Undernews For August 30, 2009

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Saturday August 29

TED KENNEDY: THE LAST RESPECTABLE LIBERAL

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - It was sad to lose Ted Kennedy, but as I followed the coverage I couldn't help feeling a bit angry as well. It was almost as if the media, rather than helping in the burial, had stolen his body instead. And then those endless encomiums from those who hardly ever thought or voted Kennedy's way. I mentioned them to someone who had worked for Kennedy early on and had stayed close. Her immediate reaction: "Yeah, those shits." It felt good to hear something real again.

Of course, the same thing happens to anyone famous who dies these days. One poll found that 70% thought the coverage of Michael Jackson's death had been overdone. The media has become obsessively vulturic, morbidly circling over the remains of anyone of importance.

But there was something else troubling. Kennedy was a good liberal of the old school, a positive voice in an increasingly misguided land. But he was far from being a leader of progressive politics. To those pushing new ideas he was often an open door into power but he was no Ralph Nader. To the media and most of those establishment figures who dabbed their eyes at his service, he represented the absolute furthest left they would ever honor. He was the last respectable liberal. And they were there to bury him and what he stood for.

Ted Kennedy was no radical but neither was he the enemy of the left. As his voting record indicates, he was often an ally of those far more progressive than himself. And even in his death, he may be once again have done a favor: freeing the space the extremist middle had assigned as exclusively his.

But It won't be long before Wolf Blitzer and his ilk anoint some other acceptable leaders of the left. Unless, of course, the left gets busy, gets loud, and beats them to it.

FINAL DAYS: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN EXAGGERATION AND DENIAL

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - Sure, the Republicans are exaggerating about death panels, but why are they getting away with it? In part because the Democrats are using denial as a rebuttal rather than dealing honestly with end of life issues in the health care debate.

Whatever health system one has makes choices about end of life, whether by law, by budget, by religion and other values, or by habit. Consider, for example, doctors who know that their hospitals are trying to cut down on costs. It doesn't matter where the insurance money is coming from; those doctors know their status will depend in part on how they handle this issue and as a result there will be less pressure to prolong life. You don't need a death panel to tell you which way the wind is blowing; all you have to know that those on top - whether public or private - are more than a little, and in some cases primarily, interested in saving money.

The whole end of life debate is an example of the bipartisan disingenuousness of the health care controversy. Here you've got a serious issue that concerns millions of people and neither side wants to use it other than to score points.

Led by Obama, the Democratic approach to healthcare has carelessly blended budget and health issues in a way that has justifiably raised concerns about the party's end of life policies. Rather than treating skeptics and critics as fools, it would be wiser - both politically and morally - to deal with the matter in an open and honest way.

Wikpedia - Futile medical care refers to the belief that in cases where there is no hope for improvement of an incapacitating condition, that no course of treatment is called for. It is dissimilar to the idea of euthanasia because euthanasia involves active intervention to end life, while withholding futile medical care does not encourage, nor speed the natural onset of death. The difference is of utmost importance to physicians who have taken and who adhere to the traditional Hippocratic oath - and have thus taken a professional vow that under no circumstances will they "prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause [a patient's] death."

One could say that it is impossible to reach a firm definition of futile medical care, because this would depend upon universal agreement about the point at which there is no further benefit to intervention, and different involved parties may always disagree about the amount and type of benefit under discussion. For instance, a cancer patient may be willing to undergo yet more chemotherapy with a very expensive medication for the benefit of a few weeks of life, while medical staff, the insurance company, and close relatives may all feel otherwise, for different reasons.

Arguments against futile care generally center on two issues. First, futile care has no possibility of achieving a good outcome and serves only to prolong death. No physical or spiritual benefit comes from such care. Futile care also prolongs the grieving process and frequently raises false hope. Also, futile care can be very difficult on caregivers, who may see themselves as forced to act against the best interests of their patient.

Secondly, in a setting of limited resources, futile care involves the expenditure of resources that could be used by other patients with a good likelihood of achieving a positive outcome. . . .

The last four decades has seen the clinical community make impressive efforts at improving the quality of their prognostic efforts. As a result, simple but imprecise rules of thumb like "percent mortality = age + percent burn" have now given way to very sophisticated algorithms based on multiple linear regression and other advanced statistical techniques. These are complex clinical algorithms that have been scientifically validated and have considerable clinical predictive value, particularly in the case of patients suffering severe burns.

While one intent of such algorithms is to provide high-quality prognostic information to aid patients and families in making difficult decisions, it takes little imagination to see how they could be used to guide resource allocation in a setting of limited resources.

