wisconsin election results: Eylül 2012

30 Eylül 2012 Pazar

The Causes of the Protests in Afghanistan

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Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by Salon

The Causes of the Protests in Afghanistan

by Glenn Greenwald Most American media accounts and commentary about the ongoing violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan depict their principal cause as anger over the burning of Korans (it’s just a book: why would people get violent over it?) — except that Afghans themselves keep saying things like this:

Afghan protesters shout anti-U.S. slogans during a demonstration in Kunduz province February 25, 2012.Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

And:

Members of Parliament called on Afghans to take up arms against the American military, and Western officials said they feared that conservative mullahs might incite more violence at the weekly Friday Prayer, when a large number of people worship at mosques.
“Americans are invaders, and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a member of Parliament from the Ghorband district in Parwan Province, where at least four demonstrators were killed in confrontations with the police on Wednesday.

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies.
Read the full article at Salon...
© 2012 Salon

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

Remotely Piloted War

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How Drone War Became The American Way of Life

By Tom Engelhardt In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles. When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they've been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands. And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around? Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar. If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us. Think about it: What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory, it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes significant training, with robotics and a degraded version of the same job outsourced elsewhere. In this case, the “offshore” location that job headed for wasn’t China or Mexico, but a military base in the U.S., where a guy with a joystick, trained in a hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is “piloting” that plane. And given our experience with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the U.S., who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011, the U.S. Air Force was already training more drone “pilots” than actual fighter and bomber pilots combined? That’s one way drones are something other than the futuristic sci-fi wonders we imagine them to be. But there’s another way that drones have been heading for the American “homeland” for four decades, and it has next to nothing to do with technology, advanced or otherwise. In a sense, drone war might be thought of as the most natural form of war for the All Volunteer Military. To understand why that’s so, we need to head back to a crucial decision implemented just as the Vietnam war was ending. Disarming the Amateurs, Demobilizing the CitizenryIt’s true that, in the wake of grinding wars that have also been debacles -- the Afghan version of which has entered its 11th year -- the U.S. military is in ratty shape. Its equipment needs refurbishing and its troops are worn down. The stress of endlessly repeated tours of duty in war zones, brain injuries and other wounds caused by the roadside bombs that have often replaced a visible enemy on the “battlefield,” suicide rates that can’t be staunched, rising sexual violence within the military, increasing crime rates around military bases, and all the other strains and pains of unending war have taken their toll. Continue Reading.........

Hershey's Not as Sweet as We Thought The Chocolate Sweatshop

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by DAVID MACARAY What happened recently at the Hershey candy factory, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, has to be considered one of the weirdest and most outrageous labor stories of the new year.
First the outrageous part. According to a story in the New York Times (February 21), Exel, the logistics company hired by Hershey to oversee its Palmyra operation, was found guilty by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) of intentionally failing to report 42 serious injuries in the plant over a period of four years. Those 42 accidents constituted 43-percent of all such injuries that occurred during that period.
The majority of those injuries were related to the lifting and rehandling of large crates (some weighing 60 pounds) of Reese’s cups, Kit-Kat bars, and Hershey’s Kisses. The Labor Department issued fines in the amount of $280,000, and David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of OSHA, was quoted as saying, “Exel understood exactly what the law was on reporting. They were aware of these other injuries, and they just did not record them.” So that $283,000 penalty (inordinately high for OSHA violations) wasn’t levied for the usual reasons—improper record-keeping or unsafe working conditions—but for the much more serious crime of willful deceit.
Of course, Hershey wiped its hands clean of the whole affair, claiming they had no knowledge of how Exel ran the operation. This “veil of ignorance” nonsense is reminiscent of American sportswear and sports equipment companies claiming not to know that their products—the ones being sold for top dollar on American shelves—are
being manufactured in Central American sweatshops where near slave-labor conditions exist, and where union activists are regularly threatened, beaten and, on occasion, murdered.
Unfortunately, this “know nothing” posture is prevalent across-the-board. By their own admission, the U.S. Government in Iraq had no knowledge of what Halliburton and Blackwater were doing, and Halliburton and Blackwater had no knowledge of what their subcontractors were doing, which meant, conveniently, that no one could be held accountable. Contractors and subcontractors now litter the commercial landscape. Say what you will about the “enemy,” but the only guys in Iraq who seemed to know who answered to whom were the insurgents.

