• sheltercrow said on Jan 09, 2009....

  Stiglitz: Goldman Would Have Fired Paulson For Bailout Investments
  
  Treasury: You Never Said We Had To Make Banks More Consumer Friendly!
  
  Warren Panel Slams Treasury's "Shifting Explanations"
  
  Oversight Panel Report Slams Treasury, Again, On TARP Funds
  
  By Zachary Roth - January 9, 2009
  

• sheltercrow said on Jan 09, 2009....

  Today's Headlines
  • Israel Continues Gaza Attack as Security Council Calls for Ceasefire
  • Palestinian Toll Reaches 778; At Least 200 Children Killed
  • UN, Red Cross Suspend Relief Work After Lethal Israeli Attacks on Aid Convoys
  • WHO: 21 Palestinian Medical Workers Killed in Gaza Attack
  • UN: 30 Died in Israeli Shelling of Crowded Home
  • Carter: Israel Broke Gaza Truce
  • Protests Worldwide Decry Gaza Attack
  • Senate Affirms Support for Attack on Gaza
  • Kucinich Calls for Probe on US-Supplied Weapons to Israel
  • Report: Obama to Hold Talks with Hamas
  • 105 Arrested Protesting Oakland Police Shooting of Unarmed Man

• sheltercrow said on Jan 10, 2009....

  The Gaza Disaster
  
  
  U.S. Weaponry Facilitates Killings in Gaza
  
  By Thalif Deen
  
  The devastating Israeli firepower, unleashed largely on Palestinian civilians in Gaza during two weeks of fighting, is the product of advanced U.S. military technology. The U.S. weapons systems used by the Israelis -- including F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions -- have been provided by Washington mostly as outright military grants.
  
  US Senate Endorses Israel's War on Gaza
  
  By Jeremy R. Hammond
  
  The US Senate on Thursday passed a non-binding resolution promoted by the influential Israeli lobby AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), effectively endorsing Israel's war on Gaza. The resolution, entitled "A resolution expressing solidarity with Israel in Israel's defense against terrorism in the Gaza Strip"
  
  Why Has This Documentary, Never Been Broadcast On U.S. Media ?
  
  This is a must watch video
  
  Twenty-five years ago, I made a film called Palestine Is Still The Issue. It was about a nation of people - the Palestinians - forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United States. So in 25 years, if we're to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back.
  
  
  The Economic Disaster
  
  
  The Coming Collapse Of The The US Dollar
   
  Video Interview
  
  Barack Obama's policies will unleash a greater economic crisis than the world is now facing, believes US financial forecaster, Peter Schiff.
  
  British Gas, Israel to freeze Hamas out of $4b. gas deal
  
  Israel and the British natural gas company BG Group Plc will move ahead with controversial plans to drill for natural gas in the Gaza Marine field, despite Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip last month, The Jerusalem Post learned on Thursday.
  
  
  The Media Disaster
  
  
  Conservative media peddle a raw deal
  
  by Jamison Foser
  
  The conservative punditocracy that has spent the past eight years propping up a president who gave us an illegitimate war and leaves us with an almost unimaginably bad economic crisis apparently grows weary of defending this spectacular failure of a president. And so they have begun to shift their efforts to an easier task: trying to turn Americans against the president who ended the Great Depression, initiated the minimum wage, created Social Security, and helped defeat the Nazis.
  
  Yes, they're trying to bring Franklin Roosevelt down to George W. Bush's level. Good luck with that.
  
  On Fox News, for example, Brit Hume insisted this week that "everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed."
  
  Unless by "both sides of the spectrum," Hume means "far-right ideologues who have shows on Fox News and far-right ideologues who do not yet have shows on Fox News," he's overstating the consensus by a fair amount.
  
  Economist Paul Krugman, for example, disagrees.
  
  Krugman may not have the gravitas that comes with being Washington managing editor of Fox News, but he does hold the most recent Nobel Prize in economics. Krugman says the New Deal included "long-run achievements" that "remain the bedrock of our nation's economic stability" and "brought real relief to most Americans" and notes that "[b]y 1937, things were a lot better than they were in 1933." According to Krugman, the New Deal would have been even more successful had Roosevelt not been "eager to return to conservative budget principles."
  
  Ben Bernanke disagrees with Hume, too. Bernanke has neither a Nobel Prize nor a gig at Fox News -- but he was appointed to chair the Federal Reserve by President Bush. Bernanke wrote in his Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."
  