While clinicians faced with difficult clinical scenarios where the probability of survival is, say, 30% might be expected to mount a valiant effort, when the chance of survival falls well below 1%, most clinicians would be expected to focus on palliative and comfort measures rather than attempting aggressive clinical measures. In a study of patients so severely burned that survival was clinically unprecedented, during the initial lucid period (before sepsis and other complications set in) patients were told that survival was extremely unlikely (i.e., that death was essentially inevitable) and were asked to choose between palliative care and aggressive clinical measures. Most chose aggressive clinical measures. This suggests that the will to live in patients can be very strong even in hopeless situations.

LA Times, 2005 - A Texas law signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1999 allowing an end to life-sustaining treatment for certain patients became a point of contention Monday in the Terri Schiavo case, sharpening the focus on the president's eleventh-hour intervention in the question of the woman's fate.

The law that Bush signed as governor sets conditions for how a patient's relatives or other surrogates may make end-of-life decisions, and it spells out procedures for cases where the surrogates and medical providers disagree on whether to continue or to suspend life-sustaining care. . .

Speaking on the House floor Sunday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said the Texas law "liberalized the situations under which a person in Texas can avoid artificial life support."

"It appears that President Bush felt, as governor, that there was a point at which, when doctors felt there was no further hope for the patient, that it is appropriate for an end-of-life decision to be made, even over the objections of family members. . . There is an obvious conflict here between the president's feelings on this matter now as compared to when he was governor of Texas," Wasserman Schultz said during a late-night House debate Sunday on the Schiavo legislation.

That measure, which Bush signed about 1 a.m. Monday outside his White House bedroom, was intended to aid family members fighting to reinstate Schiavo's feeding tube.

"If the president of the United States really cared about the issue of the removal of feeding tubes, then why did he sign a bill as governor in Texas that allows hospitals to save money by removing feeding tubes over a family's objection?" asked Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) during the House debate. . .

As Wasserman Schultz said on the House floor, the Texas law lays out procedures for physicians to follow when they think a patient's condition is hopeless, even if family members disagree. Doctors can make a case to their hospital's ethics committee. If the ethics committee agrees, life support can be removed.

But first, dissenting families are given 10 days to find another facility willing to care for the patient.

"That was a law that President Bush did not just allow to become law without his signature. He came back from a campaign trip to sign it," Wasserman Schultz said. . .

GAYS ARE TOO LATE TO DESTROY TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE

Kevin Phinney, Seattle Weekly - Legalizing gay marriage will destroy the institution of matrimony. That's been the battle cry of the religious right since the debate began taking shape more than a dozen years ago. . .

When pressed for details as to precisely how same-sex marriage will destroy straight marriage, opponents reply that matrimony is "traditionally" between two members of opposite sexes-an observation that reframes the issue while dodging the question. Debate about what might be in the future is short-circuited simply by invoking precedent.

After all, "traditionally," black people were once considered property, women had no right to vote, and slaughtering Native Americans was simply one more plank in the platform of Manifest Destiny. Didn't those "traditions" merit destruction, or at least a thorough rethinking?

Conservatives often counter that matrimony is the linchpin of the family unit. . . But we're already falling short of this wistful image in numerous ways, including divorce, single-parent families, and babies born out of wedlock. . .

In Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal for the past five years, Dr. Charles Foster is the co-founder and director of a family therapy facility called the Chestnut Hill Institute. Foster believes that opponents of same-sex marriage represent a segment of the population who yearn for the America of their youth or an imagined perfect past. "These are people feeling squeezed from every direction," he says. "Their jobs are vanishing overseas, homes are being lost, and now these are the very same folks showing up at town meetings to say they're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, and they've been exploited by the right. Back when Nixon ran for president in 1968, conservatives realized that the only way to get a majority was to convince these people to vote against their own economic self-interests, and the best way to do that was to threaten them with the loss of a lifestyle they cherish."

Defending marriage as a one man/one woman proposition became their cultural Alamo as other traditions began to topple, says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and marriage studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. . . Less than a century ago, most states' marriage laws included "head and master" clauses, which not only sanctioned men requiring women to take their surnames, but allowed the husband to determine where the couple would live and to have final say on matters of community property. "And," Coontz points out, "there was no such thing as marital rape."