Continue Reading.............

WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex

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Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK

WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering

by Pratap Chatterjee What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday.

WikiLeaks website featuring documents obtained by hackers from private intelligence firm Stratfor. Photograph: guardiannews.com
The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.
Analysts working on the Middle East for the company appeared to be very poorly informed, with no more experience than a semester of studying abroad, according to journalists who have studied the documents. "They used Google translate to read al-Akbar news articles," says an incredulous Jamal Ghosn, associate editor of that newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. "This is a guaranteed way for good intelligence to be lost in translation."
Mike Bonnano of the Yes Men, a group of international pranksters who impersonate corporate executives and government leaders to highlight environmental and social abuses, was astonished to discover that his group was being tracked by Stratfor, which was apparently making money selling a list of his public-speaking engagements.
"They [are] making it sound better to clients simply so that they can make money," says Bonnano, after reviewing the material provided to him by WikiLeaks. "We're not talking about good intelligence, we're talking about a lot of information because more information means more money. That does not mean that it's smart."
Bonnano gave another example: Stratfor allegedly sent a memo to Dow Chemical summarising a public blogpost on the use of an environmentally-friendly washing machine used by activists campaigning against the 1984 lethal gas leak from Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, India, which killed over 2,259 people instantly and an estimated 25,000 over the next few years.
Stratfor is not the first company to be caught selling low-quality "intelligence" to government agencies and multinational corporations. Aaron Barr, then CEO of HB Gary Federal, a Sacramento, California-based company that sells similar services, boasted in 2010 that he could extract information about hackers like Anonymous from social media. In early February 2011, the company website was hacked to reveal the company was selling very inaccurate information about WikiLeaks.
What is more disturbing is that the information revealed about HBGary Federal and Stratfor suggests both companies were also seeking to profit by disrupting journalists and activist groups. HBGary Federal documents suggest that they were marketing a campaign for Bank of America to attack Glenn Greenwald of Salon and for the US Chamber of Commerce to attack the Washington, DC-based thinktank, the Center for American Progress (full disclosure: I do consulting work for the CAP). (There is no evidence Bank of America or the US Chamber of Commerce responded to the alleged offer of these services.)
Likewise, Stratfor has been actively following anti-Union Carbide activist groups like the Bhopal Medical Appeal, a tiny, Brighton, England-based non-profit, which worked with the Yes Men in July 2009 to stage a protest outside the Dow office in Staines in the UK. The newly-released emails suggest that the Dow shut down its offices on that occasion to avoid the protesters, after receiving a Stratfor report.
"Why is a company like Stratfor sniffing around us?" said Colin Toogood, of Bhopal Medical Appeal. "It makes you question how smart they are. How much is this costing? Wouldn't it be better PR to just get out and clean Bhopal up?"
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks says that the emails also reveal that Stratfor has recruited a "global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards – which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world." This, he says, "is corrupt or corrupting because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients."
Assange notes that Stratfor is also seeking to profit directly from this information by partnering in an apparent hedge-fund venture with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs managing director. He points to an August 2011 document, marked "DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS", from Stratfor CEO George Friedman, which says:

"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."

The claim that Stratfor buys information from insiders, while seeking to profit from their analysis, could attract the attention of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street. This is something that Stratfor is already worried about. In an August 2011 memo released by WikiLeaks, Friedman wrote to his employees:

"We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don't plan to do the perp walk and I don't want anyone here doing it either."

The company has refused to answer any questions about the emails. Instead, it released a short statement (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stratfor-statement-on-wikileaks-...) that says:

"Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them."

Assange slyly points out that this is in keeping with a lunchroom memo from Fred Barton, Stratfor's vice-president of intelligence, in which he states that he has an unofficial rule:

"Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations."

