Glad That's Over

Am I crazy, or was 2000-2010 the shittiest decade EVAR?

Off the top of my head in no particular order: dot-com bubble burst, USS Cole bombing, G.W. Bush "elected" by the Supreme Court, September 11th, space shuttle Columbia, PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, Department of Homeland Security, MAYBE "winning" in Iraq after billions spent and no WMDs found, losing in Afghanistan, losing the war on drugs, rise of FOX News, rise of Iran, wealth gap becomes wealth chasm, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, black sites, extraordinary rendition, Wall Street taking over the government, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, Fort Hood shootings, TSA gate rape, Citizens United ruling, Virginia Tech shootings, Beltway sniper, and of course, the global financial meltdown, complete with housing and auto industry failures in the U.S. and a standing unemployment rate around 10 percent.

Miscellaneous Roundup II

A second batch of random goodness this week...

Guernica: Check out this fascinating in-depth report on the musical sensation taking Jamaica by storm - dancehall music - complete with "daggering" and violent, rampant homophobia. The Jamaicans seem to have severe schizophrenia regarding gayness - while men dress up in flourescent colors, bleach their skin and dance gaily about to dancehall, they are at the same time petrified of brushing against one another in public and violently homophobic. Weird.

Rolling Stone: For an American version of Julian Assange, see Jacob Appelbaum, leader of the Tor network.

DA: Michael Cohen argues convincingly that the White House is pushing straight propaganda bullshit on Afghanistan these days.

Salon: We're creating jobs again...overseas.

MoJo: Kevin Drum is getting tired of whiny bankers. Welcome to the club, Kevin.

NC: Finally, Yves Smith compares now to the Great Depression. Guess which is worse...

Greenwald vs. Wired on WikiLeaks

There's a very interesting argument going on between two of my favorite journalistic outlets - Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Wired magazine - about one of my other favorite things - WikiLeaks.

Wired has chats between PFC. Brad Manning and Adrian Lamo (the government informant who turned him in) that they are refusing to release, despite the fact that they could shed substantial light on several contentious public claims by Lamo. Greenwald took them to task for their lack of transparency in a couple of articles, and now editor Kevin Poulsen & Co. have responded to his criticisms, which Greenwald has immediately rebutted.

I've got to say I'm with Glenn here. There is clearly no legitimate reason to be withholding 75% of the Manning-Lamo chats when they could shed light on such an important, far-reaching story and make a huge difference in the case of PFC Manning himself. As a regular subscribe, I'm left asking Wired, WTF guys?

On a related note, the Harvard Nieman Journalism Lab inquires whether, in an age of fragmented, opinionated media, transparency is the new objectivity.

Miscellaneous Roundup

And to finish off today's roundup trifecta, a grab bag of randomness...

Susan Crawford: A good, brief takedown of the "class warfare" meme propagated by fearmongering conservatives regarding complaints about the growing wealth gap.

Sociological Images: Wendy Christensen uses a Time picture slideshow to illustrate the divide between the home front and the front lines. It seems the longer this war goes on, the more it gets separated from the daily life of the average citizen.

Daily Yonder: Really cool maps showing the states with the highest concentrations of fast food restaurants, highest rates of soft drink consumption, et cetera.

JBQ: Jane Bryant Quinn notes that rich people have a big, big loophole to avoid estate taxes in the form of perpetual trusts. You gotta have money to make money these days.

Jadaliyya: Shana Marshall elucidates how Gulf States are turning "defense offsets" into bribery's highest, most contemporary art form.

Miami Herald: Shamefully, there is still no date set for the dissolution of Guantanamo Bay, despite Obama's pie-in-the-sky promise to close the place down immediately upon becoming president. To date, exactly three of the hundreds of inmates at Gitmo have been convicted of any crime.

The Onion: Finally, the masters of mockery report that new devices are desirable, while old devices are undesirable.

Good News Roundup (Updated)

And now the good news...

Wired: Wired reports on a new process that utilizes sunlight to break water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Potential applications include fuel cell-based transport and carbon capture technology.

Raw Story: "Anonymous" has unleashed its net-wrath on the BofA website, causing at least intermittent outages. Even though I'm a BofA customer, I applaud these actions as they are likely to lead to people rethinking their banking decisions.

CNN: The former prez of Shell Oil predicts Americans could see $5-a-gallon gasoline by 2012. This is categorized as good news because it will finally start providing real economic incentive to move our economy off of fossil fuels and into alternatives.

Raw Story: Drug Czar Kerlikowske finally maybe learns that war is not the answer when it comes to combating illicit drugs, as he visits Portugal. A few years back, Portugal apparently used to be a giant heroin den with prohibition; now, after legalizing ALL drugs, flowers and rainbows and happiness abound.

This tidbit of potential good news in the drug war is offset by new WikiLeaks revelations showing the extent to which the DEA has become a major intelligence agency with significant international reach. Once again, Americans have WikiLeaks to thank for revealing to us the true extent of our government's secret activities on our behalf.

Update: Pete Guither and Ed Cone observe that our beloved Drug Czar has indeed FAILED to learn the lesson his Portugal trip was meant to teach him: fighting marijuana and cocaine with bullets and bombs DOES NOT WORK. Sigh...

Bad News Roundup

The military-industrial complex
keeps on growing

Bad news first, I'm afraid...

