Undernews For March 18, 2009

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18 March 2009

WORD
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. - Chief Seattle

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. - Theodore Roosevelt
FLOTSAM & JETSAM

TWO ERAS OF DEMOCRATS
Sam Smith

Egregious as the bonuses being given the AIG crowd are, they are a miniscule part of the bailout and while they need to be dealt with, we shouldn't obsess over them.

Politicians and the media love to get us in a furor over minor segments of a much larger problem, in part because they can understand bits and pieces while the real crisis leaves them and others befuddled.

Far more serious problems with the bailout include the inordinate amount dedicated to ineffective tax cuts, questions concerning the larger bank bailout, the elitist bias of some of the measures (epitomized by four times as much for high speed business class rail riders than for ordinary coach riders and little at all for bus riders), the low level of aid to high job producing small business, and - perhaps worst of all - the small number of new jobs anticipated - even by the Obama administration.

In fact, Obama's job projections are about the same as has occurred under the average Democratic administration since the 1940s. While this is approximately twice as many as Republican presidents have been able to produce, it falls far short of what is needed during the worst economic disaster since the great depression.

Why so few jobs?

It doesn't seem so much a political matter as a cultural one, a massive shift in our ability to solve problems as American life has become more institutionalized, technocratic and layered with bureaucracy.

Franklin Roosevelt managed to fight the depression with a White House staff smaller than that Mrs. Clinton's when she was First Lady. He fought World War II with less staff than Al Gore when he was vice president.

During the Clinton years, on the other hand, Lars-Erick Nelson wrote in the New York Daily News, "On Friday, I telephoned the Pentagon press office and told the colonel who answered the phone that I needed information on duplication in the armed forces. He replied: "You want the other press office."

A decade and a half later, it's just gotten worse. A National Park Service official explained to me how his agency was reacting to the stimulus. One problem: if you start a new project you have to go through a lengthy environment review, so you put many of these aside for the time being and concentrate on things like repairing park watch towers - things that are already there that no one has to approve.

In late summer of 1933, when it appeared that the National Recovery Administration would not be able to provide adequate employment, FDR aide Harry Hopkins began laying the groundwork for a jobs program. Hopkins -- who had pledged to himself to put four million people to work within four weeks -- fell somewhat short. In the first four weeks only 2.8 million workers were put on the government payroll. Hopkins didn't reach the four million goal until January.

In other words, Harry Hopkins got the same number of people employed in four weeks as Obama has promised within two years.

It was a different time in other ways. For example, Democrats didn't apologize for the federal government as June Hopkins explained in Presidential Studies Quarterly:

"One hot summer day in 1935, federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins presented his plan for alleviating the effects of the Great Depression to a group of shirt-sleeved Iowa farmers, not noted for their liberal ideals. As Hopkins began to describe how government-sponsored jobs on public projects would provide both wages for the unemployed and a stimulus for foundering businesses, a voice shouted out the question that was on everyone's mind: 'Who's going to pay for all that?' . . .

"'You are,' Hopkins shouted, 'and who better? Who can better afford to pay for it. Look at this great university. Look at these fields, these forests and rivers. This is America, the richest country in the world. We can afford to pay for anything we want. And we want a decent life for all the people in this country. And we are going to pay for it."

With the capitulation to the vocabulary and values of the right under Clinton, the Democrats have lost their capacity for progressive policy and action. Today, Obama is far more interested in what the GOP thinks than in what imaginative progressives in Congress and elsewhere might be advocating. A post-partisan depression has settled in. Worse, the solutions that come out of this approach tend to ones that no one really wants.

To use the archaic language of the party's earlier days, we need jobs and business - not stunningly non-specific stimuli and fiscal packages, but things people can see and feel, leading them to invest in America again as well.

Because the New Deal understood this, not only did it create employment it built or repaired 200 swimming pools and 103 golf courses, 3,700 playgrounds, 40,000 schools, 12 million feet of sewer pipe, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 15,000 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges and 125,110 public buildings, and thousands of miles of highways and roads. Add to that the programs for youth and for artists and writers and the result was something it is hard for us to even imagine today.

And it wasn't just the New Deal. Among its opponents was Governor Huey Long of Louisiana who thought Roosevelt too conservative. Long, in one four year term, reports Wikipedia, increased the mileage of paved highways in Louisiana: "By 1936, Long had [doubled] the state's road system. He built 111 bridges, and started construction on the first bridge over the lower Mississippi. He built the new Louisiana State Capitol, at the time the tallest building in the South. All of these construction projects provided thousands of much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. . .

