. Women kept these communities functioning, and supporters and donations flooded in from across the country and the world. I still recall the conversations of Nottingham miners as they adjusted their worldviews - or at least their language - to the arrival of lesbian and gay, black and feminist support groups. At times I thought the sheer determination to win would carry us through.

Comedy

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Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

Our Pitch

In spring 2008, by using some other measures, a Wall Street Journal investigation found it likely that several banks, Citibank in the lead, reported too low rates to LIBOR to hide their credit problems.The day after the WSJ first published on the issue, LIBOR rates corrected upwards. (I wrote about possible LIBOR manipulation on October 13 2008. The very next day LIBOR started their decline. But I admit that those were likely independent events - the WSJ circulation is still a bit higher then ours.)

From the WSJ investigation we know that LIBOR can be manipulated by the banks and was manipulated in spring 2008. It is hard to prove manipulation without the actual records. The British Banker's Association is supervising the LIBOR reporting and calculation. But what interest would it have to really find problems with it?

One thing is sure. In October 2008 banks had a huge incentive to report too high rates as it furthered the pressure to hand them over hundreds of billions. Simply ask yourself: What would you do to get a 100 billion dollar gift?

I'm sure the knowledgeable people already know this. But it turns out that one of the features of the 2005 Bankruptcy bill was to put derivative counter parties at the front of the line ahead of other creditors in bankruptcy proceedings. Actually, from what I can tell, they don't just go to the head of the line. They got to skip the line entirely. As the Financial Times noted last fall, "the 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company's assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors." As the article notes, ironically, this provision which Wall Street pushed for and got to protect investment banks actually ended up hastening the collapse of Lehman and Bear Stearns last year.

The Lunch Date

by Adam Davidson

Across the nation, 19 million houses and apartments — nearly one out of every seven — are vacant, the highest percentage since the 1960s. But only about six million of those homes are for sale or for rent. That means millions more could still flood onto the market, depressing prices further.

Quelle surprise!

1. Photographs, names and video footage of people attending protests are routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system".

2. The commissioner alleges that firms, including Balfour Beatty, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O'Rourke and Costain, have for many years covertly bought details of staff's trade union activities and their conduct at work, in breach of the Data Protection Act. Seized documents reveal files on invidivuals that included comments such as "communist party", "ex-shop steward" and "trouble-stirrer".

Like Frankenstein's monster, Thatcherism has turned on its creators.

Is there anybody out there willing to stand up – on this, of all days – and raise a toast to the wilful destruction of our manufacturing industry and its replacement by the financial services sector? Yes, there were unions who were resistant to change, but whoever came up with the idea that the solution to this problem was to import cars rather than make them ourselves sacrificed more than just the entire engineering skills base.

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Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned--from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake--like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.

A passage from Marx about the insatiable greed of bankers was quoted on Radio 2 one morning by Terry Wogan. For all I know he's doing it every day now...

"I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hank Greenberg was still a billionaire, even as the policies his company wrote have cost the average American household some $1,600. It’s time for his wealth to be confiscated: it might be only a drop in the bucket compared to AIG’s total losses, but it would feel very right.”

A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school's assistant principal. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14-year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6m by companies belonging to the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It's an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

DETROIT — It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.

The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.

Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.

The federal government agreed Sunday night to provide an additional $30 billion in taxpayer money to the American International Group and loosen the terms of its huge loan to the insurer, which is preparing to report a $62 billion loss on Monday, the biggest quarterly loss in history, people involved in the discussions said.

They do what they want, these people, and you and I are cut out of the conversation. I'm sure they're dimly aware we still exist. They must spot us occasionally, through the window, jumping up and down in the cold with our funny placards . . . although come to think of it, they can't even see us through the window, since they banned peaceful protest within a mile of Parliament.

And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another.

While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars -- symbols of German wealth and power.

A group calling itself BMW -- the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German -- has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said.

One-third of the incidents are classed as “political,” prompting officers to assign a special unit to investigate, Schodrowski said. No arrests have been made. Schodrowski attributed the arson to “a protest against the world economy and rising rents.”

When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: “regulatory arbitrage” and “ratings arbitrage.” The word “arbitrage” usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities — a bond and stock of the same company, for instance — that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.’s actions, however, it means something entirely different. It means taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. A less polite but perhaps more accurate term would be “scam.”

Squadristi Recruiting Centre, No Kidding

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Apparently, the new Republican line on the stimulus is this:

To give the proposed economic stimulus plan some perspective, “if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion."

Part II
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Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today’s neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a “free market” is one free of government regulation, “free” of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud (as evidenced by the SEC’s refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples’ money without constraint.

She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart's, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months. "I had some oranges," she recalls with a self-deprecating smile. "A couple of months ago, they had grapes on sale." And, "If it's less than three dollars for a package of six steaks, that looks like a good deal to me." (She tries not to think too hard about the quality of a 50-cent steak.) Her staples include PB&J, canned ham salad, soup: "I'll get chicken noodle or Campbell's Chunky. There's meat in there. You can pour it over noodles and put butter on it. It's like a delicacy."

In essence, the nation's biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley.

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming "footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

...the little bit of checking that has been done appears to reveal that a very large fraction of these securities contain, on the face of it, misrepresentation or fraud in the files.

So here we are: The banks are sitting on paper originally valued at 100 cents on the dollar (or even more) which is now worth 20 or 10 or 0 cents. If they sell the stuff at those prices, most of the capital they’ve put behind those assets will be erased, leaving them insolvent, technically and perhaps literally – as in, unable to cover their current liabilities. On the other hand, if they don’t sell their pieces of Big Shitpile, all their capital (including what Uncle Sam has already thrown into the till) will remain frozen in place, blocking them from doing any new lending. Without new lending, they can’t earn the profits they need to make good the losses they are sitting on. Zombies. Night of the Living Dead Banks.