Wonk Room: Continuing its trend of putting the most inappropriate person possible in charge of each House committee, the GOP installed anti-science, pro-oil-spill Texan Ralph Hall as the new chair of the Science Committee. Classic move, Republicans. Also, House Republicans have hired a few K Street friends (read lobbyists) to help them try to repeal health-care reform. The revolving door just got a little revolvier.

Wired: Apple was sued yesterday, along with certain app makers, for helping advertisers create secret profiles of iPhone users, complete with geographic location. I say make 'em pay, big time.

WSJ: The Journal reports that 1/4 of American kids and teens now take prescription drugs regularly. This is probably not a good thing, considering that these drugs are generally designed with adults in mind. The FDA should address this.

Boston Globe: Great journalism by Bryan Bender at the Globe to uncover the staggering rate at which retired generals are going through the "revolving door" to the private sector. The graph pictured to the right is a good depiction of this ethically dubious trend. James Fallows has good commentary on the piece, as well.

AOL:  This is a very worrying report by A.J. Perez about the rise of steroid use among police officers across the U.S.  One interviewee muses that as many as 1/4 of cops are using some sort of performance enhancing drug today.  One thing I definitely don't want is for my local cops to be jacked to the gills on steroids when they're out on patrols - not likely to lead to good decision-making and definitely more likely to lead to aggression and violence.

Merry Christmas

Security Roundup: Safety is Submission

Chronicling the disappearance of individual dignity and privacy in the United States...

WaPo: Continuing their "Top Secret America" series, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin report on the transfer of anti-terror techniques and technologies to local and state police departments. It seems that terrorism is not actually a huge threat to most small towns in the U.S., so these funds and technologies are instead being aimed at low-level criminals and generally "suspicious" persons in small communities across the land.

Salon: Glenn Greenwald comments on the above, lucidly describing America's slide towards authoritarian government via the "elite" class.

Wired: Spencer Ackerman ponders the future of Blackwater/Xe after its sale, in part, to Manhattan Growth Partners. If Tim Shorrock is correct, their stock will only being rising under Obama as commander-in-chief:

"Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad."

I see a dangerous temptation for Obama, who has committed to beginning American military withdrawal from Afghanistan next summer, to simply replace the troops he pulls out with private mercenaries, as he seems quite willing to do. Pretty soon, making war will just be another sector of business for America (the international weapons trade already is), as defense contractors become indispensable to our military.

Politico: In a frightening development, Michele "Batshit" Bachmann has somehow landed a spot on the House Intel Committee. Awesome.

Econ Roundup: Wealth Gap edition (Updated)

So, as you may have noticed, a tiny proportion of people in this country are getting obscenely rich, while the rest of us gradually sink into the huge debt they extended to us via their financial institutions. So now, rather than a stratified society with a lower, middle and upper class, America increasingly has the society of a banana republic, with a huge lower class and a very small, politically and economically dominant upper class - the rich and the poor.

Why is the wealth gap growing so? For a whole confluence of reasons, but basically because American capitalism failed. When did it fail? When we allowed the rich, who made the mistake of lending out a bunch of their money to us poor people who couldn't pay it back, to be bailed out by the government, rather than suffering the rightful economic punishment for their stupidity - bankruptcy (or the sale of their third and fourth vacation homes and maybe downgrading from the yacht they just purchased).

So now there's no economic disincentive against stupid investments - the rich can be confident that if their mistakes are big enough and they all make the same ones, the government will save them from whatever the consequences of those mistakes should be. Thus, capitalism has malfunctioned.

Now that we've established the fundamental failure of our economic system, on to the roundup:

TomDispatch: Andy Kroll on "How the Oligarchs took America"

Salon: Michael Lind on the same subject, and the need for the "reglur folks" to wake the fuck up if they want to take their country back.

BI: In 2007, 71.5% of America's wealth was concentrated in 10% of the population, with 33.8% belonging to 1% of the population. Also, 14 other mind-blowing charts about wealth inequality in the U.S. today.

ITT: Sociologist Lisa Dodson discusses how the rest of us are getting by in tough times. Her conclusion about the chances to progress beyond this situation is telling:

"My hope comes from listening to people from all over the country, of all backgrounds and ages, of different ideological perspectives, who agree we should be fair. Now, how that gets mobilized is the important question, and it’s one that I cannot answer. What I can say is there are a lot of folks who are ready and who don’t have a Tea Party perspective."

In other words, hey Americans, wake up! You're being fleeced by rich people.

DailyKos: Not all Americans are oblivious to this situation. Check out DailyKos for some grassroots rage concerning the yawning wealth chasm.

Economist: Even the conservative Economist considers whether governments should seek happiness for their populations, not "economic growth." Predictably, its answer is no.

NYT: Finally, Hale Stewart takes "a closer look" at macroeconomic metrics (GDP, consumer prices, etc - which certainly doesn't signify a "closer look" at all) in the U.S. and concludes that our economy is "doing far better than most people give it credit for."

Right, Hale. If you ignore the massive unemployment, continued lack of serious financial reform, the preposterously expensive Afghan war, the continued decline in American manufacturing, the huge mortgage/foreclosure fiasco in the real estate sector, and all the other things that make up, you know, CONTEXT, then yeah, I guess everything's peachy if the GDP looks good.