"In that 19th-century mindset of marriage, the man had a duty to support his family and the woman was responsible for supplying services needed in the home-including sex," she continues. "And it wasn't until 1993 that the last state did away with that. Marriage used to be an institution very much oriented around heterosexuals because it was based in large part upon the inheritance and passing-along of power and property for political and economic convenience, and one was not allowed to marry for love. Over the last 150 years, it's heterosexuals who have chipped away at those notions."

That process accelerated during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. "Over the last 40 years," Coontz says, "it's been heterosexuals who've said you should marry someone you're compatible with. They're the ones who've said you shouldn't be required to have children, or that you should use assisted reproduction if you want kids. Gay couples are simply buying into a model of partnering that now seems much more appealing to them."

WORD

We might wish that, if we must have a political myth, it should not contain so much moral ambivalence, such distance from known reality and so much artificial manufacture. But looking at it from a literary, rather than a political or moral, perspective, it has the stuff of all good legends: a flawed hero, tragedy, triumph, ruthlessness, danger and inexorability. . . The Kennedy legend is as Emerson described life, "evermore beauty and disgust; magnificence and rats." - Sam Smith, "America and the House of Kennedy," Illustrated London News, 1980

LOCAL HEROES: MEMPHIS CITY COUNCIL TURNS DOWN TASERS

Voice - A request by the Memphis Police Department to implement the use of Taser electronic stun guns as a method of subduing suspected criminals has been turned down by the city council. Deployment of electronic control devices has been a subject of debate since Memphis Police Chief Elena Danishevskaya acquired three units for her department through a grant program many months ago. At their most recent meeting the council revisited the controversial topic and, after airing opposing opinions, once again shunned the electroshock weapons - capable of immobilizing subjects via a 50,000-volt discharge - as an option for the city's officers.

"My feeling, still, is that Tasers for this department is not for us," Mayor Charles Garber said. . . Alternative methods to Taser deployment include utilizing pepper spray, mace, batons, bodily force or bullets. . . According to Amnesty International the total number of deaths in America following Taser gun usage has risen to 351 since June 2001.

LOCAL HEROES: DEAN BAKER AND THE HOUSING BUBBLE

Even after a major crisis such as the current fiscal crisis, the conventional media, politicians and think tankers continue to follow the advice of those who got us into the mess and ignore those who tried to prevent it. That's why you'll find crash enablers like Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin being quoted and invited to the White House while you hardly hear mention of Brooksle Born, Sheila Blair and others who tried to point out the rocks ahead. Add to the latter list economist Dean Baker. Open Left notes that "in 2002, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research, wrote a prophetic briefing paper, The Run-up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble? In the end, Baker concluded "bubble". And bubbles eventually burst:

[] In the last seven years, home sale prices have increased nearly 30 percent more than the overall rate of inflation. Approximately one-third of this increase corresponds to an increase in the price of rental housing relative to other goods and services. The other two thirds is attributable to an increase in home purchase prices relative to rental prices. . . There is no obvious explanation for a sudden increase in the relative demand for housing which could explain the price rise. There is also no obvious explanation for the increase in home purchase prices relative to rental prices. In the absence of any other credible theory, the only plausible explanation for the sudden surge in home prices is the existence of a housing bubble. This means that a major factor driving housing sales is the expectation that housing prices will be higher in the future. While this process can sustain rising prices for a period of time, it must eventually come to an end. []

SCIENTIFIC STUDY FIND JUST A FEW FUNDS, BANKS AND CORPORATIONS CONTROL FINANCIAL MARKETS

Lauren Schenkman, Inside Science News Service - A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders. . .

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston's analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

"If you would look at this locally, it's always distributed," Glattfelder said. "If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it's the same guys, [which] is not something you'd expect from the local view."

Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are "big fish" in the most countries.

The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.

"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] . . . where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said. "What you're trying to estimate is . . . the potential influence that [an investor] has."

Glattfelder added that the internationalism of these powerful companies makes it difficult to gauge their economic influence. "[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it's hard to see what they're up to and what they're doing," he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said. "In network speak, if those nodes fail, that has a big effect on the network."

• WALL STREET JOURNAL FINDS GOLDMAN SACHS GIVING TOP CLIENTS AND TRADERS DIFFERENT ADVICE THAN AVERAGE CUSTOMERS
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• BAD ADVICE AND THE CRASH
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OBAMA TO CONTINUE ILLEGAL BORDER COMPUTER SEARCHES

Washington Post - The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search -- without suspicion of wrongdoing -- the contents of a traveler's laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.. . . Representatives of civil liberties and travelers groups say they see little substantive difference between the Bush-era policy, which prompted controversy, and this one. "It's a disappointing ratification of the suspicionless search policy put in place by the Bush administration," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. . . "Under the policy begun by Bush and now continued by Obama, the government can open your laptop and read your medical records, financial records, e-mails, work product and personal correspondence -- all without any suspicion of illegal activity," said Elizabeth Goitein, who leads the liberty and national security project at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE POOR IN LIBERAL POLITICS?