  So liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says the New Deal was a success, and the Bush-appointed Fed chair says the New Deal was a success. That's quite a broad spectrum of people who disagree with Brit Hume's assertion that "both sides of the spectrum" agree that the New Deal failed.
  
  Not that Hume is alone in his attacks on the New Deal. Washington Times columnist Jeffery Kuhner called it "a complete and utter failure" during an appearance on Michael Savage's radio show, in part because it "never tackled the problems of unemployment and poverty." And Pat Buchanan added that "[b]efore 1940, not once did unemployment fall below 14 percent," concluding that "economically, the New Deal was a bust."
  
  That sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Unemployment above 14 percent every year of the New Deal? What a failure!
  
  Well, maybe not. Here's a Heritage Foundation chart upon which Buchanan is likely relying for that statistic. Note that at the point Heritage identifies as the beginning of the New Deal, unemployment was higher than 35 percent. Suddenly 14 percent looks like extraordinary progress, doesn't it?
  
  But there's another problem with Buchanan's use of the 14 percent figure, as Media Matters noted: It ignores public sector jobs. Given that a significant part of the New Deal consisted of jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration, which put millions of people to work doing things like building highways and bridges, excluding public-sector jobs in order to claim that the New Deal created few jobs is simply absurd, not to mention dishonest. It boils down to saying, "If you ignore all the jobs the New Deal created, the New Deal didn't create many jobs." Well, sure. Hard to argue with that.
  
  In any case, even using Buchanan's 14 percent number, the unemployment rate dropped more than 60 percent during Roosevelt's New Deal. You might think that, given the soaring unemployment rate under fellow conservative George W. Bush -- from 4.2 percent when he took office to 7.2 percent today, a 70 percent increase -- right-wing pundits would avoid picking fights with FDR over how to reduce unemployment.
  
  But that assumes a level of honesty that simply is not in evidence. This is a crowd that claims to be shocked when it snows in January so that they can argue that global warming is a myth. They think nothing of fudging a few numbers here and there.
  
  (FDR's job creation record isn't the only aspect of his legacy taking a beating in the media. On CNN yesterday, anchor Tony Harris and correspondent Christine Romans described Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme.")
  
  The reason for the conservative media's assault on FDR is clear: With a new president facing economic crisis, conservatives want to prevent him from stimulating the economy via government spending on things like unemployment benefits and infrastructure. Such spending would not only help people who need it most, it would also do more to stimulate the economy than would the tax cuts Republicans prefer. And that's according to Mark Zandi, who was economic adviser to John McCain.
  
  So why don't conservatives want Obama to pursue such stimulus plans? Because they're rigidly opposed to government spending as a matter of ideology. Well, let me amend that: They're rigidly opposed to government spending by progressives. They're rigidly opposed to government spending on things like health care. They're wildly enthusiastic about government spending on things they like; government spending increased rapidly under Bush, just as it did under Ronald Reagan. (Just as their insistence that people have a right to be free from government interference goes by the wayside when it comes to reproductive rights or your ability to marry the person you love or to conduct telephone conversations without fear of Dick Cheney listening in via wiretap.)
  
  So how do conservatives want to fix the economy? Must be tax cuts, right? They always think tax cuts are the solution, no matter what the problem.
  
  And that's where things have gotten really strange.
  
  For years -- no, decades -- conservatives have been repeating as a mantra their complaint that Americans are taxed too darn much. Not just too much, but too often. "We're taxed when we're born, when we work, when we get married, when we die," the right likes to remind us, as though the number of taxes we pay is more important than the amount.
  
  But suddenly, many conservatives in the media seem to think there is only one kind of tax: federal income tax.
  
  That's because President-elect Obama is considering as part of his stimulus package a $500 individual tax credit. You would think conservatives would be thrilled; instead, they denounce it. Fox anchors and Pat Buchanan and Don Lambro and countless other conservatives have attacked the tax credit as a giveaway to "people who don't pay taxes."
  
  What they mean is that some people who would receive the tax credit effectively pay no federal income taxes because their income is too low. But it isn't the case that they "don't pay taxes." They pay payroll taxes and excise taxes (such as taxes on gasoline) and property taxes and sales taxes.
  
  Conservatives used to delight in enumerating the ways in which Americans are taxed. Now, in order to oppose tax cuts for those who could most use the money, those same conservatives are pretending there is only one type of tax: federal income tax. For the sake of opposing Barack Obama, and in order to keep people who most need help from getting it, these conservative commentators are actually arguing against tax cuts, disregarding years of their own rhetoric in order to do so.
  