Update: David Sirota uncovers some startling data in IRS tax records. Top earners used to pay about 70 percent of their income in taxes - nowadays it's down around 25 percent. Basic math, people, basic math.

Also, even Paul Krugman is getting pretty sick and tired of blatant economic bullshit spewed by political fatcats.

Good News/Bad News Roundup

I've noticed that my cynicism regarding U.S. politics and policy has started to become a bit overbearing and depressing here, so I'll endeavor to turn that frown upside-down and include more good-news stories in my roundups for a while. Maybe a good news/bad news split would help?

The Good News

Yelp: Good news for my fellow Bostonians - this Saturday is Santacon!

ESPN: Not really good news, per se, but a good story detailing how Madden video games became the great American pastime they are today. The games were originally 7-on-7, but Madden insisted it be "real football" if he was going to put his name on it. John Madden is a football god.

HuffPo: CURE FOR AIDS?!?! (Suck it, anti-stem cell crowd.)

Naked Capitalism: Iowa attorney general claims he'll "put people in jail" over the mortgage/foreclosure fiasco in his state. This isn't a story I've been following very closely, but I'm glad someone, somewhere is (maybe) going to jail in the financial industry.

NPR: Not content to commemorate "World Press Freedom Day" while the DOJ brainstorms some trumped-up prosecution of WikiLeaks (the world press), Obama has decided to nominate a defender for whistle-blowers while America's number one whistle-blower rots in solitary confinement. Obama's a hipster, though, so it's not hypocrisy - it's irony.

Raw Story: The judicial branch finally gets around to protecting your e-mails from warrantless domestic surveillance.

Japan Times: Tina Burrett senses a reset in Russian diplomacy, as well, which sees more benefit to cooperating with foreign powers and encouraging their investment. Cool!

American Footprints: Eric Martin notes that the collapse of the recent Middle East peace talk initiative may have opened the door for the international community to foist a peaceful settlement upon the warring parties.

I'm a firm supporter of this plan - have the U.N. recognize some sort of Palestine, have everyone else recognize it and put a fork in this thing. It's clear that the Jews and Arabs will never reach peace on their own, and the ongoing humanitarian and security harms from this are too great for the rest of the world to continue waiting on some magical moment of agreement to arrive. Also, check out this press release from "The Elders" on the same subject.

The Bad News

Drug WarRant: Predictably, the drug czar comes to the wrong conclusion from the study I cited yesterday showing teens using more marijuana and less alcohol. He blames it on the trend of medicinal marijuana allowances by the states. The ONDCP lives in some sort of imaginary bizarro world of reverse causation, because the medical marijuana trend actually came AFTER this trend of rising teen weed use, which has been steady for a decade-plus now.

IMO, you literally have to have your head inserted in your own rectum to be on the wrong side of the marijuana issue at this point. How do these people keep getting appointed? Seriously, where are they finding them?

Nieman Reports: David Cay Johnston describes the dearth of beat journalists in mainstream media today, and how it's been allowing for more and more petty corruption at the local and state level. Won't someone please pay me to keep an eye on their elected officials for them?

CJR: Jim Dickinson relates the increasingly cold shoulder he's getting from the FDA press office, and the harmful effect it has on the quality of health reporting. It seems to me that when drug makers are sending studies overseas for easier results and producing drugs overseas in unsupervised conditions, we need transparency in the overburdened FDA more than ever. But what do I know? I'm just a concerned citizen.

WaPo: Continuing their solid series on "The Hidden Life of Guns" (stupid title - guns are not animate), WaPo finds that gun dealers have no trouble circumventing ATF shutdown orders. Now, I wonder where all those Mexican drug dealers are getting their weapons? How about that guy in Florida shooting up the city council meeting? How about the gunfight in a Sacramento barbershop today? Yeah, maybe we should tighten that down a bit.

Also, this is very reminiscent of the revelation that the FAA has no idea who owns about a third of the private planes in this country. It's weird how all these oversight agencies seem to have fallen behind on their duties. It's almost as though they were intentionally staffed with incompetent, apathetic idiots by a two-term president who didn't give a shit about regulation or oversight or accountability. Weird how that happened, huh?

War Files

Let's check in and see how the U.S. is doing in the two major wars it's still fighting: the war in Afghanistan and the drug war. As for Afghanistan, there seems to be a growing consensus that it's about time to sue for peace, as the prospects for victory haven't changed in, oh, 10 YEARS or so. Maybe if we had gone with CT over COIN, we'd see a different picture now.

And what do you know, the war on drugs is also a terrible failure, something recognized by seemingly everyone except those in Washington, D.C. Even idiot high schoolers have been opting for weed over booze, which I would say is due both to its easier availability and lower health risks and side-effects.

So to sum up, America is losing two wars right now, BIG TIME, in addition to all her political and media problems. Great.

Crazen People in Congress

I invented a new word today:  crazen.  It's a combo of crazy and brazen, which are the two words that spring to mind when you observe what the newly empowered Republicans have been up to on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps the perfect exemplar of crazen behavior is Sen. Michele Bachmann, who is a one-woman freak show of ignorance, idiocy and irrationality. For instance, apparently oblivious of the need to keep the three branches of U.S. government separate from one another, she has invited Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to hold civics classes for members of Congress.