The banks know this, investors know this, Geithner and Co. know this. And everybody knows that the others know. (...)

One of the things that creeps me out about the political system’s response to the crisis so far – the insolvency of the banking system in particular – are the increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a phony façade of free markets and private enterprise, in an economy now utterly dependent on the federal safety net. I totally expected that from Hank Paulson and the Cheney Administration, but is Obama’s financial team really pressed from exactly the same Wall Street mold?

It may be best not to think too much about that question. It reminds me too much of the USSR’s fetish for preserving the trappings of socialist "democracy" – a Supreme Soviet, a ministerial government, courts, etc. – even though the actual decisions were all made, behind the scenes, by the party and the Politburo. It’s not a good sign when societies routinely lie to themselves about such big, fundamental truths, which in turn suggests that toxic assets may not be the poison we most need to worry about: The rottenness and decadence of the entire system may do us in first (not exactly a new theme for me.)

In Giovanni Arrighi’s thorough account in The Long Twentieth Century, we see hegemony shifting from the city states of Genoa and Venice in the sixteenth century to Amsterdam and the Low Countries in the seventeenth before concentrating in Britain from the late eighteenth century until the United States eventually took control after 1945. There are a number of features to these transitions that Arrighi emphasizes and which are relevant to our analysis. Each shift, Arrighi notes, occurred in the wake of a strong phase of financialization (he cites with approval Braudel’s maxim that financialization announces the autumn of some hegemonic configuration). Each shift, Arrighi notes, occurred in the wake of a strong phase of financialization (he cites with approval Braudel’s maxim that financialization announces the autumn of some hegemonic configuration).

The laughter was at its height when Obama officials explained that the White House planned to guarantee a wide swath of toxic assets -- which they referred to as "legacy assets" -- but wouldn't be asking Congress for money. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a bailout opponent in the fall, asked the officials to give Congress the total dollar figure for which they were on the hook. The officials said that they couldn't provide a number, a response met by chuckling that was bipartisan, but tilted toward the GOP side.

Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds, told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion. (...) Referring to overpayment on assets, Warren said Treasury has failed to specify its goals and methods in helping more than 300 institutions. "There may be good policy reasons for overpaying, but without a clearly delineated reason, we can't know that," Warren said. Senate Banking chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said the overpayment was sure to "raise eyebrows." "I can understand some gap," he said. "No one is expecting perfection between the price you pay and what you think you're getting. But that's a pretty large disparity."

Gowan: Consequences of the New Wall Street System

Much of the mainstream debate on the causes of the crisis takes the form of an ‘accidents’ theory, explaining the debâcle as the result of contingent actions by, say, Greenspan’s Federal Reserve, the banks, the regulators or the rating agencies. We have argued against this, proposing rather that a relatively coherent structure which we have called the New Wall Street System should be understood as having generated the crisis. But in addition to the argument above, we should note another striking feature of the last twenty years: the extraordinary harmony between Wall Street operators and Washington regulators. Typically in American history there have been phases of great tension, not only between Wall Street and Congress but also between Wall Street and the executive branch. This was true, for example, in much of the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet there has been a clear convergence over the last quarter of a century, the sign of a rather well-integrated project. [30]

An alternative explanation, much favoured in social-democratic circles, argues that both Wall Street and Washington were gripped by a false 'neo-liberal' or 'free-market' ideology, which led them astray. An ingenious right-wing twist on this suggests that the problematic ideology was 'laissez-faire'—that is, no regulation—while what is needed is 'free-market thinking', which implies some regulation. The consequence of either version is usually a rather rudderless discussion of 'how much' and 'what kind' of regulation would set matters straight. [31] The problem with this explanation is that, while the New Wall Street System was legitimated by free-market, laissez-faire or neo-liberal outlooks, these do not seem to have been operative ideologies for its practitioners, whether in Wall Street or in Washington. Philip Augar's detailed study of the Wall Street investment banks, The Greed Merchants, cited above, argues that they have actually operated in large part as a conscious cartel—the opposite of a free market. It is evident that neither Greenspan nor the bank chiefs believed in the serious version of this creed: neo-classical financial economics. Greenspan has not argued that financial markets are efficient or transparent; he has fully accepted that they can tend towards bubbles and blow-outs. He and his colleagues have been well aware of the risk of serious financial crisis, in which the American state would have to throw huge amounts of tax-payers' money into saving the system. They also grasped that all the various risk models used by the Wall Street banks were flawed, and were bound to be, since they presupposed a general context of financial market stability, within which one bank, in one market sector, might face a sudden threat; their solutions were in essence about diversification of risk across markets. The models therefore assumed away the systemic threat that Greenspan and others were well aware of: namely, a sudden negative turn across all markets. [32]


[30] There were tensions between Wall Street and New York state regulator Eliot Spitzer after the dot.com bubble burst, but this simply highlighted how strong was the consensus at a higher level.
[31] References to these kinds of debates can be found in Andrew Baker et al., Governing Financial Globalization, London 2005.
[32] See Greenspan, ‘We will never have a perfect model of risk’; Alan Beattie and James Politi, ‘Greenspan admits he made a mistake’, FT, 24 October 2008.

Cálice

(Translation)

Censored version:

Gogol: Vous ne pensez pas qu'il y a une juste mesure entre le capitalisme débridé d'un Sarkozy et votre ligne radicale archaïque ?

Commençant son aventure il y a quatre siècles, le capitalisme, même débridé, est beaucoup plus ancien et archaîque que toutes les lignes radicales qu'on lui oppose. Cessons de considérer que le libéralisme, à la mode dans les années 1840, incarne la modernité et les réformes. C'est le communisme qui est une idée neuve en Europe.