Today's Stories

December 19 - 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edition
December 19 - 21, 2008

Earning Billions By Losing Trillions

Shock and Awe Economics

By ALAN FARAGO

It was inevitable that the shock and awe we glimpsed for the past twenty years in the fast growing regions of the United States through an unsustainable boom in housing and construction would come to grief. It was born of hubris, and it continues through this day.

In The Miami Herald, Stuart Miller, CEO of Lennar Homes, the Miami-based homebuilder expresses hope that a fiscal stimulus package by the Obama administration will lift the fortunes of his company and homeowners. Lennar has suffered consecutive year losses totaling $3 billion; it has $1.1 billion in cash and also received "a $230 million tax refund" as part of an earlier intervention by the homebuilding industry, crediting to homebuilders some of the taxes paid during the fat years. (Lennar fights back in housing freefall, December 19, 2008) And it wants more.

CEO Miller told the Herald, “… home prices are in a ‘freefall’, and the only way to break the downward spiral is a federal government stimulus package.”

But largesse from the federal government—the same government that Lennar and fellow homebuilders bullied when it came to fighting growth curbs through environmental regulation and by throttling regulations governing the issuance of debt, insurance and mortgages-- has a hollow, devalued ring to it as eight years of George W. Bush unwinds to a dismal end, removing bubble gum from under the White House desks on the way out and keys to Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress in an envelope by the door.

Yesterday President-elect Obama sought to dampen the flames of anxiety with a cool, calm and collected wartime demeanor. Responding to the deepening revelations of Wall Street fraud earning billions while losing trillions, he called on all Americans to return to the ethical behavior we expect of adults; not just through regulation but by moral values.

That is all well and good, as fear of deflation see-saws with fear of inflation; the confidence of ordinary investors has been badly shaken to navigate the kind of long, protracted recession/depression/crisis that Lennar and its $1.2 billion will ride out; its corporate values intact.

The Financial Times writes that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke "has not merely slashed the federal funds rate to below 0.25 percent. He has lent freely to the banks against undisclosed but probably toxic collateral. Now he is buying securities in the open market. The result has been an explosion of the Fed's balance sheet and of the monetary base. With assets approaching $2.263 billion and capital of less than $40 billion, the Fed increasingly resembles a public hedge fund, leveraged at more than 50:1." (The Age of Obligation, December 19, 2008)

So, what, then are the lessons since the Reagan Revolution? If we had truly organized ourselves by Reagan "values", filling mega-churches and supporting elected officials devoted to "free market" corporate fundamentalism, how is this a rational outcome unless the preachers of virtue were thieves?

"The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I've never been asked before: 'So, just how corrupt is America?'" This is how Tom Friedman's latest column in The New York Times begins. (The Great Unraveling, December 16, 2008)

I wonder if Americans are ready to understand the full scope of the dilemma. I'm not sure Friedman gets it right, either: "Far from being built on best practices," he describes the Wall Street fraud, "... this legal Ponzi scheme was built on the mortgage brokers, bond bundlers, rating agencies, bond sellers and homeowners all working on the I.B.G. principle: “I’ll be gone” when the payments come due or the mortgage has to be renegotiated." But that's not all.

Wall Street greed was the big gear driving a whole system of smaller gears, all the way down to property rights activists in bankers' wing tips; turning farmland into suburban sprawl one hundred acres at a time and becoming wealthier by load of limerock fill in wetlands.

If you have ever spent time trying to influence a zoning hearing to protect your community -- to persuade community councils or planning advisory boards or county commissioners-- you know full well that what drives Lennar and fellow inflaters of asset bubbles is fealty to the law of predetermined outcomes that tilts the playing field toward behavior that, in its best light, is unethical.

The housing boom in fast growing states like Florida was a feast for special interests connected to Wall Street. Anyone else, from any other class of interests, for instance non-profit environmental groups, were given a seat at the table if they "played ball" and acted nice but otherwise played jester, relegated by the politically powerful to kicking and clawing, often at each other, for scraps fallen from the table.

It is important to hold this picture in mind, when reading The New York Times, "Wall Street Profits Were a Mirage, but the Huge Bonuses Were Real." (December 18, 2008) "Back in New York, Mr. Kim’s team was eagerly bundling risky home mortgages into bonds. One of the last deals they put together that year was called “Costa Bella,” or beautiful coast — a name that recalls Pebble Beach. The $500 million bundle of loans, a type of investment known as a collateralized debt obligation, was managed by Mr. Gross’s Pimco. Merrill Lynch collected about $5 million in fees for concocting Costa Bella, which included mortgages originated by First Franklin."