Yeah, why not just get Congress, the president and the Supreme Court all in one room and have them decide things all at once? Talk about small government - we could downsize the entire federal bureaucracy to one building! This is the type of lunacy that doesn't even try to masquerade as sanity - it's simply crazen.

Here's another crazen idea: Let's take the "King of Pork" and put in him charge of the committee governing earmarks, and let's take a Wall Street darling who believes "regulators exist to serve the banks," and put him in charge of financial oversight when Wall Street is already running amok. Done and done.

Wake the fuck up, America. This place is being run by crazen people.

Conspiring in Plain Sight

A basic characteristic of any good conspiracy is secrecy. The conspirators necessarily have to meet in private and keep their deliberations and membership private, also, to avoid being recognized as conspirators.

In the U.S. today, however, the conspiring of economic and political elites to not just "game the system," but write the very rules undergirding that system to their advantage, happens in plain sight. Take, for instance, the report by the New York Times today describing the shady group of elite bankers that have been holding private meetings in New York to essentially govern the derivatives trade and exclude other banks (and the average Joe, if the average Joe had millions laying around to buy a derivative in the first place) from participating and profiting in it.

The article describes how nine huge banks have managed to keep hold of the derivatives market for themselves, strong-arming competitors and fending off attempts to make the derivatives market more transparent, like the stock market.

Another good example is the unprecedented millions in corporate donations raked in by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on behalf of companies concerned that the Dems might try to close the wealth chasm a bit. This cash will be used by the ChamCom to keep tax rates low for corporations and sustain their lobbyist's momentum for deregulation gained during the Bush years. Corporations know that Republicans will convince their intelligence-challenged, economically poor party-mates (mostly in the South) that slashing private and corporate tax rates and deregulating all sorts of industries is in their interests.

Oh, look, here's another example of elites conspiring against developments that could give more power to the people: Finding WikiLeaks guilty before there's even been the possibility of a trial. Corporations are only too happy to join in the vilifying of Assange and his organization, which represents a threat to expose some of their shadiest (and most profitable) activities. Google "Nigeria" and "Halliburton" if you're curious about what activities I'm referencing.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, so don't call me a conspiracy theorist. It's simply the rich and powerful acting like, well, the rich and powerful. Take a look at this letter from Thomas Jefferson on a visit to France in 1785, where he notes the deleterious effect that wealth inequality has on the populace of that nation.

Jefferson saw then what is occurring in plain sight now - too much money and power at the top. For Christ's sake, the top 1 percent of our country owns 25 PERCENT of this nation's wealth - A QUARTER OF OUR COLLECTIVE WEALTH to 1 PERCENT. These types of figures spur people like Robert Reich to say things like this:

"Here's the obstacle, though. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block us from hearing this story.

The midterm elections offered dramatic evidence. According to NBC News, for example, Crossroads GPS -- one of the largest Republican groups channeling secret money -- received a big donation from Wall Street hedge-fund and private-equity managers who had been fighting a Democratic proposal to treat their earnings as ordinary income rather than as capital gains, subject to only a 15 percent tax.

In other words, the problem isn't big government. It's power and privilege amassing at the top.

This is the story Obama, Democrats, and progressives must tell. Stop talking policy. People don't think in terms of policies. Policies make sense only to the extent they illustrate a larger story. Obama's biggest failure has been an inability to connect the dots."

This trend, which probably started with Reagan, grew gradually through Clinton's years and hit high gear under Bush and Co., has continued largely unabated through Obama's first two years, as Barry seems to think putting the same people in positions of power and influence that were there for the past 30 years will change things. Unless Obama finds his liberal backbone at some point during the next two, I see more of the same. That leads me to think that this country is headed toward either a collapse of some kind or a populist coup, and makes me want to move to Japan or Germany, where apparently, they've figured out that the economy is for everyone, not those who benefit the most already.

Update: BTW, if you want to fight back against the elite, shadowy interests increasingly running the country you live in, this might be a good start. A less courageous action would be to pull your money from large financial firms like Bank of America and Citi and put it in nice, safe community banks, where it won't be potentially packaged into something economically unrecognizable and resold five more times.

14% of Americans on Food Stamps

Since 2001, when about 6% of the country was using food stamps, the rate has MORE THAN DOUBLED to 14%, and that was under the most "pro-business" administration possible. Trickle-down economics is finally, irreversibly dead. This is how Republicans think of food stamps.
Meanwhile, corporations are sitting on the largest reserves of cash they've had since the '50s and pretty much doing nothing with it.

MUST READ - Assange's Last Interview Before Jail (updated)

Via the excellent, hard-nosed reporters at Narco News:

I hope this this story we published today isn't the last interview that WikiLeaks' Julian Assange will be able to give. After all, US Army soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking more than 250,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest, denied access to news organizations. There are people in power that would like to see Assange silenced the same way, or worse.

The interview itself is here.

Also, check out Jay Rosen's stellar takedown of contemporary mainstream journalism at Press Think. See Glenn Greenwald at Salon for an impassioned excoriation of our media's authoritarian tendencies. And read this Guardian piece to understand why WikiLeaks is on the side of justice, and our government is not.

Upside-Down Roundup

Overnight, the world turned upside-down...

ThinkProgress: For instance, fucking nutbag Michele Bachmann started complaining about the tax cuts Obama "compromised" on, saying they were really tax increases.