Ezra Klein, Washington Post - Groups such as MoveOn.org or True Majority [are] all in favor of efforts to address poverty, but it's not the core item on the agenda, and that's because their constituencies fundamentally aren't poor. Because of that, they're a lot more aggressive on policies that appeal to their membership's political beliefs - the public option being a good example - than policies that directly help the poor. . .

Conversely, the groups that spend a lot of time on poverty - the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, or Families USA - aren't member-driven. They're advocacy organizations, they tend to rely on foundation grants or endowments, and they tend to play a bit more of an inside Washington game, because they don't have funding sources or a membership structure that lends itself to grass-roots pressure. Foundations, after all, give a lot of money for research, but not that much money for attack ads. And people living just above the poverty line don't tend to send in $100 when you tell them subsidies in a bill are about to be cut, even though those subsidies will hurt them a lot more than the public option will help most of MoveOn.org's members.

Put another way, the basic problem is that poor people, by virtue of being poor, can't donate a lot of money to popularize their concerns, and are fairly marginalized from the political process in general. The result isn't that those concerns are entirely ignored in Congress, as many of these institutions are very effective, and many legislators take this stuff very seriously. . .

The effects of this can be a bit weird: The health-care bill, for instance, spends pretty much all of its money on the poor, and its structure is primarily designed to increase coverage among low-income Americans. But pollsters have advised Democrats not to talk about that, and so they don't. Instead, they talk about how insurers are evil, or the public option is good, because those issues are more resonant both among the broader electorate and the liberal base.

WE ALREADY HAVE A PUBLIC OPTION

Marshall Auerbach, Counterpunch - Since its inception in 1965, Medicare has covered almost all citizens over age 65, and it is one of the most popular government programs existing today. Individual state-managed health programs with low reimbursement to caregivers cover additionally most children with congenital malformations and children with many other disorders. For low-income families, the combined federal and state-managed Medicaid program is available for the majority of medical disorders that are not primarily cosmetic. Why not expand its role to incorporate citizens not covered in any of the existing private health insurance plans? Why not, in fact, allow Medicare to compete against private health insurance companies in order to keep them honest?. . .

Few Americans rail against Medicare or characterize it as a nefarious "socialistic" takeover of the health care system. As a program, it has great political legitimacy and is as strongly entrenched in the American political landscape as our Social Security system. . .

Today, 43 million of Americans are covered by the program, yet seldom does one hear a senior citizen complain about struggling under the burden of "socialistic health care". . . . At 4% per annum its administrative costs less than half of most private insurance companies and polls consistently show very high satisfaction among its participants. . .

Most advanced countries have dealt with the defects of private health insurance in a straightforward way, by making health insurance a government service. Through Medicare, the United States has in effect done the same thing for its seniors. There are a number of incrementalist ways this could be expanded . . . One suggestion by Rick Fonkalsrud, M.D., and economist Michael Intriligator of UCLA proposes "Medicare Expansion," would build a national care system by expanding on the existing Medicare program for citizens over the age of 65 years, with a gradual phasing out of the very uneven and underfunded state-administered Medicaid programs:

"The first step in the Medicare Expansion program would be to enroll children under 5 years of age, pregnant women and those with lifelong illnesses by the end of 2010. The remainder of the population would be phased in gradually, taking the most needy age groups first, until all persons are covered within five years. In 2011, those between 55 and 65 would be enrolled, and in 2012 those from 5 to 15 and those from 45 to 55 would be included. Those between 15 and 25 as well as those from 40 to 45 would be added in 2013. Finally, by the end of 2014, by adding the remaining population between 25 and 40 the entire U.S. population would be covered: There would be Medicare for all in a single-payer system. There would be no limitations based on pre-existing conditions, as is common in private insurance plans."

FARM PROFITS TO FALL BY MORE THAN A THIRD THIS YEAR

Wall Street Journal - The Agriculture Department forecast that U.S. farm profits will fall 38% this year, indicating that the slump is taking hold in rural America. Much of the sector had escaped the harsher aspects of the crisis, such as the big drop in property values plaguing city dwellers and suburbanites.