Statfor belongs to an extensive industry. In Top Secret America, a new book by Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post, the authors reveal that there are literally thousands of so-called intelligence analysts hawking equally dubious information to the federal government.
By its very nature, of course, such information is secret and often protected by government order. Nothing short of a major congressional investigation will be able to drill down into this intelligence-industrial cartel to assess not just the quality of the information and the way it was obtained, but whether or not any of it serves the public interest – or the very opposite. That is, unless Anonymous or WikiLeaks gets there and does the work first.
© 2012 The Guardian/UK

Pratap Chatterjee is the author of two books about the war on terror: Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War and Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004). He is the former executive director of CorpWatch and a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR.

Why Progressives Can't Ignore Religion

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Alternet/by Mike LuxWall or no wall, politics and religion have always been inextricably intertwined, and we won't win until we recognize and deal with that fact. February 28, 2012 |

Photo Credit: David ShankboneIn this fine country of ours, there is "a wall of separation between Church and State," as Thomas Jefferson once put it. And thank God for that (at least, if you’re inclined to believe in it). Our country has been so much stronger and more free as a result of having that wall. Here's the thing, though: having that wall doesn't mean that the cord linking politics and religion can ever be severed, at least not in this country where religion lives so fervently. The fact is that the USA remains, by a considerable margin, more religious and more Christian than any other Western nation, with close to 80 percent of us still calling ourselves Christians (in spite of somewhat falling percentages on that number in recent years).Even beyond that, though, religion permeates our culture, our language, our traditions, our public rituals, our history, and yes, our political debate. More than anything else -- more than political party, more than political history, more than any cultural icon whether it be Shakespeare, Star Wars or John Wayne — Christian religion is at the core of what America believes in and relates to. Progressives ignore or dismiss religion at our peril: we will never get to a majority political coalition in this country without understanding religion and the people who believe in it. The fact is that religion has driven most of our country's great conflicts and has been the inspiration for most of our progress. The abolitionists and the pro-slavery Southerners, the suffragists and the appalled conservative ministers who railed against them, the Populists of the late 1800s and the High Church business elite who were locked in combat, the Protestant Prohibitionists and the heavily Catholic "wets" who opposed them, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950-'60s and the racist but Bible-beating Southerners who fought them: they have all fought over an impossibly tangled blend of religion and politics.The good news is that the religious fault-lines are pretty much the same kind of fault-lines as the political ones political activists are more used to. In religion as in politics, conservatives tend to be rather individualistic, as the ultimate goal is to win the reward of heaven for yourself. Conservatives tend to value tradition and traditional hierarchy above change and openness, believing that too much change is scary and that only traditional authority figures can protect us. Conservatives tend to believe that an excess of democracy and "rights,” whether in government or a church setting, is a bad thing. God's role for conservatives is to punish us if we stray from the one true path. Religious progressives, on the other hand, are drawn less by hope of heaven and fear of hell than by the appeal of the sacred community, and the teachings of religion to love their neighbors as themselves. They tend to be more open to new ideas, new kinds of leaders, and new ways of thinking about faith; and much less inclined toward thinking there is one true path.The happy thing about the American experiment with freedom of religion — which actually echoes ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity became the official state religion — is that while people are inevitably shaped, motivated and drawn to politics by their religion and philosophy, our constitution's wall of separation between church and state has generally (with some notable exceptions) kept our politics far more free of zealotry and violence than you find in countries without that wall. For most of world history, politics and religion were so intertwined they corrupted each other and caused a great many bad things. The fact that this has not happened as much in America is a tribute to founders like Jefferson.