Raw Story: The Brits, who are usually much more polite and effeminate than us swaggering cowboys here in the U.S., reminded the world what a serious, rough-and-tumble grassroots protest looks like. The U.S. better take note, because the way things are going in D.C., we could be witnessing similar scenes here very soon.

NYP: Meanwhile, Republicans hollered a big "fuck you" to 9/11 responders, filibustering legislation that would have provided health benefits for Ground Zero workers. The sad thing is, this is just standard Republican prickishness - not really a departure from their general modus operandi.

Raw Story: In the WikiLeaks story, Assange's lawyer says the U.S. is very close to indicting the man on spying charges (WTF are you thinking, Holder, seriously?) AT THE SAME TIME as the prosecution's case against Assange for rape apparently begins to fall apart.

BBC: And to round out this bizarro world, young, rich dick Mark Zuckerberg's heart grew three sizes when he joined the Gates' Giving Pledge campaign to give away most of his money to people who actually need it.

Big Pharma Going Global Means Riskier Drugs At Home

Don Barlett and James Steele have a fantastic article up at Vanity Fair today about Big Pharma going global, both in terms of testing new drugs and producing the drugs we consume here at home. They give plenty of facts and figures to describe the growing trend among pharma companies to outsource both the testing and the production of new drugs, away from those pesky FDA regulators.

As usual, the root of the problem is money. It simply costs a LOT less money for pharma companies to experiment on poor populations in developing countries, and it further removes them from the scrutiny of an already-overburdened FDA. I think I'll stick to aspirin and home remedies this winter...

Follow the Money Roundup

Follow the money. Find the truth.

BBC: To kick things off, the BBC reports that the entire world is becoming more corrupt. So overall, we're all headed in the wrong direction. Their poll suggests it's also the world's most talked-about problem, however, so maybe we're turning a corner?

Sociological Images: Good food for thought - a comparison between increases in corrections funding and increases in higher education funding in the U.S. between 1987 and 2007. Seems like the prison lobby could teach the higher ed lobby a thing or two.

TAP: Jamelle Bouie has a superb article describing the many flaws in Republicans' anti-earmark logic. By opposing earmarks wholesale, Repubs are actually ceding the power of the purse to the president, who generally sets the budget agenda for Congress overall.

Moreover, earmarks are relatively transparent compared to other forms of federal funding. Politico details how Republicans continue to backpedal on their earmark ban, realizing that they probably didn't really think this one through.

Truthout: Dina Rasor debuts the "Solutions" series at Truthout with a look at reforming DOD contracting. The article is a MUST-READ, explaining why, for instance, the DOD paid $435 for a hammer. Here's a good paragraph:

The problem with this system is that the DoD has tolerated so much fraud, waste and fat in each weapons program, with only a few of the contracts scrubbed for inflated costs. This has resulted in generations of fraud and fat, which have become part of the new baseline on historic costs. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), right now, major weapons programs are overrunning by $300 billion. What will happen with most of these programs is that the DoD will pay for these weapons with their overruns anyway, and then those overruns will become part of the new baseline for new programs for new weapons. Essentially, this process magnifies the waste and makes it grow exponentially with every new weapons system.

And then she gets into the use of private contractors:

KBR and others realized that they would have little oversight during the beginning of the [Iraq] war, and used common contractor tricks and devices to run up the early costs, inflated numbers which would then be used constantly for the duration of the contract. KBR and other companies charged 12 hours a day, seven days a week in labor costs, regardless of how much work was accomplished, not just at the beginning of the war, but continuing on to the present. Since much of KBR's work is not connected to the manufacturing of weapons, but more of a war-service industry, labor costs are the majority of the overall costs. Even adding overhead, General & Administrative (G&A), and other costs, it still boggles the mind that KBR could run up a contract to over $40 billion for driving trucks, maintaining barracks, doing laundry and slinging hash. [Emphasis mine]

TIME: Stephen Gandel muses about which bailouts were constitutional and which weren't, ultimately deciding that it's a moot point since the bailouts were so successful. Two things, Stephen: A) The jury is still out on the success of the bailouts. Those companies are still around and back to being "profitable," sure, but the rest of the country is not much better for it.

B) The bailouts set a dangerous precedent, no matter how "successful" they were economically, that the private sector can expect the government to, well, bail it out if its incompetence and/or corruption is pervasive enough to threaten the national economy. That harm outweighs any monetary profit the U.S. government received from saving these institutions because it allows the systemic corruption and incompetence that got us here in the first place to continue.

The instant the federal government started saving private companies, something fundamental about American free-market capitalism failed - the disincentive for making bad investments. Now banks can feel free to invent and sell whatever privatized, leveraged financial products they want, confident that if they fail again, the Fed will step in. How is that a success?

Founders Founders

This isn't really news, but I just love the delicious irony of a school based on Ayn Rand's philosophy failing due to lack of state funding. As Ayn knew well, the market is a cruel, cruel place.

Also, it is almost the year 2011 and there is an actual witch hunt underway. WTF?

Good News Roundup

We must take encouragement where we can, for dark days are ahead...

AMB: I'm especially amused this holiday season at Christian over-reactions to the atheist ad campaign going on around the country. In particular, I smiled when I learned that a Christian group has hired a billboard truck sporting an "I love you from God" message to follow public buses displaying atheist ads in Fort Worth.