"Long's free textbooks, school-building program, and free busing improved and expanded the public education system, and his night schools taught 100,000 adults to read. He greatly expanded funding for LSU, lowered tuition, established scholarships for poor students, and founded the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. He also doubled funding for the public Charity Hospital System, built a new Charity Hospital building for New Orleans, and reformed and increased funding for the state's mental institutions. His administration funded the piping of natural gas to New Orleans and other cities and built the seven-mile Lake Pontchartrain seawall and New Orleans airport. Long slashed personal property taxes and reduced utility rates. His repeal of the poll tax in 1935 increased voter registration by 76 percent in one year."

FDR got his pressure from the left; Obama gets his from the right thanks to the unwillingness of progressives to push him. FDR could take action without a gang of media manipulators telling him to be careful. There wasn't an inordinate pyramid of bureaucracy chipping away at every decision before it went into action. Liberals had more passion than status and really cared about those at the bottom of the American heap.

Are we trapped forever in this contemporary paradigm? Or can we face what has happened to us and start to change it? Can liberals once again represent the ordinary American or can such Americans only expect a few nods in their direction? Can we condemn a whole class of citizens because of what we fear some rightwing Republicans will say if we do something real to help them?

This is a time when status, style and semantics won't save us. Reality has entered the house of America without knocking. It can't be spun away. And time is running out.

PAGE ONE MUST
RECOVERED HISTORY

6000 YEAR OLD CAVE PAINTINGS FOUND IN PERU
BRITISH SCHOOL SCANDAL RAISES CONCERN OVER U.S. TESTING OBSESSION
Guardian, UK - An investigation into the marking of Sats by the government's own exams agency has revealed that nearly half of grades awarded for some papers are wrong, prompting new calls for the controversial tests taken by every 11-year-old in England to be scrapped.

A review of the marking of test papers by the Qualification and Curriculum Authority found that in English writing tests taken at aged 14, 44% of grades awarded were wrong, in reading up to a third were faulty and in science up to one in six were wrong. Math tests were found to be accurate. . .

Ministers abolished tests for 14-year-olds last year in the wake of the collapse of the marking process last summer. But they insisted tests for 11-year-olds should stay, setting up an expert group to consider their future. . .

Previous research by academics has suggested that up to one in three results are inaccurate but the fact that this research was conducted by the government's own exam agency will put pressure on ministers to . . .

The QCA employed ordinary markers to re-mark a sample of test papers taken in 2006 and 2007, with senior examiners providing a second opinion to see whether the levels, or grades, awarded to pupils were accurate. The results confirmed longheld concerns teachers have had about accuracy, particularly about English results, which involve longer written answers leaving more scope for error. . .

A separate paper from the QCA revealed that record numbers of schools had appealed the results of 150,000 papers taken last year when the marking process collapsed under the management of a new company, ETS. Some 22,000 appeals resulted in new levels being awarded. But it said there was "no particular cause for concern" about the quality of last year's marks as a result. . .

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers said that Sats had now been proved unviable and should be scrapped. "The government's Sats policy is not viable. There's no reason to expect that the situation is any different in primary schools."

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "We always feared that the assessment house for 14-year-olds was built on sand and this proves it.". . .

Wikipedia - Educational Testing Service (or ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, operating on an annual budget of approximately $1.1 billion on a proforma basis in 2007. ETS develops various standardized tests primarily in the United States for K-12 and higher education, but they also administer tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language TOEFL, Test of English for International Communication TOEIC, and Graduate Record Examination GRE internationally. . .

In England and Wales ETS Europe was contracted to operate the National Curriculum assessments on behalf of the government. ETS took over this role from Edexcel in 2008. The first year of their operation was struck by a number of problems, including the late arrival of scripts to examiners, a database of student entries being unavailable, and countrywide reports of problems with the marking of the papers. . . Their contract with the QCA was terminated in August 2008: ETS is to pay back L19.5m and cancel invoices worth L4.6m.

ETS has been criticized for being a "highly competitive business operation that is as much multinational monopoly as nonprofit institution".

Problems administering England's national tests in 2008 by ETS Europe were the subject of thousands of complaints recorded by the Times Educational Supplement. Their operations were also described as a "shambles" in the UK Parliament, where a financial penalty was called for. Complaints included papers not being marked properly, or not being marked at all and papers being sent to the wrong schools or lost completely. . .

The Better Business Bureau gives ETS the grade of 'F'.