SENATE BILL WOULD GIVE PRESIDENT DICTATOR'S POWER OVER THE INTENET IN A "CYBER EMERGENCY"

Declan McCullagh, CNET - Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773, which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cyber security emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cyber security emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cyber security professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.". . .

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says. . .

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version). . There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

NEMAZEE INVOLVED WITH BOTH CLINTON AND REPUBLICANS

Who What Why - On August 25th, Hassan Nemazee, a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, was arrested and charged with forging loan documents in order to borrow $74 million from Citibank. . Behind the Nemazee arrest lies a sprawling cautionary tale of presidents, would-be presidents, and the shadow world of wealthy operators who cozy up to them for their own gain. It reaches into the Bush operation as well as that of the Clintons, and is a microcosm of an influence bazaar that has gone global along with the economy.

Hassan Nemazee, who served as a finance director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, began raising sizable sums for the Democratic National Committee in the mid-nineties. In 1998, in the midst of the Lewinsky affair, Nemazee collected $60,000 for Bill Clinton's legal defense fund in $10,000 increments from relatives and friends. .

In 2005, Nemazee and his business partner, Alan Quasha, went deep into the Clinton circle to hire Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton confidante and former chairman of the Democratic Party, for Carret Asset Management, their newly acquired investment firm. During the interregnum between McAuliffe's party chairmanship and the time he officially joined Hillary Clinton's campaign as chairman, Nemazee and Quasha set McAuliffe up with a salary and opened a Washington office for him. . .

In March 2007, Nemazee, at the behest of McAuliffe, threw a dinner for Ms. Clinton at Manhattan's swank Cipriani restaurant, which featured Bill Clinton and raised more than $500,000. In 2008, after Barack Obama gained the nomination, Nemazee raised a comparable sum for him.

Before moving into the Democratic camp, Nemazee had backed such Republican senators as Jesse Helms, Sam Brownback and Alfonse D'Amato. . Nemazee's business partner, Alan Quasha, who specializes in buying up troubled companies, has also played both sides of the partisan divide. Quasha gave to both Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and in the 2008 race gave to Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani as well as Democrats Barack Obama and Chris Dodd.

The strikingly trans-partisan and trans-national nature of this high-stakes influence game is best exemplified by the relationship between Quasha's oil company, Harken Energy, and George W. Bush. Harken provided a home for Bush in the 1980's when his own oil businesses failed, offering him handsome compensation and a solid financial base from which to enter politics. Bush was named to the Harken board and received a range of benefits from the company while devoting most of his time to his father's presidential campaign and then his own outside career efforts.

Harken is a curious outfit. Its early funding sources were opaque, and its investors and board members had a dizzying array of connections into global power centers - and ties to the Saudi leadership and the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah of Iran, as well as to the Swiss Bank, UBS, which has been charged by the US government with providing cover for Americans who were evading taxes.

Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University's endowment, the largest in the nation. . Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. . .

Nemazee's role as a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton can be better understood through his own Iranian connections. His father was a shipping magnate who was close with the Shah of Iran and served as the Shah's commercial attaché in Washington; Nemazee was a founding member of the Iranian-American Political Action Committee, a lobbying group. Recent strains have been reported between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over policy toward Iran. Clinton has advocated a harder line toward the Islamic fundamentalists who took over when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, while Obama has stressed dialogue.

For more on Harken, Baker's 2009 book, Family of Secrets

FDIC SEES BANKS AT RISK UP 36%

Washington Post - The federal agency that repays depositors at failed banks said that cleanup costs reduced its insurance fund to $10.4 billion at the end of June, the lowest level since the early 1990s, and that many surviving banks face mounting problems. The decline in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. fund increases pressure on those banks because they pay fees to cover the cost of failures, but it does not threaten the safety of accounts in failed banks. The government ultimately guarantees it will protect depositors. The FDIC said banks lost a total of $3.7 billion in the second quarter as growing numbers of borrowers failed to repay existing loans. In response, the industry continued to reduce the volume of its new lending, a major impediment to renewed economic growth. . . The FDIC said Thursday that it counted 416 banks at risk of failing as of the end of June, a 36 percent increase from the first quarter.

BAILOUT WINNERS: FOUR BANKS NOW ISSUE ONE HALF OF ALL MORTGAGES AND TWO-THIRDS OF ALL CREDIT CARDS

Washington Post - When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system. The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show. A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

"It is at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed," said Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "It fed the crisis, and it has gotten worse because of the crisis." Regulators' concerns are twofold: that consumers will wind up with fewer choices for services and that big banks will assume they always have the government's backing if things go wrong. That presumed guarantee means large companies could return to the risky behavior that led to the crisis if they figure federal officials will clean up their mess.