For one, it's a sign that Christians (who know the power of evangelism better than anyone) are taking the atheist campaign seriously and feel the need to counter it, lest the sheeple populating their flocks realize that, hey, there's an alternative point of view about this.

Second, it's nice to see Christians having to spend some money to defend their faith, rather than using it to churn out mission trips around the world where they forcefully spread their ignorance in developing countries. Want to know why AIDS is so bad in Africa? Ask the Catholic Church what they told everyone over there regarding condoms. So by all means, Christians, spend profusely to counter the atheist message this holiday season. You are only weakening yourselves.

Raw Story: I was likewise heartened to see that Peter Singer and Noam Chomsky, two of America's brightest academic lights, have sent a persuasive open letter to Australian PM Julia Gillard, asking her not to forsake her duty to give Julian Assange the full protection he deserves according to Australian law. Their letter is worth reading in full, and it's also worth taking a glance at the impressive list of additional signatories.

Raw Story: Another nice development to observe - a whole passel of companies distancing themselves from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in response to the ridiculous amount of money it shoveled into anti-Democratic ads during the 2010 election. What's the matter, ChamCom, you didn't think any of your members were Democrats? Idiots.

NYT/NPR: Yes, Obama faltered badly with the tax cuts, hurting the country and his own political chances simultaneously. Maybe he can undo some of that damage if he follows through on his own call, yesterday, for a new "Sputnik moment" here at home regarding investment in science and technology education and research.

Obama's right: American education is falling behind, and it is directly threatening not only our economic and technological position in the world, but our own ability to intelligently govern ourselves (witness the election of a bunch of climate change deniers this fall). Plus, space has become a hot topic again, as new life forms have been found here on earth and the estimated number of inhabitable worlds for alien life has tripled.

Investment in science and tech research and education has something for everyone - public sector reinvigoration (NASA brought back to life?), private-sector participation (a private company just launched a prototype space vehicle for NASA yesterday), and of course, better funding and a better future for those without a political voice in this country - American schoolchildren. A Sputnik moment could very well be exactly what America needs to reverse its steady, obvious decline.

Are You Joking, State Department?

I can't believe the State Department had the balls to put out this press release today.

What a time to announce the U.S. hosting "World Press Freedom Day" - when the U.S. is actively persecuting the one press outlet that's meaningfully utilizing its freedom!

(h/t Glenn Greenwald)

American Decline

Ian Welsh has a nice post summarizing my feelings about the current state of our union.

Food for Thought Roundup

Think a little deeper...

Adbusters: A good question is posed by Roland Kelts to all those adherents of American exceptionalism: What's wrong with being #2?

Big Think: Besides the lost lives, money, careers, etc. caused by the drug war, it may also be cutting into the rate of marriage across this country. How do you like that, conservatives? Your war against drugs as a threat to the "fabric of society" has actually harmed the fabric of society. Great job.

NPR: Surprise, surprise, Americans are getting dumber every year, especially the young ones.

DHS: From the Big Brother files, Dept. of Homeland Security has announced a partnership with Wal-Mart to promote "see something, say something." Prediction: A bunch of false terror alerts stemming from the dumb yokels who shop at Wal-Mart seeing things and saying things.

Foreign Policy Contradiction

From a NYT article on U.S. efforts to stop illegal arms trading:

The United States is the world’s largest arms supplier, and with Russia, dominates trade in the developing world. Its role as a purveyor of weapons to certain allies — including Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states — has drawn criticism that it has fueled an arms race. But it has also taken on a leading role as traffic cop in trying to halt deliveries of advanced weapons and other arms to militants and adversaries.

I wonder how those terrorists keep getting weapons. I mean, Saudi Arabia is where most of the funding and material support for jihadist extremism comes from, so where are they getting all those weapons? Oh, right, FROM US. We are selling weapons to people who use them to shoot our soldiers. America is fighting itself.

Read for Yourself

I'm always startled by how few people take the time to go and read firsthand sources or documents for themselves before they start spouting off their opinions about an issue. When it comes to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has published an op-ed in The Australian that clearly states the organization's aims and rationale. I urge you, read it for yourself and decide if he's the international terrorist mastermind that our servile, puerile press has depicted him as.

Then check out Glenn Greenwald for more.

Cash4Story: My Plan to Get Rich Quick

Step 1: Write thorough articles criticizing shady companies on major websites.

Step 2: Get bribed by said companies to remove said articles or rewrite them.

Step 3: Profit.

Mega-Roundup

Longest roundup EVAR...

Truthout: Read this amazing post from Thom Hartmann decrying the media AND the educational system in this country for not being sufficient to sustain American democracy. Judging by the current state of national politics, Thom couldn't be more correct.

DownWithTyranny: Another excellent vindication of WikiLeaks from DownWithTyranny. Well worth the read.

FDL: BP is challenging the government's estimate of how much damage it did in the Gulf of Mexico, seeking to minimize ultimate costs now that the story is out of the papers. Makes sense, since BP is a corporation and what do corporations exist for? To maximize profit!

Guardian: Excellent article from Juan Gabriel Tarkatlian (h/t DrugWarRant) pointing out that the sole winner in the supposedly defunct "war on drugs" has been U.S. Southern Command, which has seen its role and responsibilities skyrocket as it has involved itself in combating drug traffickers in Central and South America. You can bet your ass SOUTHCOM will be among the most fervent critics of any drug-control strategy NOT involving state-sanctioned violence.