Guardian, UK - Sixty teachers and teaching assistants helped pupils cheat in their GCSEs or A-levels or were guilty of some other "malpractice" in exam halls last summer, the exam watchdog revealed. Of the 60 exam [overseers] caught, 42 were found to be helping pupils in the middle of examsSome 1,618 students brought "unauthorised" material into an exam room, such as a mobile phone. Just over a quarter - 1,037 - of the incidents of malpractice were for plagiarism, failure to acknowledge sources, copying from other candidates or collusion. Some 476 students were penalised for being disruptive.

Guardian,UK, February 2009 - The Cambridge review of primary education has been three years in the making. More than 70 academics have produced 29 reports with thousands of children, parents, teachers and head teachers taking part in surveys across the country. It presents a damning view of the primary curriculum, which it suggests has failed generations of children, as well as a blueprint for a radical new kind of schooling.

What is wrong with the curriculum?

There is an over-emphasis on the skills of reading, writing and maths at the expense of other subjects, the report claims. This limits children's enjoyment of school and risks severely compromising their natural curiosity, imagination and love of learning, it says.

National testing at 11 has meant schools focus on short-term learning at the cost of children's long-term development. The most "conspicuous casualties" are arts and the humanities. Learning that requires time for talking, problem solving and exploring ideas is sacrificed for what it describes as a "memorization and recall" style of learning.

There is a false belief, it claims, that a focus on basic skills combined with a breadth of learning covering a full range of subjects cannot be achieved. This is a false debate, according to the report's lead author, Robin Alexander, of Cambridge University, who cites evidence that schools that blend literacy and numeracy into the wider teaching of other subjects often get the best results. . .

Guardian, UK - Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognize it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers. . .

He will claim that schools have concentrated on a very narrow definition of intelligence: the logical and the linguistic, at the expense of cultural, physical, social, personal, moral and spiritual intelligence. He will add that we should be asking: "Not how intelligent is a child but rather, how is the child intelligent?"

Seldon will argue the case for bringing back playing fields, placing orchestras and music at the heart of the curriculum, and offering dance, physical exercise, outdoor adventure and challenge to everyone.

"Dickens's message is as timely and urgent for us in 2009 as it was in 1854," Seldon will argue. "It is that soulless, loveless, desiccated education damages children for a lifetime. Education should be an opening of the heart and mind. That is what education means; it is this, or it is nothing."
THE COST OF DISSIN' LABOR UNIONS
Tim Rutten, LA Times - When the auto companies went to the Bush administration asking for help, the first conditions imposed on them were executive pay cuts and renegotiation of their union contracts to bring down labor costs. The United Auto Workers went along because it wanted to save the firms and the jobs of the workers they employ.

What we're essentially being asked to believe is that employment contracts involving hardworking men and women on Detroit's assembly lines are somehow less legally binding -- less "sacred" in the current rhetorical argot -- than those protecting a bunch of cowboy securities traders living in Connecticut. When Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, piously tells us that the administration's hands are tied because we all must abide "by the rule of law," perhaps it's time to ask: What rule and for whom?

For years, the smart guys on Wall Street have convinced a growing number of Americans that organized labor is an impediment to economic progress, an unacceptable "cost" in a globalized system of production, a quaint social fossil from the era of mills and smokestacks. If there's a lesson to be gleaned from the current crisis, however, it's that when the chips are down, organized labor is a far more responsible social actor than the snatch-and-run characters who fancy themselves financiers.

The implications of this are wider than most of us imagine, and they deserve to be considered. Today, slightly less than 8% of all American workers belong to a union. Half a century ago, when more than one in three American workers were unionized, the middle class was growing -- not simply because organized labor won better wages and benefits for its members but because the presence of a vigorous labor movement pulled everybody else's compensation up as well.

As union membership dropped, middle-class incomes -- and average families' share of the nation's wealth -- stagnated and then fell. Families compensated for their reduced opportunity at first by sending both parents into the workplace, then by working more hours and, more recently, by simply going deeper and deeper into debt. At the same time, the incomes and share of the national wealth held by people like the AIG securities traders grew exponentially.
HOMELESSNESS UP A THIRD
Stateline - Nearly 700 homeless families in Massachusetts are living in hotels at state expense because emergency shelters are full. New York City saw a 40 percent rise in families seeking shelter since the recession began. . . And tent cities have sprung up throughout Hawaii and in Sacramento, Calif., Reno, Nev., Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and other cities. .

President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package includes $1.5 billion to address the problem, but officials say it’s not enough to cover the cost of housing for millions of families in crisis.