WHOLE FOODS BOYCOTT GROWING

The Progressive Review was one of the early journals to give coverage to the Whole Foods boycott and it somewhat stunned us to discover that just two weeks later, there are over 2 million links to the boycott issue on Google.

Judging from the mail we have received and comments elsewhere, the issue has neatly divided iconic liberals from populist progressives, with the former sticking to their favorite brands - i.e. Whole Foods and Obama - while the latter are concentrating on the issues underneath the symbolism. It also seems that boycotts have become so rare in the contemporary liberal repertoire that they appear to some as vaguely subversive or otherwise dangerous. While one can logically argue that a Whole Foods boycott would not be effective or is aimed at the wrong target, the generally weak liberal support for single payer healthcare and other core issues suggests something more is at work. It is probably another sign of what might be called check-off liberalism: you check off a ballot or a petition - or send a check off to some cause - and your work is done.

Our own view is that the WF effort is a classic case of a boycott that could work. The potential boycotters are the very people the target depends upon. Additionally, the boycott is a direct attack on the marketing symbolism of the company. All in all, in a time of little action, a nice example of what people could be doing more of. Come to think of it, a six month boycott of recording companies represented by RIAA might not be a bad idea either.

Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate - [WF CEO John Mackey] was already the nemesis of organized labor and other progressives before his op-ed ran. The CEO also opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, and in April, Mother Jones magazine (available for purchase, by the way, at the checkout racks at Whole Foods) reported that it had obtained an internal company document that named remaining "100 percent union-free" as a key corporate goal. . .

Jobs with Justice and the Single Payer Network point out that there are other local food stores that support their communities, including Stop and Shop, which is unionized, and Northampton's River Valley Market co-op.

Wikipedia - A boycott is a form of consumer activism involving the act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with someone or some other organization as an expression of protest, usually of political reasons.

Although the term itself was not coined until 1880, the practice dates back to at least 1830, when the National Negro Convention encouraged a boycott of slave-produced goods. Other instances of boycotts are their use by African Americans during the US civil rights movement (notably the Montgomery Bus Boycott); the United Farm Workers union grape and lettuce boycotts; the American boycott of British goods at the time of the American Revolution; the Indian boycott of British goods organized by Mohandas Gandhi; the successful Jewish boycott organized against Henry Ford in the USA, in the 1920s; the boycott of Japanese products in China after the May Fourth Movement; the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott of German goods in Lithuania, the USA, Britain and Poland during 1933. . .

Boycotts are now much easier to successfully initiate due to the Internet. Examples include the gay and lesbian boycott of advertisers of the Dr. Laura talk show, gun owners' similar boycott of advertisers of Rosie O'Donnell's talk show and (later) magazine, and gun owners' boycott of Smith & Wesson following that company's March 2000 settlement with the Clinton administration. They may be initiated very easily using either Web sites (the Dr. Laura boycott), newsgroups (the Rosie O'Donnell boycotts), or even mailing lists. Internet-initiated boycotts "snowball" very quickly compared to other forms of organization.

Another form of consumer boycotting is substitution for an equivalent product; for example, Mecca Cola and Qibla Cola have been marketed as substitutes for Coca-Cola among Muslim populations.

Academic boycotts have been organized against countries. For example, the mid and late 20th century academic boycotts of South Africa in protest of apartheid practices and the less successful but more recent academic boycotts of Israel.

Some boycotts center on particular businesses, such as recent protests regarding Costco, Walmart, Ford Motor Company, or the diverse products of Philip Morris. Another form of boycott identifies a number of different companies involved in a particular issue, such as the Sudan Divestment campaign, the Boycott Bush campaign. The Boycott Bush website was set up by Ethical Consumer after U.S. President George W. Bush failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol - the website identifies Bush's corporate funders and the brands and products they produce. . .

Boycotts are unquestionably legal under the common law. The right to engage in commerce, social intercourse, and friendship implies the right not to engage in commerce, social intercourse, and friendship; since a boycott is voluntary and nonviolent, it is unable to be stopped by the law. Opponents of boycotts historically have the choice of suffering under it, yielding to its demands, or attempting to suppress it through extralegal means, such as force and coercion.

Daily Finance - In the latest move in the John Mackey - Whole Foods health care brouhaha, two unions have joined in the chorus of voices opposing the embattled CEO. The Change to Win investment group and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union have released statements attacking Mackey and calling for a boycott of the store.