Newshoggers: One, two, three, four - I declare a CLASS WAR!

WaPo: How do we get MORE Muslims to hate us? Let's infiltrate their peaceful, Constitutionally protected religious services and try to entrap them into sympathizing with terrorists so we can arrest 'em! Oh wait, THAT'S ALREADY HAPPENING.

Houston Chron: Even Tom Friedman can see the value WikiLeaks holds - it exposes the vexing lack of American leverage over, well, everyone. Could it be that America is no longer the unchallenged global hegemon of the 1990s? Tune in next week to find out...

MoJo: Big Meat is working hard to counter all this terrible "environmental consciousness" that seems to be pervading American education concerning what we eat. This should help everyone remember the value of eating three square meats a day.

Politico: And to wrap things up, the U.S. is still funding religious institutions with federal dollars, this time via ARRA:

"Part of our job is to ensure that there's a level playing field — we don't encourage anyone to favor faith-based groups over other organizations, but we do want to ensure that there's no discrimination against faith-based organizations," said Joshua DuBois, who heads the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which Bush created and President Barack Obama renamed and expanded.

Right, Joshua - make sure you don't exclude anybody. That's the community organizer's way, and that's how we're going to get this big, happy, bipartisan country moving again, right?

Friday Roundup II

A double dose of misery, for those not depressed enough by my first roundup:

MPP: Mike Meno has a nice post at MPP decrying the continued uselessness of DEA efforts to counteract Mexican drug cartels, especially regarding marijuana. At this point, the contrast between what happens when you keep marijuana on the black market and the potential harms of legalization has never been clearer.

Do we honestly think that legalization of marijuana will bring harm to our society that can compare with the sickening violence perpetrated every day between murderous criminal cartels fueled by American dollars and weapons? Even the AP has declared the drug war a failure - the ASSOCIATED PRESS. By now, it's conventional wisdom that this thing is a failure, and yet, the DEA still spends resources arresting elderly country music stars and low-level thugs. RE-TAR-DED.

CounterPunch: Nice post by Gareth Porter here about WikiLeaks revealing a complicit national media. Why do we need WikiLeaks? Because our press has failed us. Why do we need WikiLeaks? Because our press has failed us. Why do we need WikiLeaks? Because our press has failed us. Has that been drilled into your heads, yet?

Guardian: Sadly, the most incisive writing on issues of American domestic policy these days often comes from abroad. Witness Paul Thomas slamming the American educational system for becoming corporatized. Why are our schools now being run by CEO's and corporate executives? Shouldn't, like, educators be in charge there?

But it's not all bad news - check out this cool "Story of Stuff Project" I found. When was the last time you thought about what happens to your trash?

Friday Roundup

Is this guy selling us out?  Turning his back on us?

Why should we fact-check our government? Why not just blindly believe what elected officials spew into the media's mikes, eagerly thrust aloft by a sycophantic press corps? This is why:

USA Today: After an abject failure to obtain Republican cooperation after his much-discussed "Slurpee Summit" with Republican leaders, Obama has predictably been holding discussions behind closed doors to discuss what sort of horse-trading can be done to get bills passed in Congress. Most likely, he'll cave on the Bush tax cuts for the uber-rich in exchange for continued unemployment benefits for the uber-poor. Classic compromise that satisfies no one.

The problem with Obama is that he was elected as an ideologue, a fire-breathing reformer descending on D.C. to CHANGE (remember that word, Obama?) things. But from the moment he stumbled through his oath of office, Obama became a pure pragmatist, willing to work a deal with anyone, as long as something gets done.

Mr. President, the people don't want a pragmatist. They don't want a big, bipartisan press conference announcing your new deal you just made with Republicans to give them everything they want in exchange for simply maintaining the status quo. If the people wanted that, they would have elected Hillary Clinton.

The people simply want you to do what you said you'd do on the campaign trail - close Gitmo, reform the financial system meaningfully, get our country back on the right track with regards to infrastructure, energy, education and health care (remember your three "priorities?" I don't see taxes anywhere in there, do you?) So stop kowtowing to the selfish idiots that almost capsized this country over the last decade and do the awesome shit you said you were going to do.

It's not that hard to go on TV and say, "Look, I don't agree with the stubborn positions the Republicans are taking; Democrats are still in the majority; thus, nothing will get done until they become more reasonable and start meeting us halfway." You're losing your base, Mr. President, and it's your own damn fault.

Raw Story: Well, how about that? Another diplomatic cable reveals yet another major American misdeed in the world. Those calling for the head of Julian Assange need to demonstrate that he's causing harm that's AT LEAST comparable to the murder of 14 women and 21 children, an act perpetrated by the U.S. military in Yemen.

Note to the military: Why are you such pussies? How about manning up and actually going in on the ground, if you're going to take action against al-Qaida? You need to stop launching missiles from some drone control center in Nevada to kill a bunch of illiterate tribes-people. Your cowardly, idiotic method of making war is really only multiplying our enemies.

If the "strongest military in the world" can't stage a successful infantry raid against a desert terrorist camp, what the fuck is it worth? And I don't cotton to bullshit about needing plausible deniability for Yemen's government. Either send in troops to take people out or don't go in at all. This way, we just look like a fucking evil empire, launching missiles into random countries around the world.