As many as 3.4 million Americans are likely to experience homelessness this year – a 35 percent increase since the recession started in December 2007 – and a majority will be families with children, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. . . .
DIEBOLD ADMITS SYSTEM IN 31 STATES HAS MAJOR PROBLEM
Wired - Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day. The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.

The revelation confirmed that a problem uncovered by Threat Level in January, and reiterated in a report released two weeks ago by the California secretary of state's office, has widespread implications for election jurisdictions around the country that use any version of the company's Global Election Management System software to tabulate votes. The GEMS software is used to tabulate votes cast on every Premier/Diebold touch-screen or optical-scan machine, and is used in more than 1,400 election districts in 31 states. Maryland and Georgia use Premier/Diebold systems exclusively, therefore the GEMS software counts every vote statewide.

"Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the non-profit California Voter Foundation. "The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems. They and the jurisdictions that have used paperless voting machines have repeatedly pointed to the audit logs as the primary security mechanism and 'fail-safe' for any glitch that might occur on machines.

"To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security," Alexander said.
WHAT'S REALLY BEHIND THE AIG BAILOUT
Eliot Spitzer, Slate - Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars? For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars - that is, our dollars - flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.
TSA INTRODUCES MORE HASSLES FOR PASSENGERS
USA Today - A new, more aggressive effort by airport screeners aims to halt randomly selected passengers for a security check just before they step onto their departing plane, according to a government memo obtained by USA Today. . .

Passengers can be selected at random or for suspicious behavior, according to a TSA memo. The program primarily targets riskier flights, according to the memo, which doesn't specify how flights are singled out. .

The new effort raises concerns about passengers feeling hassled and flights being delayed. "I hope the TSA can work with airports and airlines to ensure that flights that may already be late aren't targeted," said Christopher Bidwell, security chief for the Airports Council International trade group.
FORMER SENIOR U.S. OFFICIALS URGE TALKS WITH HAMAS
Boston Globe - "Nine former senior US officials and one current adviser are urging the Obama administration to talk with leaders of Hamas to determine whether the militant group can be persuaded to disarm and join a peaceful Palestinian government, a major departure from current US policy.

"The bipartisan group, which includes economic recovery adviser Paul A. Volcker and former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, made the recommendation in a letter handed to Obama days before he took office. . .

"Signatories included former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat; former United Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering from the first Bush administration; former World Bank president James Wolfensohn; former US trade representative in the Ford administration Carla Hills; Theodore Sorensen, former special counsel to President John F. Kennedy; and former Republican senators Chuck Hagel and Nancy Kassebaum Baker."
THOSE HURT BY THE SWITCH TO DIGITAL TV
New America Media - In three months, old TV sets that receive signals through the air - with the aid of rabbit ear or roof antennas - will stop working. . . A crush of complaints prompted Congress to delay the massive switch when it realized that many of the estimated 20 million U.S. households - mostly low-income and seniors - were not ready for the analog-to-digital TV transition. The federally mandated switch will free up the airwaves for emergency services and wireless technology.

The switch requires people to install digital converter boxes to their old television sets. To offset the costs to the public, the government instituted a $40 coupon program -- two vouchers for each U.S. household. But the coupon system was riddled with problems. Last year, officials ran out of them. In addition, people who earlier had received the cards couldn’t redeem the coupons because they had expired.

Although some federal stimulus package money has been pumped into the digital TV switch, [the] program only allows for coupons to be sent to addresses defined as existing households designated by the U.S. Postal Service, excluding buildings that don’t provide individual locked mailboxes to its residents. Postal officials do not recognize SROs as households, but as a place of business.
PENTAGON TO CUT WEAPON SYSTEMS
Boston Globe - As the Bush administration was drawing to a close, Robert M. Gates, whose two years as defense secretary had been devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to warn his successor of a crisis closer to home. The United States "cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates said. The next defense secretary, he warned, would have to eliminate some costly hardware and invest in new tools for fighting insurgents.

What Gates didn't know was that he would be that successor. Now, as the only Bush Cabinet member to remain under President Obama, Gates is preparing the most far-reaching changes in the Pentagon's weapons portfolio since the end of the Cold War, according to aides.

Two defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly said Gates will announce up to a half-dozen major weapons cancellations later this month. Candidates include a new Navy destroyer, the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet, and Army ground-combat vehicles, the officials said. More cuts are planned for later this year after a review that could lead to reductions in programs such as aircraft carriers and nuclear arms, the officials said.
WHO'S DEFICIT IS IT?


