Corporatism and Fascism

Nancy Pelosi: A Hawk in Donkey's Clothing?
By Stephen Zunes | Alternet
Pelosi has a history of voting for pro-war measures and supporting pro-war candidates. Her current behaviors should come as no surprise.

Congressional approval to continue funding of the ongoing war in Iraq, a major segment of the $90 billion supplemental appropriate package, passed on Tuesday thanks to heavy-handed pressure by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., against anti-war Democrats.

This has led to great consternation here in her home district in San Francisco, where anti-war sentiment remains stronger than ever. The timing of the measure is particularly upsetting given that California's record budget deficit has resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers, the incipient closure of almost all of our state parks and draconian cuts in health care, housing, public transportation,the environment, social services and other critical programs. While unwilling or unable to get Congress to provide some financial support for the crisis here at home, our most powerful member of Congress was quite willing to work hard to insure continued financial support for war.

What few people outside of San Francisco realize is that despite representing one of the most liberal congressional districts in the country, Pelosi has been a strong supporter of the Iraq war for most of past seven years. Read more.

Hi Doug, Doug and Tom of "Wake Up Daytona" on WELE 1380 AM,

I've been listening in and am glad to hear you guys talking about the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and "the Rule Of Law" on your program. Hopefully you will take the time to watch the following short YouTube videos from the recent gathering in Tampa of the Florida Oathkeepers and the speeches given by the national commander of The Patriots, Lt. Col. Robert M. Bowman, and the coordinator for the Orlando chapter of We Are Change Florida, Joshua Parrish.

Obama's Financial Reform Proposal: A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control
By Stephen Lendman

When politicians plan reform, it's wise to be skeptical and hold on to your wallets. So fixing the economy by bailing out Wall Street is wrecking it, and Obama's proposed health care reform taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, avoids the most vital solutions, and leaves a broken system in place.

Now there's "Financial Regulatory Reform, A New Foundation: Rebuilding Financial Supervision and Regulation" - announced June 17 with Obama saying he'll send Congress a plan to create new government agencies, give the private banking cartel Federal Reserve more power, and address five major problems needing regulatory and legislative measures to fix.

Addressing business executives in the White House East Room, he said:

Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order:" Part I
By Stephen Lendman

For over 30 years, F. William Engdahl has been a leading researcher, economist, and analyst of the New World Order with extensive writing to his credit on energy, politics, and economics. He contributes regularly to business and other publications, is a frequent speaker on geopolitical, economic and energy issues, and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Engdahl's two previous books include "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" explaining that America's post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world's reserve currency along with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources.

Medical Conflicts of Interest and the Glass Houses
Health Care Overhaul Must Start With Doctors, One Physician Notes
Opinion by Dr. Nortin Hadler | ABCNews.com

Health care reform is focused on the quality of care, its accessibility and its cost. The debate is heated and likely to intensify in the months to come. It is also loud, so as to drown out debate on a focus for reform far more critical than impending fiscal bankruptcy.

There is debate on the degree to which health care in the United States is ethically bankrupt, and what to do about it. The Institute of Medicine and nearly every other professional organization in the health arena has chimed in. Academic health centers and unaffiliated hospitals are racing to write or expand policy statements on conflicts of interest in regard to clinical activities. Read more.

Where Are They Now? Ex-Bush Loyalists Cash In
By Nick Turse | TomDispatch.com

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.

While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies," a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.

Tyson Foods To Pay Maximum Fine Following Employee Death | RTT News

Tyson Foods Inc. (TSN: News ) is being ordered to pay the maximum fine for violating worker safety regulations, with the violations ultimately resulting in the death of a worker at the company's River Valley Animal Foods plant in Texarkana, Arkansas.

The company was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Arkansas to pay $500,000, the maximum criminal fine as well as serve one-year probation.

According to the court documents filed in the case, Tyson used high-pressure steam processors called hydrolyzers at plants to convert feathers into meal.Read more.

Audit Finds That U.S. Overpaid Blackwater
By Yochi J. Dreazen | WSJ

A government audit found that the State Department overpaid the contract-security firm once known as Blackwater
Worldwide by tens of millions of dollars because the company failed to properly staff its teams in Iraq.

The report didn't identify any specific security breaches, but it said the State Department should have withheld at least $55 million in payments to the company because of the shortfalls.

The audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and the State Department's Inspector General said the firm didn't employ enough guards, medics, marksmen and dog handlers to fully man the teams, which were responsible for protecting the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and other high-level officials.

The failure to consistently field the right numbers of guards endangered the U.S. officials whom the company was being paid to protect, the report concluded. Read more.