  Set aside the inconsistency for a moment, though: The more important fact may be that in denouncing tax cuts for people who don't make enough money to pay federal income taxes, conservative commentators like Buchanan are opposing tax credits for the very people who would be most likely to spend that money, thus stimulating the economy.
  
  The conservative pundits, then, don't want to deal with the economic crisis by spending money on things like unemployment benefits and much-needed infrastructure improvements. And they don't want to address the situation by giving tax credits to the people who most need them and would be most likely to spend them (the whole point of including tax cuts in a stimulus package in the first place).
  
  So what does that leave us with? Oh, right: tax cuts for the rich.
  
  Matt Yglesias explains:
  
  
  Jeremy Pelofsky and Richard Cowan report for Reuters that "Some Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have pushed for cutting the 25 percent middle-class tax rate as a way to get money into the hands of Americans quickly." But of course conservatives always say they want to help the middle class, but they always mean they want to help multi-millionaires. And as we had occasion to observe yesterday, this proposal is no exception.
  
  
  Ben Furnas, Yglesias' colleague at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, offers more detail:
  
  
  A new analysis from the Tax Policy Center finds that this tax change would lower taxes by less than $400 for average middle-class Americans, give a $4,000 tax break to those making over $2.8 million a year, and do nothing for households making less than $40,000.
  
  For households with children the benefits are even more uneven. Families making less than $70,000 a year would see their taxes go down by an average of just $21 and those making between $70,000 and $140,000 would get even less. Households making over $600,000 with children, however, would get an average tax cut of $3,600.
  
  
  In other words, conservatives don't want to return to Franklin Roosevelt's policies, they want to continue George W. Bush's.
  
  Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

• sheltercrow said on Jan 10, 2009....

  The Economic Disaster
  
  
  Value of 2008 Bailouts Exceeds Combined Costs of All Major U.S. Wars
   
  The total value of the bailouts undertaken by the federal government in 2008 now exceeds the combined cost of every major war the United States has ever engaged in, according to a comparison of war costs calculated by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the value of the bailouts as calculated by Bloomberg News or Bianco Research.
  
  The Obama Gap
  
  By PAUL KRUGMAN
  
  “I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.”
  
  So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He’s right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump.
  
  But Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.
  
  Bear in mind just how big the U.S. economy is. Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it’s able to sell.
  
  And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this “output gap.”
  
  
  Military Spending Disaster
  
  
  Gates estimates 2009 war costs at $136 billion
   
  Defense Secretary Robert Gates says military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost almost $136 billion for the 2009 budget year that began Oct. 1 if they continue at their current pace.
  
  How the Military-industrial Complex is Destroying the USA
  
  9 Minute Video
  
  What are the forces that shape and propel American militarism? This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine. Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life?
  
  A Military Dictatorship Coming To America?
  
  By Pakistan Daily
  
  THE WORSENING ECONOMIC CRISIS has prompted the US Army War College to issue a report urging the use of military troops to contain possible civil unrest throughout America. Entitled, Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development, issued on November 4, 2008, the report argues that the US military must prepare for a “violent domestic dislocation provoked by an economic collapse.”
  
  
  Police State Disaster
  
  
  Many Americans do love their police state
   
  Unfortunately, all too many of our friends, neighbors and relations have come to relish acting like bit players in a bad Cold War film. They're more than happy to bow down to the nearest uniform so long as somebody assures them it will "keep us safe" -- from whom, it doesn't matter, though it's certainly not from overbearing authorities.
  
  
  The Gaza Disaster
  
  
  In Pictures: Carnage in Gaza: Warning - Viewers discretion advised
  
  Israeli troops kill U.N. truck driver at Gaza crossing
  
  Israeli soldiers opened fire Thursday on a truck attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Gaza Strip, killing one United Nations-contracted driver and seriously wounding another, U.N. officials said.
  
  UN agency halts Gaza operations over Israeli fire
  
  "UNRWA decided to suspend all its operations in the Gaza Strip because of the increasing hostile actions against its premises and personnel," Adnan Abu Hasna, the agency's Gaza-based spokesman, said.
  
  Petition: IDF targets ambulances
  
  Eight different human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with the High Court of Justice Wednesday, demanding that the IDF be prevented from attacking medical teams and ambulances operating in Gaza.
  
  Red Cross slams Israel over access to wounded
  
  "The ICRC believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded," the Geneva-based group said in a statement.
  
  Holocaust Denied
  
  The lying silence of those who know
  
  By John Pilger
  
  When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC.
  