OBAMA IN TROUBLE OVER PROPOSED MEDICAL CARE PLAN FOR VETS
Examiner - Washington State's senior senator, Patty Murray. . . questioned new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. After stating her overall approval of the proposed Obama Veteran's Affairs budget, she added this cautionary note:

"Finally, while there is much to commend in this budget, I do want to express my concern about a rumored proposal that would supposedly allow the VA to bill a veteran's insurance company for service-connected disabilities and injuries. I believe that veterans with service-connected injuries have already paid by putting their lives on the line for our safety. When our troops are injured while serving this country, we should take care of those injuries completely. We shouldn't nickel and dime them with their care. While no such proposal has been formally made, I can assure you that it will be dead on arrival in this Congress if it is proposed.". . .

While it has been policy for the VA to bill a veteran's private insurance for injuries or illness determined to be non-service related, the rumor that President Obama may be considering a shift in that policy has got more than Senator Murray speaking up. On February 27th an open letter co-authored by every major veterans organization in the country was sent to President Obama. Organizations represented included the VFW, AMVETS, Vietnam Veterans of America, and more. In part the letter said:

"This proposal ignores the solemn obligation that this country has to care for those men and women who have served this country with distinction and were left with the wounds and scars of that service. The blood spilled in service for this nation is the premium that service-connected veterans have paid for their earned care"

On Monday, President Obama met with the signers of the letter to discuss his proposed veterans budget as well as listen to their concerns about this proposed policy change. Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show to discuss the issue. He said that, while Obama had been willing to listen to the group's positions, he did not commit to immediately drop the policy proposal . . . Riekhoff said that his group would be mobilizing opposition the proposed policy change.
BREVITAS
CRASH TALK

Reuters - Connecticut's attorney general said he had "significant doubts" that $165 million of bonuses recently awarded by American International Group Inc are required under state law. "AIG is shamelessly shielding itself behind the Connecticut Wage Act, a joke of a justification for squandering scarce taxpayer resources," Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement on Tuesday. "We should use any and every well-founded legal weapon to recapture these baseless bonuses." Blumenthal said his office will "carefully investigate" the merits of AIG's claims, but added: "Corporate collapse demands accountability -- not windfall payments."

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post - A plausible solution would be for the government to assume control of those banks that are insolvent, as it routinely does when banks go under. It could then install new management, wipe out the shareholders, take the devalued assets off the banks' books, restart lending and restore the banks to private control at a modest profit for the taxpayers. There may be reasons that Geithner's plan makes more sense than this one, but if they exist, Geithner has failed to explain them.

It's certainly not because Americans are dead set against bank nationalization: A Newsweek poll this month found that 56 percent of respondents supported it. Hell, Alan Greenspan supports it. But Geithner seems unable to imagine a banking system not run by its current leaders or owned by its current shareholders or engaged in the same arcane securitization practices that led to its collapse. An administration that is busily creating alternatives to our health-care system and our energy policies is being dragged down by a Treasury secretary who cannot conceive of an alternative to our catastrophic system of banking.

Fortunately, Geithner is not the only public servant grappling with banking's daily outrages. In the Senate, Vermont's Bernie Sanders, joined by Illinois' Dick Durbin, has introduced a bill to cap the interest rates on credit cards. Even as banks are borrowing funds from the Fed interest-free and are counting on taxpayer largess to keep them from going bust, they are still charging usurious rates of interest. In 2007, the Demos Foundation found that one-third of credit card holders were paying rates in excess of 20 percent, in some cases as high as 41 percent, and the rates have not dropped notably since then.

Once, states were able to regulate their banks' rates, but in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that banks operating nationwide could charge whatever they wished if they moved their operations to states that had no usury laws, such as South Dakota. Shortly thereafter, Citigroup moved its credit card headquarters to South Dakota, and, as we know, Americans began funneling more and more of their money to the banks. Sanders's bill would cap interest rates at 15 percent, which is the same rate cap that Congress set 30 years ago for federal credit unions.

In 1991, New York Republican Alphonse D'Amato authored a bill to cap credit card rates at 14 percent. It passed the Senate 74 to 19, but died in the House. Today, as populist rage at the banks rises, Congress and the administration should be racing to pass the Sanders bill.

Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1982 - There were a number of individual bankers who went far beyond unwise banking practices and who, as individuals, took personal advantage of the information they had of individual depositors' affairs and of their privilege as top bank officers to do truly inimical things to enrich their own positions. Few today remember that a half-century ago a number of New York and Chicago's top bankers were sentenced into penitentiaries-the New Yorkers into Sing Sing-the senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, the president of the National City Bank, the president of Chase Bank. Every one of them had been found to be doing reprehensible financial tricks. They were selling their own friends short. They were opening their friends' mail and manipulating the stock market. They were manipulating everybody. They were way overstepping the moral limits of the privileges ethically existent for officers in the banking game, so a great housecleaning was done by the New Deal.

Guardian, UK - Barclays Bank obtained a court order banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax. The gagging order was granted by Mr Justice Ouseley after Barclays complained about seven documents on the Guardian's website which had been leaked to the Liberal Democrats' deputy leader, Vince Cable. The internal Barclays memos - leaked by a Barclays whistleblower - showed executives from SCM, Barclays's structured capital markets division, seeking approval for a 2007 plan to sink more than $16bn into US loans. Tax benefits were to be generated by an elaborate circuit of Cayman islands companies, US partnerships and Luxembourg subsidiaries.

OBAMALAND

As this is written the White House is suppressing the video, but here's how Sky News in the UK reports it

Sky News - A teleprompt blunder has led to Barack Obama thanking himself in a speech at the White House in a St Patrick's Day celebration.Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realized it all sounded a bit too familiar. It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter. Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: "That's your speech." A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

The Examiner reports that Obama received a $101,332 bonus from AIG in the form of a political contribution during the campaign. Dodd and Obama were the biggest AIG congressional beneficiaries.

JUST POLITICS

Some people claim that instant runoff voting is too difficult for voters to understand. Rob Richie of Fair Vote counters that with some date from the recent IRV election in Burlington VT:

- Burlington spent all of $995 to educate the town's 33,000 voters, about three cents a voter.

- Out of nearly 9,000 ballots in the mayoral race, a recount determined there was only a single over vote was cast -- meaning 99.99% validity

- More than 80% of voters ranked a second choice, with the exact same rate of 82% in the lowest-income wards and 82% in the highest-income wards.

McClatchy - The National Republican Congressional Committee is sending out video "trackers" to ask provocative questions of Democratic members of Congress. The trackers, who are congressional committee staffers, were earlier reported by Congress Daily. . . NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay told McClatchy that Democratic complaints were "whining," adding that "The modern-day world of campaign politics demands that we track our opponents' steps and missteps. We have nothing to hide when it comes to asking tough questions, but it appears that Democrats do when it comes to answering them." The NRCC doesn't require its questioners to identify themselves as partisans on grounds that anyone has a right to approach a member of Congress and ask a question. It wouldn't say how many lawmakers have been questioned: A GOP statement said that, "Videos are posted on a case-by-case basis."

MEDIA

When TR Reid was writing for the Washington Post, he was one of those reporters we read just because the byline. Now Reid is planning to run for the Colorado state legislature as a Democrats. Reid was bureau chief in Tokyo, London, and Denver.

ABC Australia - A survey of Australian journalism students found 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, preferring to source news from commercial television or online media.

GREAT MOMENTS AT THE PENTAGON

NY Times - Air Force officials acknowledge that more than a third of their unmanned Predator spy planes - which are 27 feet long, powered by a high-performance snowmobile engine, and cost $4.5 million apiece - have crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

INDICATORS

USA Today - More babies were born in the USA in 2007 than ever before, driven by increases in fertility rates, teen birth rates and childbearing by unmarried women, according to new government data. The preliminary report from the National Center for Health Statistics is gleaned from birth records and shows that most of the growth - to a record 4.31 million births - was fueled by adult women. The previous record for births in a single year was in 1957 with 4.30 million. Birth rates rose for women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s. An estimated 1.7 million babies were born to unmarried women, comprising just under 40% of all births in the USA. Teens accounted for 23% of births. "I don't think the U.S. was heading to a baby boom that would have mirrored the 1950s," says Hans-Peter Kohler, a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Population Studies Center. . . But Kohler says it's "striking" that the USA has had a sustained increase in birth rates at a time when such rates are declining in many developed countries. And he says it's remarkable that the U.S. increases occur "across so many different population groups and so many age categories."

JUSTICE & FREEDOM

POLICE KILL 73 YEAR OLD BLACK MAN FOR NO APPARENT REASON

GREAT THOUGHTS OF RICHARD CHENEY

Alternet - On Fox News, Chris Wallace asked Dick Cheney to identify the "highest moment" of the last eight years. It wasn't a trick question. Cheney pondered this for a few moments before answering, "Well, I think the most important, the most compelling, was 9/11 itself, and what that entailed, what we had to deal with." Wallace followed up by noting that the highest moment was also the lowest, which Cheney was quick to agree with.