Senatorial Privilege? Sen. Dick Durbin Cashed Out His Stocks and Shares After Meeting With Paulson and Bernanke on Economic Crisis
By Jonathan Turley | Jonathan Turley.org

Sen. Dick Durbin, the second most senior democrat in the Senate, cashed out his stock the day after meeting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Durbin took the money and invested much of the $115,000 in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The transfers occurred on Sept. 19th. The prior day he met with Paulson and Bernanke on the banking crisis.

I have long advocated a change in the ethics rules to require blind trusts for all members of Congress. Currently, members can make killings on the market by using their access to policy changes and special tips. Read more.

Momentum Builds For Ron Paul's "Fed Transparency" Act
Joe Weisenthal | Business Insider

For years, Ron Paul has been a lone voice in Congress, questioning the wisdom of the Federal Reserve -- both its various chairmans and the institution itself. His dogged questioning of Alan Greenspan, and then Ben Bernanke, make for great TV (otherwise, those hearings are total snoozefests).

But now, as America wakes up to its dire financial situation and average people talk about things like "fractional reserve lending", the gold standard, and Zimbabwe-like inflation, he's finally getting some momentum.

It's baby steps, of course. Paul is the sponsor of the Federal Reserve Transparency act of 2009, which demands a GAO audit of the Fed, and a full report to Congress sometime next year. And it's gaining steam. It already has 175 co-sponsors in the House, and now a major Democrat, Rep. Alan Grayson (ironically, the same one who's proposing that stupid France vacation bill we mentioned this morning has joined on, and is urging his party colleagues to join them. Read more.

Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam
By Marjorie Cohn | MarjorieCohn.com

Last week, the Bureau of the IADL, meeting in Hanoi, presented President Nguyen Minh Triet of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with the final decision of the Tribunal. The judges found the U.S. government and the chemical companies guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ecocide during the illegal U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. We recommended that the Agent Orange Commission be established in Vietnam to assess the damages suffered by the people and destruction of the environment, and that the U.S. government and the chemical companies provide compensation for the damage and destruction.

"A Perfect Storm for Disaster" Brewing With Washington's "Unprecedented" Shadow Army
By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports

I’ve been reading through the hot-off-the-presses, exciting 100+ page report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting: “At What Cost? Contingency Contracting In Iraq and Afghanistan.” There have been several good pieces that covered the Congressional hearings related to this report, so I thought I would just post some of the more important excerpts from the report. One general note: The Commission, which was created due to the diligent efforts of Senators Jim Webb and Claire McCaskill, has been doing some incredibly important work digging deep into the corruption, waste, abuse, fraud, etc of the US war contracting system. The statute that created the commission “requires the Commission to assess a number of factors related to wartime contracting, including the extent of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement of wartime contracts. The Commission has the authority to hold hearings and to refer to the Attorney General any violation or potential violation of law it identifies in carrying out its duties.”...

The full report can be downloaded on the website of the Commission on Wartime Contracting. Read more.

US House to debate Ron Paul’s ‘Audit the Fed’ bill
By Stephen C. Webster | Raw Story

“To understand how unwise it is to have the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the magnitude of the privileges they have. They have been given the power to create money, by the trillions, and to give it to their friends, under any terms they wish, with little or no meaningful oversight or accountability. Thus the loudest arguments against greater transparency are likely to come from those friends, and understandably so.”

After months of activism and lobbying by Congressman Ron Paul’s supporters, House Resolution 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, will move out of committee to be debated by the full House of Representatives.

In a show of cross-party unity, Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich became the bill’s 218th co-sponsor, pushing it over the threshold for debate in Congress. Read more.

Check here to see whether your House Representative has signed on to the bill yet.

Oil and Indians Don't Mix
by Greg Palast | Friday, June 12, 2009 | For Air America Radio's Ring of Fire

There's an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo-them away. Shoo-ing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware. Lately the Natives are shoo-ing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government's murder of more than a dozen rainforest residents who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

Again and again I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud. Here are a few pit-stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly's oil tank in Oklahoma. Here's the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.

Stanlee Ann wasn't Koch's only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.

Koch, according to the tape, would, "giggle" with joy over the records of the theft. Koch's own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the Native lands.

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators. Read more.

KBR Wasted Billions in Troop-Support Work, Panel Says

KBR Inc. wasted billions of dollars through inefficiencies, lax oversight and poor management of its contract to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an independent, bipartisan panel.

The contract -- to provide housing, food, laundry, mail delivery and fuel for U.S. troops -- was ultimately worth $31.7 billion, with most of the work being done in Iraq and Kuwait.

“The services could have been delivered for billions of dollars less,” the commission stated in a report released today at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform’s national security panel. “Substantial evidence supports the view” that KBR’s services “cost too much.”

The Wartime Contracting Commission, in its first report since Congress established it last year, gives the most critical assessment to date of the contract that Houston-based KBR, then a unit of Halliburton Co., won in December 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Read more.