I don't know the specific platted subdivisions whose grid lines delimit mortgages packaged into "Costa Bella", and the Times doesn't say: but I can take a good guess: the same subdivisions that comprise Costa Bella's can be found behind high stucco walls off any turnpike exit in Florida. From the air, they look like fields of Mediterranean tiled roofs fixed by the square mile. And from the air, too, you can see the lifeless water features that pass for amenities or "flood control structures", depending on the audience; fooled consumers, regulators, elected officials or all of the above.

What fattened Wall Street was called "what the market wants". It was what the market wants, the same way as what tobacco and sugar said the market wanted-- products to make Americans passive consumers of danger and risk; toxic to public health, to the environment, and last but not least-- the premise that an economy can exist on debt-driven consumption without generating of real growth in the economy.

Wall Street paydays weren't made by "what the market wants": they were made by what they could finance under the lightest touch of supervision and regulation their campaign contributions could buy. They built structured financial instruments around any forms of debt they could lay their hands on: home mortgages, car loans, student loans, credit card loans, loans based on loans based on insurance, swaps involving phantom products to offset real liabilities chopped, sliced and diced in a thousand directions and enriching their originators every step and every trade along the way.

The housing boom ground the public interest into the dust in Florida and other fast growing parts of the nation; wetlands plowed under with no compunction but avoidance of regulation, beaches cleared for sandy ribbons printed with condominiums like those built by WCI Communities—whose former chair, Al Hoffman, ran both George W. and Jeb Bush’s finance committees, Army Corps projects filled and done to protect sand here, losing sand there, coral reefs despoiled by clouds of sand and nutrients, metering and science dodged, streams polluted, estuaries over-taxed by fresh water demands or inputs: an entire system of living out of balance, out of scale, out of reach of citizens, and built on sand.

“It’s an unstoppable force!”, Hoffman crowed of suburban sprawl to the Washington Post in 2002.

One of the most false moments of the Bush presidency was the appeal by the president to volunteerism as the housing boom and asset bubbles pushed the ship of state onto the shallow reef of greed and great expectations. If you tried to "volunteer" by offering your time to go to public zoning meetings, to charitable organizations that scrounged for exhausted wage earners to participate in a civil society, in particular to protect a neighborhood stream or the Everglades, you know exactly what it meant to stand up to the shock and awe campaign that unfolds here:

"... Costa Bella, like so many other C.D.O.’s, was filled with loans that borrowers could not repay. Initially part of it was rated AAA, but Costa Bella is now deeply troubled. The losses on the investment far exceed the money Merrill collected for putting the deal together."

Here's what happened in Florida, the state where US Senator Mel Martinez found his way to the top of the political ladder through careful cultivation of developers who originated the housing asset bubble. At the time, he was Secretary of HUD and explained to a January 2003 audience of the National Association of Home Builders in Las Vegas:

"We also must work in close partnership to dispel the myth that our nation is experiencing a "housing bubble." ... Bubbles of course do burst, but the housing market is not in the same category of other weaker and less competitive sectors of the economy… this Administration is making it easier for people to purchase their own homes - a change that will help drive home development and sales. And, it will help more minorities become homeowners.”

The New York Times goes on: "By the time Costa Bella ran into trouble, the Merrill bankers who had devised it had collected their bonuses for 2006. Mr. Kim’s fixed-income unit generated more than half of Merrill’s revenue that year, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. As a reward, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Kim paid nearly a third of Merrill’s $5 billion to $6 billion bonus pool to the 2,000 professionals in the division.

Mr. O’Neal himself was paid $46 million, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm and data provider in California. Mr. Kim received $35 million. About 57 percent of their pay was in stock, which would lose much of its value over the next two years, but even the cash portions of their bonus were generous: $18.5 million for Mr. O’Neal, and $14.5 million for Mr. Kim, according to Equilar. Mr. Kim and his deputies were given wide discretion about how to dole out their pot of money. Mr. Semerci was among the highest earners in 2006, at more than $20 million. Below him, Mr. Mallach and Mr. Lattanzio each earned more than $10 million. They were among just over 100 people who accounted for some $500 million of the pool, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter."</span>

The truism goes: "It takes a village to raise a child." These days we learn, "It takes a Depression to raze a village." At companies like Lennar, still trying to plant a small city of 18,000 called Parkland within shouting distance of the Everglades, the values take back seat to clamor for bailouts and aid. If the American village emerges from the brink of insolvency, it will be through resourcefulness, not just fiscal stimulus.

What is so worrisome is that we are not yet there, by half.

Alan Farago, who writes on the environment and politics from Coral Gables, Florida, and can be reached at alanfarago@yahoo.com

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