DENVER STUDYING ONE DOLLAR POT FINE

Channel 9, Denver - A city panel in charge of overseeing marijuana possession crimes in Denver recommended that the fine for possession be set at $1. If Denver's presiding judge accepts the recommendation from the Denver Marijuana Policy Review Panel, the fine would be the lowest in the entire nation for marijuana possession. The panel was created by Mayor John Hickenlooper in December 2007 after voters passed an ordinance that made it so adult marijuana possession is the city's "lowest law enforcement priority." In May 2008, the city attorney's office made it so those cited for the crime can mail in their fines instead of having to appear in court. At that time, the city attorney's office assigned the value of the fine at $50. . . Lt. Ernest Martinez with the Denver Police Department is also part of the panel and voted against lowering the fine.

FURTHERMORE. . .

HOW TO USE A LAW LIBRARY PROPERLY. . .AND WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DON'T
KENNEDY'S PROGRESSIVE VOTING SCORE

READER COMMENT EXCERPTS

U.S. RANKS 28TH IN WORLD IN INTERNET SPEED

There has to be some consideration for the shear size of the US and its larger rural population in these figures, yes? My hometown in Western Massachusetts still has no cable provider that would bring high speed connections so people connect with dial up. Are they figured into the average? I would be curious what the best download speeds for cities in the US are compared to abroad. - Lars

MARIJUANA & SEX

That is very interesting about marijuana. It seems like its just like drugs like Paxil and other elective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These medicines are thought to work by increasing the activity of the chemical serotonin in the brain. They too cause sexual side effects not unlike those mentioned from smoking weed - Beth

THE MAINE EXPERIENCE WITH OBAMA CARE STYLE HEALTH

As a Mainer myself I've followed the Dirigo fiasco (all the signs said "fiasco" before the ink was dry on the bill) from Day One and the parallels to various current Washington proposals are all too clear. There were some even worse ideas inspired by the Massachusetts disaster, like mandatory enrollment. My question then becomes "How many Harvard degrees does it take to equal the common sense of one supermarket employee in Maine?" (I suspect the number is infinite). - DLR

If you really want more affordable healthcare, improve the visibility of the connection between patients paying and providers receiving, don't make it more obscure by burying it in layers of bureaucracy. Unless you really want a health system that's as cheap and effective and transparent as the Pentagon.

WAR ON SOCIAL SECURITY WINNING SUPPORT

How can these people that want to opt-out look at themselves in the mirror? I would have thought that the various 'bubbles' like dot.com, Wall Street, and then Housing, would have proven that money can be a fickle thing.

And now, in the wake of the devastation left by Dubya et al, there are still those that have no concept, or respect for, the common man. Or that we should have a certain responsibility for those around us in this artificial construct called a capitalistic society.

Social Security doesn't make anybody rich. But even for people who worked all their lives with a normal job, it can make a big difference. And for people who didn't make a lot of money and don't have a pension, or when their employer screws them out of their pension, or their 403b is decimated by the market, Social Security will become a necessity. - Da Theorist

HEALTH CARE RATIONING

Of course we need health care rationing. To prevent procedures from being done on elderly patients to their detriment, due to the fee-for-service system which rewards doctors for expensive procedures regardless of whether it is in the best interest of the patient. See the statistics of our health care compared to "socialistic" Europe and Canada.

WHOLE FOODS BOYCOTT IDEA HITTING THE INTERNET

Sam Smith, good Lord! You've been a dumb ass since 1964? That may be a record of some kind. Too much LSD in the 70s?

RECOVERED HISTORY: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION

There was also the Black Tom explosion of 1916 in Jersey City, fronting on New York Harbor - thought to this day to have been an act of German sabotage. Two million pounds of munitions - including 100 thousand pounds of TNT on a barge- blew up. Much of the explosives had been stored in freight cars for eventual shipment to our future allies in World War I. The explosion damaged the Statue of Liberty, including its arm.

OBAMA ADMIN CLAIMED RIGHT TO SPY ON CAR DEALERS' COMPUTERS

The dealers should just file their rebate claims from an old junk computer set up solely for this purpose and make sure no other information is stored on the hard drive.

HOWARD DEAN

Dean is obviously not the establishment's choice, as evidenced by the full-court press dumped upon him after he gained some momentum in the 2004 race. From the manufactured "Dean Scream" to disparaging stories in all major media, he was all but wiped out in a couple of weeks.