Below is an essay which Thomas Paine wrote yesterday, on the 200th anniversary of his death; he generously approached me to inquire as to whether I would be willing to transcribe it for your readers and others who might benefit from his posthumous words of wisdom.~~Sean Madden

I, Thomas Paine, Two Hundred Years Hence*

It is Monday, 8 June 2009, two hundred years to the day since my miserable death, though I should add that while death was, indeed, miserable it was a swim in the sea compared with my life as it finally turned out. However, I have been dead for too long to want to harp on those wretched final years of my life—the assassination of my character, of my person, the unspeakable hypocrisy of it all, my freefall from grace and renown, the poverty, ill health, my seeking refuge in a bottle. But if there remains even one son or daughter of Liberty and Democracy in this present day—that is, the person to and for whom I write, as opposed to those who celebrate the cartoon Tom Paine, never thinking to read my works or to carry forth the struggle—then I should think that such a son or daughter of Liberty is unlikely to protest my assuming the privilege of penning this brief posthumous account. If not a single such person remains who is, in word and deed, committed to Liberty and Democracy—the only fit state for a human being who wishes to live as a whole person and who refuses to be infantilised—then rather than to assume the privilege, if there’s none worthy to grant it, I shall steal it back as rightfully my own.

I can quite quickly sum up what befell me and what has befallen countless other revolutionaries over the course of history; however, I do so not out of a desire or need to explain myself, but rather as a word of warning to those whom I consider my rightful progeny. My task is made easier by the fact that my rightful progeny, by the nature of the task which lies before them, shall already have apprised themselves of the historical accounts of revolutions, failed and successful, if in fact there has ever been an example of the latter. In brief, revolutionaries with integrity—those who hold, still, to the original stated aims of the revolution, the aims of Liberty and Democracy—are, at the point of the revolution’s failure (as opposed to the success touted in history books), quickly stripped of their honours, hollowed out, and hung safely out to die so that the ‘revolutionaries’ who were merely playing a part can usurp The Powers That Were to become those That Be. This perverted outcome must be avoided, and it shall not be avoided unless those who are in the struggle forever keep this near-inevitable outcome in mind, day in and day out, and for ever more, as the innumerable false actors lie constantly in wait.

Alabama Decisions Illustrate Abuse of Judicial Power
By Andrew Kreig | Huffington Post

The plight of litigants who face a biased judge is illustrated by the track record of a prominent Alabama federal judge, as well by major recent decisions requiring new trials in West Virginia and Georgia courts.

The track record of Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller of Montgomery, Alabama shows that he continues to supervise cases compromised by his personal, financial or political interests despite his promise at his 2002 confirmation hearing to recuse himself from any conflicts.

Settlement Reached in Human Rights Cases Against Royal Dutch/Shell | Press Release
On Eve of Trial, Settlement Agreements Provide $15.5 Million for Compensation to Nigerian Human Rights Activists and to Establish Trust Fund

New York, June 8, 2009 — Today, the parties in Wiwa v. Shell agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

The settlement, whose terms are public, provides a total of $15.5 million. These funds will compensate the 10 plaintiffs, who include family members of the deceased victims; establish a Trust intended to benefit the Ogoni people; and cover a portion of plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs. The settlement is only on behalf of the individual plaintiffs for their individual claims. It does not resolve outstanding issues between Shell and the Ogoni people, and the plaintiffs did not negotiate on behalf of the Ogoni people.

Wartime Contracting Report: We Have Big, Costly Problems
By Robert O'Harrow, Jr. | Government, Inc. Blog

As promised, here's the new report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the organization formed by Congress to examine where all the money went.

It's a sad reminder about just how bad the contracting system has been in recent years, and all the billions that have been wasted because of poor oversight, poor planning and plain old corruption.

"The environment in Iraq and Afghanistan has been and continues to be susceptible to waste, fraud, and abuse," the report said.

The report, called "At What Cost? Contingency Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan," contains the interim findings of the commission, which will issue a final report next year. It underscores the gloomy finding about the troubled federal procurement system from a host of other analysis in recent years.

It'll be the subject of a hearing today by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's national security and foreign affairs subcommittee. Read more.

How Much Money Has The Health Care Industry Contributed to Rep. Charles Range (D-NY)?

Click "Read more" to see contributions from the Health Care Industry to Rep. Rangel.

Global weapons spending hits record levels
By Richard Norton-Taylor | Guardian.co.UK

• US accounts for more than half total increase to $1.4tn
• China now second biggest spender in world league table

Worldwide spending on weapons has reached record levels amounting to well over $1tn last year, a leading research organisation reported today.

Global military expenditure has risen by 45% over the past decade to $1.46tn, according to the latest annual Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

Though the US accounts for more than half the total increase, China and Russia nearly tripled their military expenditure over the decade, with China now second only to the US in the military expenditure league table. Read more.