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29 Eylül 2012 Cumartesi

When Big Business and Human Rights Collide

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Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by the Los Angeles Times

When Big Business and Human Rights Collide

A case before the U.S. Supreme Court may deny victims abroad recourse against corporate-sanctioned abuse.

by Ka Hsaw Wa Among the thousands of interviews I've conducted as a human rights investigator over the last 24 years, one of the most difficult was in 1996, outside a refugee camp along the Thai-Burma border. I was no stranger to suffering in my country. I had fled from Burma (also known as Myanmar) just a few years before, escaping the brutal military regime after being arrested and tortured. I had gone to the camp to investigate reports that villages were being uprooted and brutalized to make way for a natural gas pipeline built by U.S. oil giant Unocal and other multinational corporations. There, I met a young mother from my Karen ethnic group whose baby had recently been killed by Burmese troops providing security for the pipeline.

A protestor during a demonstration at the Unocal Terminal Motor Transport facility in Los Angeles is seen on Dec. 12, 1996 holding aloft a photo of a resident of Burma reportedly injured by a landmine explosion. Other protestors chained themselves to a Unocal tanker truck. The demonstration's intent was to protest Unocal's involvement in a Burmese pipeline project, which activists claimed led to human rights abuses and destruction of the Burmese rainforest. (Leane Johnstone/Earth Action Team/AP Photo) That was Jane Doe, as she would later be known. She would go on to help establish the legal principle that U.S. corporations can be held liable for complicity in severe human rights abuses abroad. Now, a case being argued before theU.S. Supreme Courton Tuesday may mean that future Jane Does will have no such recourse against corporations.
Jane Doe 1 was a poor farmer whose great misfortune was that she was living in the path of the project when Unocal — now owned by Chevron — and its French and Thai corporate partners began building the pipeline. Their other partner was the Burmese military regime, and the corporations contracted with its army, despite its abhorrent human rights record, to provide security for the project.
The soldiers forced thousands of villagers to provide slave labor for the project. One of those villagers was Jane Doe's husband. As Jane Doe told me in the camp, the military forced her husband at gunpoint to clear the jungle and carry heavy loads. When he escaped, the soldiers came looking for him. They found Jane Doe instead, nursing her baby near a cooking fire. She told them she didn't know where her husband was. The soldiers beat her into unconsciousness and kicked her and her baby into the fire. Jane Doe recovered from her injuries; her baby died.
I remember trying to comfort her and thinking: How is it possible that foreign companies can come into Burma, hire a rogue army, make billions of dollars and have no responsibility for what their business partners do? There have been positive changes in Burma recently, but at that time, justice was impossible; the courts served the military. But Unocal was a U.S. company, and I had met American lawyers who believed that U.S. corporations were not above human rights laws.
And so, in 1996, Jane Doe 1 became a lead plaintiff in Doe vs. Unocal, a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, where Unocal had its headquarters. The case was based on the U.S. Alien Tort Statute of 1789, which allows non-U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in the U.S. for violations of international law. Jane Doe's case was the first to apply that law to corporations accused of liability in human rights violations. In 2005, Unocal agreed to a settlement. The case has provided an underpinning for similar claims against corporations headquartered in the U.S. or doing business in the U.S., and thus it has helped victims of crimes against humanity gain some justice.
For example, in 2007 Yahoo agreed to compensate the families of two Chinese dissidents imprisoned after the Internet company provided their identifying information to the Chinese government, and in 2010 the military contractor Blackwater compensated the families of several Iraqi men allegedly killed by Blackwater guards.

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Rick Santorum and the Sexual Counter-Revolution