JAZZ IS LOSING ITS AUDIENCE

I love jazz music and I'm only 18. i don't think it's ever gonna get old or be forgotten. It's a very important part of American culture.

DNA EVIDENCE CAN BE FABRICATED SAY SCIENTISTS

The solution for the type of fraud described in the article would be to develop tests that look at a much longer list of markers or a randomly chosen subset of a much longer list of markers. It is about time to get multiple samples tested from different laboratories

AMERICA'S OVER THE TOP SEX OFFENDER LAWS

Having read the article, I feel I should speak about my own experience here in the UK. I am a convicted offender, and I have had to register also, however the laws here do not seem to be as strict (I was shocked when I read the article as the harshness in which offenders are treated is the states seems to me to be extremely excessive).

I have to be on the national register for five years (as is the minimum here) and I narrowly escaped a custodial sentence due to my remorse regarding my actions and the fact that I handed myself in.

One benefit of being on the register here rather than the states is that it is not made public. I know all to well how valuable the non-disclosure is. Having been the victim of a smear campaign, things could have been a lot worse had my details been made available to the public as a whole.

With regards to ensuring the safety of others, the police here work very closely with offenders and probation workers, to ensure the offender rehabilitates and does not pose a threat.

My son is on a sex offender registry from a false accusation. He was only 15. He passed multiple polygraphs, and her medical exam showed her virginally intact after claiming he raped her every day for two weeks. Rape shield laws protected her three past accusations. The change in laws that made it easier to convict guilty people made it easier to convict innocent people.

My son was forced to accept an Alford plea (not admitting guilty, but considered a guilty plea) when the accuser and family fled the state 10 days before trial. He never allowed to face his accuser in court. She ever testified - her word alone to police stood. "Children never lie" railroaded my son into a lifetime of hell.

Every birthday for the past 11 years my son has been forced to register for a crime he did not commit.

His younger brother had to enroll in school in the next town after a 'concerned mom' let everyone in his class know his brother was a sex offender.

His older sister lost a fiance he feared losing custody of his son if his ex found out about her brother.

The wonderful young couple next door lost a huge amount of money on the sale of their home - next door to a sex offender.

I no longer associate with my neighbors - it's demoralizing to know they have spied on me and my family. I live in fear everyday some nut case will show up on our door step with a gun.

TEXAS PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO TEACH BIBLE THIS FALL

I have no problem with this idea as long the Bible is treated on an equal footing with other early fictional literature like the Illiad, the Aeniad, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Poetic Edda, etc. Studied as the tool of religious, social, and political propaganda it has been for 2000 years, it could provide a valuable learning experience.

The fight over whose bible is going to be used. Then it'll be a fight over whose interpretation of that specific bible will be used. Then it'll be a fight over which denominations are on the school boards that select the text to be used in each specific class. Then the ostracized Catholics will demand their input in the bi-lingual textbooks for the predominantly Catholic immigrants. Then lawsuits will be filed when companies like Black & Decker and Blue Devil are prohibited from shop classes, and Harry Potter and books containing word 'sex' are banned on 'religious grounds'. Homecoming bonfires will double as 'historic reenactment' book-burnings of religiously unacceptable literature.

Only after the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders are required to dress in "appropriate attire" that covers 98% of their bodies, and replace their heathen secular cheers with good clean Christian psalms, does one brave soul dare to nail a list of complaints to the front gate of the Cowboys Stadium.

Luckily, the list is found by a member of the American Inquisition and destroyed, the man gets tazed and arrested as a terrorist, convicted and tried by a good Christian jury, and immediately executed to save his soul.

SCALIA DOESN'T THINK INNOCENCE IS GROUNDS TO OVERTURN EXECUTION

This idea is the very opposite of the original intent of English Law. The purpose of our criminal justice system is supposed to be to ensure that no innocent man is ever convicted or executed regardless of how many guilty men go free as a result. Justices Scalia and Thomas deserve to be wrongly convicted themselves. Maybe that would give them a more sensible perspective on this issue.

FEDERAL HEALTH CARE MANDATE UNCONSTITUTIONAL?

I wonder if overturning the mandate would be supported by the right wing Supreme Court? It is certainly unconstitutional and overturning it would sink the Obama plan so one may think they would jump at the chance. But on the other hand the powerful insurance industry would love the mandate. It gives them the power of taxation in all but name - pay or be jailed or otherwise punished.

My guess is the Supreme Court would rule for the powerful insurance corporations and let the mandates stand.

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