GOOD REASON TO STAY AWAY FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS

Houston Chronicle - Using the “F-word” in public places is starting to get Houston-area residents handcuffed or arrested. For the second time within the past eight months, a person using the word during private conversations in public places - once at a Wal-Mart in La Marque and then at a Mexican restaurant in Galveston - have been taken into custody and cited for disorderly conduct. . . State law says the use of abusive, indecent, profane or vulgar language in a public place, which causes an “immediate breach of peace,” meets the definition of disorderly conduct.

HEALTH & SCIENCE

New Scientist - Getting in the groove goes deeper than just hitting the notes at the right time, it seems. Musicians playing the same tune together have brain patterns that are virtually identical, researchers find. The discovery came from electroencephalogram recordings of brainwaves from pairs of guitarists as they duetted. The recordings were taken while each of eight pairs played many as 60 renditions of the same short jazz-fusion melody.

Telegraph, UK - Jerry Jalava has built a special prosthetic finger which contains computer storage for photos, movies and other useful files. While the prosthetic looks like a normal finger Jerry can peel it back from the 'nail' and plug it into the USB slot on his computer using it as an additional hard drive. . . When Jerry told doctors what he did for a living they joked he should have a USB 'finger drive' but that was good enough for him, and he set about making one. Using a traditional prosthetic finger Jerry has been able embed a 'USB key' - like the ones used in traditional flash drives - giving him the world's only two gigabyte finger. The finger is not permanently attached to his hand meaning it can be removed when plugged into a computer.

BELIEFS

Telegraph,UK - Pope Benedict XVI said that the distribution of condoms 'aggravates' the Aids crisis, as he embarked on his first trip to Africa. While en route from Rome to his first stop, Cameroon, the Pope said that the condition was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems."
FROM OUR READERS
OBAMA'S POLLING PROBLEM

So now you are citing the Wall Street Journal, a known bastion of 'objectivity' as a source to support for your fallacious proposition that President Obama is becoming increasingly unpopular among the American people. Isn't it time you stop your ridiculous tirades against President Obama? You failed to mention in your recent article that the current Pew Center poll, the Gallup poll, Newsweek poll, and even Fox News poll dispute your proposition. Those polls all dispute the Rasmussen poll, yet you conveniently omitted those facts from your article. Let's leave the shameful deception to the Republicans. Deception from the right is to be expected; however, I expect better from progressive voices. You risk losing many progressive subscribers with your deceptive and dishonest diatribes against President Obama. - Timothy V. Clark, Indianapolis, Indiana

The polling was conducted by Rasmussen, an excellent firm that did better in the final 2008 result than Gallup, and by a former pollster for Bill Clinton. The poll has also been somewhat supported by both Pew and CNN. The latest Pew survey finds Obama's approval rating down 5 points and from last month and his disapproval rating up 9 points. CNN finds the rating down 3 points and disapproval up 5 points. What's different about the Rasmussen poll is that it uses the gap between those who strongly approve and those who strongly disapprove for its index. You may not like that approach but it certainly is not partisan.

ISRAEL GIVES JEWS A BAD NAME

Saul Landau, you reminds me of Nazi propaganda. I was wondering if you guys were still around. I was beginning to think you were extinct. Guess not. What a shame.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology, not a religion. We know all we need to know about Islam: it is a vicious, narrow-minded, murderous, intolerant and an undemocratic cult - opposite of anything the west stands for.

When Palestinians realize that the only way to protest their situation is through nonviolence (i.e., Ghandi and MLK), then their situation will improve. So long as these idiots choose to continue lobbing rockets daily at a civilian population, they can expect to be invaded and bombed from time to time. If Mexico allowed the lobbing of thousands of rockets at US cities every year, you can be damn sure there would be overwhelming support for retaliation. And, just like with the most recent Israeli response, that retaliation would be justified.

Saul Landau is opposed to the western philosophies of government, except for Marxism which was developed by Karl Marx in his flat in London.Landau is a student of victimology. Whomever he classifies as a victim is more authentic, has better ideas, and produces better literature, than those he classifies as oppressors.