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Laurie-penny

By Laurie Penny
Source: New StatesmanAlmost a century ago this month, women's rights activist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York for distributing "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles". What she was doing was handing out pamphlets about birth control, with the aim of freeing women sexually and socially from the burden of unwanted pregnancy, and she got a spell in a prison workhouse for her trouble. Walk around Lower Manhattan today, as I did this morning, and you'd think that history had vindicated Goldman's long campaign for sexual freedom. Pop songs promising a catalogue of horizontal delights pump out of the doorways of shops selling dildos and cheap knickers in the early mornings. Men hold hands with their husbands in SoHo. Wall Street workers in skirt suits jostle on the subway with excited teenagers in tiny shorts defying their parents and the winter chill. Everywhere, on billboards and bus-stops and hoardings a hundred feet high, images of female sexual availability bulge and shine and flutter their perfect airbrushed eyelashes. Thighs glisten, legs spread and giant red lips open wetly for the latest low-calorie yoghurt. Surely, you'd think, this is a sweaty shangri-la of erotic liberty. Surely this is one place where the sexual revolution of the 1960s was allowed to reach its logical conclusion. Step into any coffee shop or diner that carries the rolling news, however, and you'll find that in the land of the free not everything is as free as it seems. Over the past few weeks, right-wing politicians have launched an all-out assault on women's sexual and reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, attacking not just gay marriage and abortion but contraception, too. In 2012, the morality of hormonal birth control is now a serious hot-button issue in the Republican presidential race. Last week, not a single woman was allowed to testify before a Washington hearing on reproductive rights and "religious freedom" -- which includes allowing bosses to deny their female employees contraceptive health coverage on moral grounds. Meanwhile, the state of Virginia debated whether or not to force every women seeking an abortion to submit to vaginal probing with an ultrasound device, a policy that campaigners called "state-sponsored rape" -- one state representative commented that he couldn't see what the problem was, as these women had already consented to being penetrated when they got pregnant. As panels of terrifying old men gather on national television to debate whether and how far women should be punished for having sex outside marriage one could be forgiven for thinking that American politics had temporarily been scripted by Margaret Atwood. As the recession crunches down, the country is awash with anti-erotic, anti-queer, anti-woman rhetoric that goes beyond 'culture war' into the territory of sexual counter- revolution. The Republicans know that contraception in particular is a losing issue for them - a New York Times poll found that two thirds of voters, including 67 per cent of Catholics, support requiring employee health care plans to cover the cost of birth control, and Obama is up ten points with women from August - but they can't help themselves. One whiff of an uncontrolled pudenda and they start scrapping like housedogs who have been sprayed with pheromones, which makes for such classic TV moments as candidate Newt Gingrich, currently America's most famous serial adulterer, seriously participating in a debate about sexual continence. To call this backlash a culture war would be to imply that more than one side is fighting. This is far from the case. Compared to the pageant of homophobic and misogynist pants-wetting going on on the American right, all the Democrats need to do to make themselves look like a sane and useful political outfit is to sit back and watch the Republicans engage in auto-erotic asphyxiation. Americans have short memories, particularly in election years, and most seem to have forgotten that it is barely two months since President Obama stepped in to restrict the sale of the morning-after-pill -- to girls under 17 -- a move seemingly designed to reassure the increasingly suspicious, sexist American centre-right that he hates sexual freedom a little bit, too. Just not as much as those crazy Republicans. Curiously enough, precisely the same arguments seem to be at play when British conservatives attack abortion rights and sexual health - they might be gradually reintroducing fear of female sexuality into mainstream public life, but at least they're not as bad as those crazy Americans. Meanwhile, the public conversation about women's rights and sexual freedom is creeping back, inch by inch, towards conservative censoriousness. This new sexual counter-revolution is bigger than America. The rhetoric of god, marriage, morality and little girls learning to keep their legs closed has crossed the pond with all the tooth-aching tenacity of a Katy Perry song. Last week, we had Baroness Warsi going to the Vatican to announce that Europe needs to be more 'confident in its Christianity'. This week, it's a campaign by the Telegraph to remind women, their doctors and the government that abortions are not available 'on demand', a move that follows two years of attacks on sex education and the legal right to choose in parliament. Just like in the United States, the effect of this mission creep of legislative misogyny is to chip away at public support for women's right to control our bodies and our destinies. It's worth reminding ourselves what birth control and abortion actually mean in political terms. The hormonal birth control pill was the first step in a technological revolution that, within living memory, liberated one half of the human race from functional dependency on the other. With legal abortion as the other side of the equation should birth control fail, women can finally be the mistresses of our own reproductive systems, rather than the slaves of it. We can choose when, if and how many children we want, we can be sexually active without fear of pregnancy, and we can participate, at least in theory, in every area of public and professional life - we can have, in short, all the advantages that men have always enjoyed through accident of biology. Pro-choice campaigners speak of a woman's right to "control her own body", rather than have it controlled for her by her husband, the church or the state, as if that right were a social given rather than something that our mothers and grandmothers fought and went to prison to win. When conservative head-bangers like Rick Santorum complain that birth control encourages women and girls to have sex outside marriage, the appropriate response should be "yes, and?". Of course we want to have sex outside marriage without fear of social or economic punishment. Of course we want to control our fertility and, with it, our future. These are precisely the technological advances that make real equality a possibility, and they are precisely the advances that players in the big boys' throwback club of modern politics wish to curtail when they complain of "moral decline" in public life. The sexual counter-revolution is all about control. It's about control of women, control of desire, and control of political space at a time when elected representatives have nothing to offer voters beyond sops to our most fearful prejudices. As for those dirty billboards, they are part of the equation. A culture of objectification is part of managing and monetising the social fact of desire.Anglo-American culture has never had a problem with sex as long as it is carefully managed -- as long as it is enjoyed only by straight men and endured by women, guiltily, in the dark.
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Hershey's Not as Sweet as We Thought The Chocolate Sweatshop

WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex

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Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK

WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering

"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."

"We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don't plan to do the perp walk and I don't want anyone here doing it either."

The company has refused to answer any questions about the emails. Instead, it released a short statement (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stratfor-statement-on-wikileaks-...) that says:

"Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them."

Assange slyly points out that this is in keeping with a lunchroom memo from Fred Barton, Stratfor's vice-president of intelligence, in which he states that he has an unofficial rule:

"Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations."

Why Progressives Can't Ignore Religion

28 Eylül 2012 Cuma

Are Democrats And Republicans Just The Same Establishment Crap?

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I'm no fan of Obama's. He's been pretty good on some stuff and much less than any good on other stuff. He's an inspirational figure for obvious reasons but it hasn't gone much beyond the obvious reasons. I have feint hope-- self delusion at best, most likely-- that he'll be any better in his second term. Alas, though, there is not one issue on which Romney would be better. In fact, Romney would be far worse on every issue. So... as Chris Hedges opined for TruthDig earlier in the week, How Do You Take Your Poison?
Before we get to Chris' very solid reasoning, Romney (or Newt or Santorum or Huckabee or any of that dreck) isn't the only think that's positively toxic about our politics of late. We mostly concentrate here on ripping the DCCC for pushing reactionary Blue Dogs and corrupt New Dems, but just look at the Democrats running for Senate. The list is actually putrid. Almost all the incumbents are horrible or, at best, mediocre (obviously Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehouse and Sherrod Brown excepted). Joe Manchin? What even makes him a Democrat? Claire McCaskill is barely any better and the only thing that vaguely recommends her is the threat of having Todd Akin in the Senate. And the challengers? Mostly just awful (exceptions being Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono). Joe Donnelly (IN) is the very worst of the Blue Dogs-- anti-Choice, gay-hating bigot, corporate whore, a tendency to vote with the GOP as a default position. Bob Kerrey (NE) might be as bad. The other alternative is that Bob Kerrey will be even worse. New Dem Shelley Berkley (NV) reeks of corruption and political cowardice, the worst of what the House Democrats are all about. Think of her as a malignant amalgam of Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel and Steny Hoyer.
Hedges writes that, basically, Romney and Obama are both so bad that there's barely a difference. I respect his point of view-- even if mine is slightly more nuanced, though not nuanced enough to get me to vote for Obama again... though I might if I lived in North Carolina. Both, he asserts, are puppets to their corporate masters. And he's talking about more than just the "Grand Bargain" Obama and Boehner have cooked up for after the election.