Be the fucking American soldiers you're supposed to be and go in on the ground and kick some ass instead of screwing your own country in the long term by remotely killing women and children for the world to see. I mean, I know the people in the military aren't geniuses, but good god, you have to be near retarded to think we're winning this war on terror the way we're fighting it.

Slight Paranoia: Finally, Chris Soghoian has done some classic gumshoe journalism and, via a FOIA request and appeal process, received documentation from the DOJ confirming that Our Beloved Government has been spying not only on our phone records and emails, but also our credit card transactions, airline reservations and more:

"As the document makes clear, Federal law enforcement agencies do not limit their surveillance of US residents to phone calls, emails and geo-location information. They are also interested in calling cards, credit cards, rental cars and airline reservations, as well as retail shopping clubs.

The document also reveals that DOJ's preferred method of obtaining this information is via an administrative subpoena. The only role that courts play in this process is in issuing non-disclosure orders to the banks, preventing them from telling their customers that the government has spied on their financial transactions. No Fourth Amendment analysis is conducted by judges when issuing such non-disclosure orders."

THIS is why we can't trust our own government to be open with us, and we NEED organizations like WikiLeaks and journalists like Mr. Soghoian, who have the means and methods to make such information public. This is what is meant by a "watchdog press" - something the U.S. has been lacking for the better part of my lifetime. It will be interesting to see if/how the MSM reports this one.

If You Are a Republican, You Are a Traitor to this Country

I can't say it much more clearly than that. If you are for the Republicans as they are now, you are against America. You are undermining her national security, her economy, her environment, her infrastructure, her educational system, her FUTURE. If you are a Republican, you are now a traitor in my eyes...period.

For more, see Driftglass.

Drugged Detainees Committed Suicide at Guantanamo

More rainbows and puppy dogs from your favorite extrajudicial detention center (via excellent reporting at Truthout):

"The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding."

Not content to jail these people for 10 years illegally, our government has been drugging them to the gills, probably causing a few of them to kill themselves. This is just classic U.S. military shenanigans:

"Mefloquine is also known by its brand name Lariam. It was researched by the US Army in the 1970s and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1989. Since its introduction, it has been directly linked to serious adverse effects, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, confusion, hallucinations, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores and homicidal and suicidal thoughts. It belongs to a class of drugs known as quinolines, which were part of a 1956 human experiment study to investigate "toxic cerebral states," as part of the CIA's MKULTRA mind-control program."

Rule of law, my ass. I'm more ashamed to be an American now than ever in my life. Hey Obama, remember when you said you'd close down this international embarrassment on your first day in office? I remember that, and history will, too. This is what happens when you procrastinate doing the right thing - your country suffers.

Super-Roundup

There's a lot going on today...

Arabist: Well, there goes my career with the State Department. I'm pretty sure I've already voiced enough praise for Assange and his organization here to preclude me from serving my country in the diplomatic corps in the future.

This fact depresses me greatly, but also simply ignites my passion to ensure that WikiLeaks is accepted and appreciated for the vast benefit it provides to the American people. Our watchdog press have been miserably failing for pretty much the entirety of my lifetime, parroting official statements and stubbornly refusing to perform some actual critical investigation of their sources. It's mostly a big echo chamber now that sends around the latest conventional wisdom spewed by government officials or well-compensated, complacent "experts."

As a 24-year-old foreign policy junkie with a government and philosophy degree from Georgetown University, I would much rather devote my career to effecting positive change with WikiLeaks than joining an increasingly corrupt and incompetent State Department, anyway. Your loss, America.

C&L: In other news, it seems that whole economic bailout business (remember that way back when?) was more extensive than anyone realized, or was willing to admit. Even the infallible, all-powerful hedge funds were begging money from Uncle Sam. Mental note: remove my money from Bank of America before WikiLeaks destroys their tenuous reputation with a document release early next year. Deposit firmly under mattress.

WB: Moving from economic to environmental disaster in America, it seems like those Gulf shrimp may not be safe to eat after all, and much of that is due to the barely-tested chemical dispersants that were used to make all those unsightly oil slicks go away. New phrase that will soon be on your nightly news: polycyclical aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

Newshoggers: Finally, check out this provocative post from Steve Hynd, arguing that the mafia state of Russia and the banana republic that now is the United States are not so different after all...

Mr. Understandable

Ah, the vernacular joy that is Tom Friedman. No one else can sum up American foreign policy so accessibly. Read and understand.

Fun Stuff Roundup

Why so serious?

Discover: Scientists make mice grow younger. Suck it, death.

Gizmodo: Iranians hate Jews. Iranians hate when Jewish symbols randomly appear on buildings.

CNN: Lopburi monkey feast with cool pictures.

CBS: Kids using nutmeg to get high during the holidays. Just freaking legalize weed, already!

Republicans Still Against Functional Government

As usual, Senate Republicans have come out strong against having a functional, effective government today, declaring that no issue is more important to the American people right now than tax cuts and government spending, so they won't deal with any issues other than those.

They know that the American people care so much about this because the Republicans ARE "the American people" and if you're not a Republican, you're not an American person. Therefore, Congress is deadlocked, as usual. Good thing we elected these people again to ensure we strangled any national progress before it really got going...