Israel is a western-style democracy being pressured to make peace with a neighbor that has attacked it over and over and over. Furthermore, people forget that the entire reason that the Palestinian people are displaced is that the entire Arab world declared war on Israel long before it was a nation. How would we react if a large aboriginal group started launching frequent attacks? Would we react by peacefully letting them form their own nation where they would be free to continue to launch attacks? It would go a long way if people stopped seeing Israelis as so different from themselves. - James

I love all the screaming Zionists (and Christian Zionists) who came to denounce Saul Landau and the Palestinians...James, we once had a "large aboriginal group" who would fight us as we moved West; they were called American Indians and they did what they could to drive the white man off their land, but it was too little, too late. Many Indian children from the late 19th century onward were forced to go to schools (set up by the BLM) where they were beaten for speaking their tribal languages and made to feel inferior while their parents were forced to live in reservations with little job opportunity and rampant alcoholism. - Strelnikov

I stand four-square behind Israel, our true friends in a region where Anti-Americanism is the real danger. In the light that reveals the Arab lunacy gripping the Middle East today, Israel has proved to be a sane, democratic island surrounded by an ocean of hate and self-destructive mayhem. Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah and the rest are not credible entities for the world to support. Israel is - and the world media need to abstain from bashing them for protecting their existence. - JR

Saul, you are not posting correct information. Every Israeli citizen can vote. Last election one Arab party was banned from running after being charged with incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to countries listed among Israel's staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria. Did not Britain ban Sinn Fein? Did not France ban the retain-Algeria right-wing party? - Yahuda

ABORTION

The article on abortion, incredibly, states that "one can have an abortion without doing harm to others". Huh? No harm? When an D&E abortion is performed, and a fetus is cut into pieces with wires, saws and other surgical instruments, you don't consider this to be harm?

Your comments that " most American don't consider the fetus as human" is at the least, misleading and at the most, disingenuous. The time period of pregnancy which is spread over nine months, encompasses a wide range of stages of development and periods of time in which viability changes dramatically. Most peoples' beliefs are not whether the fetus is human, but when the fetus is human.

My wife and I had twins born 9 weeks early. One of these daughters just had twins born to her 8 weeks early. All 4 of these people are healthy. Are you stating that most Americans believe that these fetuses were not human beings up until the moment that they were born?

The US Supreme Court, when making abortion legal in it's Roe vs Wade decision, stated that "we do not know when human life occurs", thereby leaving open the possibility that we are killing human beings every day through abortion, and yet made the decision anyway. In other words, human life is sometimes sacred, sometimes for some people and sometimes not. You do not address at all the question of what should those people do who believe that helpless, blameless, innocent human beings are being murdered every day. Those who resisted the legal treatment of the Jews by the Nazi hierarchy in Germany in the 1930s and 40s are today considered to be heroes.

And finally, the delusion continues to grow. We now have a president, the leader of Americans, the leader of the free world, who led the fight while in the Illinois Legislature, to defeat a bill that would have required survivors of abortions to be given medical succor. Even when the fetus is outside of the mother's body, breathing on his own, our president believes that he is not worthy of life. "We have earmarked you for abortion, and by God, you are going to die." What group will be next-Journalists perhaps? - Capt. Stephen F. Formel USMM

Differences in views on abortion have changed remarkably little over time. The point of the article was not to continue this debate but to argue that Catholic hospitals should not be required by the federal government to offer abortions.

I am beyond the reproductive years which makes me old enough to have grown up in a country without the Civil Rights Act so what I am about to say may seem outrageous: why would a woman want to ask someone to treat her who is opposed to the treatment she needs? Why not just go to the hospital without the religious connection? I think that trying to force Catholics or evangelicals to offer abortion will only make people sympathetic to their cause.

TWO ERAS OF DEMOCRATS

"Franklin Roosevelt managed to fight the depression with a White House staff smaller than that Mrs. Clinton's when she was First Lady. He fought World War II with less staff than Al Gore when he was vice president."

Probably not the best defense. FDR also

- created the military industrial complex via his "dollar-a-year men" who, since they continued to be paid by and loyal to their corporate masters, saw nothing wrong with giving the military everything it wanted, since the military would be buying said everything from said corporate masters.

- let Morganthau shift the income tax from the hyper-wealthy onto us proles,

- and, to save capitalism, created the culture of consumption that's now bidding fair to make Earth uninhabitable by high-order life forms.

Not the best record.

THE BILL MOYERS YOU DON'T HEAR ABOUT

If you've ever heard Moyers rant about how all the world's troubles can be traced to religious persons, you'd find it hard to take much else he says seriously. It's puzzling to me that Moyers finds no difference between, say my sainted grandmother who treated everyone lovingly regardless of their treatment of her, and the charlatan buffoons who use religion to become wealthy and to suppress anyone else's freedom who might be a threat to their scam.

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