  Gaza Catastrophe: Resource Conflict?
  
  Natural Gas, Palestinian Elections, and Israel’s Subversion of the ‘Peace Process’
  
   By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
  
  The current outbreak of violence cannot be understood without analysing the asymmetries in military violence between the two parties; the dynamic structure of the conflict in the context of the character of the Israeli occupation; the central role of recent discoveries of substantial natural gas reserves in Gaza; and joint Anglo-American and Israeli attempts to monopolise the lucrative (and strategic) energy resources through a political process tied to a corrupt Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party.
  

• sheltercrow said on Jan 12, 2009....

  
  The Bush Disaster
  
  Think Progress - ThinkFast: January 12, 2009 Newsletter
  
  

  President Bush has “presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades. … The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago.” Additionally, Americans’ incomes grew “more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father.”
  
  “It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter, unfortunately,” said Ed Lazear, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “In the long term, things look good. The reason things look good is this economy will rebound, and it will rebound strongly.”
  
  Roll Call reports that some top business lobbyists are privately grumbling that they lack the kind of access they had at the beginning of the Bush administration and wonder if their agendas are being taken seriously.”
  
  Barack Obama and congressional leaders “plan to move soon to block the estate tax from disappearing in 2010. … In making their case for the restoration, Democrats contend that such a large additional tax break for the rich shouldn’t go into force halfway through Mr. Obama’s proposed economic-recovery package.”
  
  President Bush will hold his final White House press conference this morning at 9:15 am. “The President will make a brief opening statement, commenting on the important role the White House press corps has in covering presidents and the White House, and then will take questions,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
  
  Prince Harry has apologized after video surfaced of him referring to a fellow soldier as “our little Paki friend” and saying another soldier wearing a head cloth made him “look like a raghead.”
  
  In a surprise visit to a “dangerous Taliban-stronghold area of Afghanistan” yesterday, Vice President-elect Biden promised U.S. support for that country’s “struggle against terrorism, drugs and corruption.” Biden explained, “I am very interested in what becomes of this region, because it affects us all.”
  
  In a new report, the GAO documents a list of “13 urgent issues requiring the attention of Barack Obama and the 111th Congress during the first year of the new administration.” The GAO put improving the image of the U.S. abroad at number 5 on the list, writing that it is “more critical than ever” that the U.S. do so.
  
  Human Rights Watch said yesterday that “Israel’s military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies.” An Israeli military spokeswoman refused to comment on the charge, saying only that the army was acting “in accordance with international law.”
  
  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) won a procedural vote yesterday in “an unusual Sunday session to advance a big package of public lands bills being held up by Republican Tom Coburn.” The 66-12 vote to take up the bill, which sets aside more than 2 million acres in nine states as wilderness, “is the latest episode in a long-running feud between Reid and Coburn.”
  
  “Federal prosecutions of immigration crimes nearly doubled” to reach “more than 70,000 immigration cases in the 2008 fiscal year,” in a move that has “siphoned resources from other crimes” and that some prosecutors call “demoralizing.” Mark Agrast, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told the New York Times that “[p]rosecutorial priorities are expected to change after President-elect Barack Obama takes office.”
  
  And finally: After eight years of loyalty, Deputy Assistant to the President Gordon Johndroe is finally breaking his silence: he doesn’t really like President Bush’s beloved dog, Barney. “I think America has been shielded from Barney somewhat,” he said. “You know Barney is fickle.” According to ABC News, Johndroe “has kept his feelings quiet, because of the president, who he says shows Barney unconditional love — whether he deserves it or not.” Last year, Karl Rove admitted that he thinks Barney — who recently bit a White House reporter — is a “lump.”
  

  
  

• sheltercrow said on Jan 14, 2009....

  TRUTHDIG ORIGINAL REPORTS:
  
  Robert Scheer on Wall Street Bandits
  "Wall Street Robber Barons Ride Again" -- Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?
  
  Ann Jones on America's Failure in Afghanistan
  "The Afghan Scam" -- The vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast after the U.S.-led invasion. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration’s real goal—to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever.
  
  "Time to Stop the Mideast Comparisons" -- It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel’s propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies—we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes—don’t realize the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza.
  
  Eugene Robinson on Bush's Blindness to His Own Failure
  "Bush’s Short View of History" -- In his eyes, there’s “no such thing as short-term history.” It’s true that some presidencies look different after a few decades. But it’s also true that presidential acts can have immediate consequences—and Bush’s eight years are seen as a nadir that will take years to recover from.
  

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