We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution-- Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors-- are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

And while Romney has been, courtesy of the magazine Mother Jones, exposed as a shallow hypocrite, Obama is in a class by himself. There is hardly a campaign promise from 2008 that Obama has not broken. This list includes his pledges to support the public option in health care, close Guantanamo, raise the minimum wage, regulate Wall Street, support labor unions in their struggles with employers, reform the Patriot Act, negotiate an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, curb our imperial expansion in the Middle East, stop torture, protect reproductive rights, carry out a comprehensive immigration reform, cut the deficit by half, create 5 million new energy jobs and halt home foreclosures. Obama, campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, said that as president he would fight for the right of collective bargaining. “I’d put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll … walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America,” he said. But when he got his chance to put on those “comfortable pair of shoes” during labor disputes in Madison, Wis., and Chicago he turned his back on working men and women.

Obama, while promising to defend Social Security, also says he stands behind the planned cuts outlined by his deficit commission, headed by Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican. The Bowles-Simpson plan calls for cutting 0.3 percentage points from the annual cost-of-living adjustment in the Social Security program. The annual reduction would slowly accumulate. After a decade it would mean a 3 percent cut. After two decades it would mean a 6 percent cut. The retirement age would be raised to 69. And those on Social Security who continued to work and made more than $40,000 a year would be penalized with further reductions. Obama’s payroll tax cuts have, at the same time, served to undermine the solvency of Social Security, making it an easier target for the finance corporations that seek to destroy the program and privatize the funds.

...Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell.
Well, not 100% the same

I mentioned yesterday that I had had dinner with former Republican Congressman Mark Foley. He asked me to run the Blue America questions by him. One of the questions we ask our candidates is what they would do if they were elected and Obama was reelected and Obama came and asked them not to back the Congressional Progressive Caucus legislation to defund the occupation of Afghanistan. I have a dramatic presentation playing the reasonable role of Obama asking for help as the leader of the country, the free world and the party. Foley assumed the answer we were looking for-- logical for a Republican-- is that the candidate would back the president. He seemed slightly shocked when I explained that that was not the kind of candidates we look for and the purpose of the question was meant to help us determine how independent of the Establishment the candidate would be under extreme circumstances. If their name is on this list they passed the test. Independent-minded progressives is what we need on our side of the aisle, not the crap Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are dredging up from the pits of Democratic hackdom. If they had a similar question, they would be looking for the answer Rep. Foley thought we were trying to elicit. Their reptilian lizard brains work the same exact way Republican lizard brains work. There's even a Blue America page for candidates who are running on an anti-Austerity platform and who are embracing Jacob Hacker's fundamental ideas about Prosperity Economics.

"Education Nation" might be a more inspiring rubric if it applied to a nation that actually had some respect for education

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"Education Nation is NBC News' year-round initiative to engage the country in a solutions-focused conversation about the state of education in America."
-- from NBC News's Education Nation website
by Ken

The phrase "Education Nation" has a nice ring, though the ring rings a tad hollow when you consider that the nation in question is supposed to be our own, which has never been an education nation ans in modern times has devolved into an anti-education or mis-education nation. Nevertheless, under that rubric NBC News and the New York Public Library have been cosponsoring a week's worth of weirdly and wonderfully eclectic free events that really do assume that learning is a core value.

I see by NBC News's Education Nation website that in addition to Education Nation Summits in New York City, of which this week's was the third, there's an annual Education Nation Tour -- this year's already over, alas. But the website stresses that the effort is ongoing, year-round.

GOOD FOR THEM, I SAY. SOMEBODY
HAS TO BE IN FAVOR OF EDUCATION

Especially now that the cause of educational "reform" has been taken over by a gaggle of Democrats, heavily weighted to the millionaire ilk, making common cause with brute right-wing educational fascists, as Diane Ravitch for one has been screaming bloody murder about. I've written about her views in a number of posts, including one from September 2011, "When we put the plutocrats in charge, we get their crackpot ideas on matters like education," and a pair from February 2012, "With such powerful forces for mis-education arrayed against actual learning, is there any hope for American education?" and "In NYS's education war, Diane Ravitch asks: 'Will we ever break free of our national addiction to data?'"

For Ravitch's thoughts on master thug Rahm Emanuel as educational reformer, which I meant to write about but never got around to, see her terrific NYRB blogpost "Two Visions for Chicago's Schools."

ACTUALLY, EDUCATION NATION DID MAKE
NEWS WHEN WILLARD OPENED HIS FOOL TRAP

And let fly a barrage of educational imbecility (see Joy Rasmovits's HuffPost report), woven around the theme that class size doesn't really matter, as liberal whiners are wont to whine, and as he himself once believed, in another, now-forgotten lifetime. What matters is -- are you ready for this? -- great teachers! And what makes a great teacher? Someone who (1) doesn't belong to a union (is it any wonder that a born bully hates unions, which enable powerless people to stick up for themselves?) and (2) breathes the passion of standardized-testing euphoria.

MY FIRST "EDUCATION NATION" EVENT WAS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PANKAJ MISHRA AND IAN BURUMA

And the New School's community and student center was packed! The Indian-born reporter-author, who's done a lot of terrific descriptive and analytical reporting on South Asia for the New York Review of Books, was there to talk about his latest book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, with one of my favorite writers, the seemingly infinitely and effortlessly erudite Dutch-born Ian Buruma. I arrived late, because I had a DWT post to finish before I could head out, but I got the idea: that Mishra is looking at the clash between East and West that played out in the late 18th and early 19th centuries from the vantage point of the Easterners, one we hardly ever see from.

My favorite moment, though, came in the Q&A period, when Pankaj and Ian were asked, more or less, "What about Syria?" The question took a lot longer to ask, but didn't seem any more specific than that. Ian ventured that if the question was, should we be doing something about the horrendous situation there?, then he would have to say that this is one reason he rates President Obama higher than many of his liberal friends -- the recognition that there really isn't anything more we can do.

Needless to say, this is something that the perpetual thugs of the Right refuse even to try to understand. But then, refusing even to try to understand is the hallmark of the American Mis-Education Nation.

My second "Education Nation" event was something completely different: a celebration of the Bronx. I think I'll save that for tomorrow.

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Lance Enderle Shocks GOP Hack Mike Rogers In Raucous Cleary University Debate

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Michigan's 8th congressional district gave Obama a hefty victory over McCain in 2008, 53-46%. It was slightly altered in the new redistricting, but just slightly and Obama would have won it under the new boundaries 52-46%, a healthy 6 point lead. It's likely he'll beat Romney by an even greater margin in November. The heart of the district is the same: Lansing and East Lansing (Ingham County) and Livingston County east of that, a white flight county that accounts for Rogers' long tenure despite his pathetic record of achievement. (For example, in 2008, his Democratic opponent won 53% of the Ingham County vote but Rogers took 67% of Livingston, 63% of the part of Oakland County in the district and all the smaller counties.) MI-08 would be a natural target for the DCCC. Democrats can win there. But Rogers is a senior Republican and head of the Intelligence Committee, so Steve Israel issued the "free pass" he has given to all GOP leaders. The same way Israel refuses to take on Budget chairman Paul Ryan and Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon, he has made it clear that Lance Enderle can expect no help-- ZERO-- from the DCCC. These are the guys who are making the policies that are so detrimental to the country but the reptilian Mr. Israel would rather spend millions of dollars on clowns like Allen West and unknown backbenchers no one has ever heard of.
Tuesday evening progressive Democrat Lance Enderle-- the kind of reform-minded scrapper Democrats need in Congress-- took the battle directly to Rogers and having forced him into a debate, pulverized him in front of voters and the media. The biggest newspaper in Livingston County, the district's GOP heartland couldn't make Rogers look good. The video above comes from their website. Rogers tried a deceitful approach that made him sound reasonable instead of like the far right hack he is. He seemed shocked when Lance wouldn't like him get away with it and accused him being a corporate whore:

In a tense, often harsh, 60-minute exchange, Democratic underdog Lance Enderle accused 12-year Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of selling out to large contributors, including an accusation that Rogers had taken "blood money" from a contributor whose safety violations led to the death of 29 coal miners in West Virginia.

"You were sent to Washington to represent us," Enderle said to Rogers. "You haven't been doing a very good job."

An obviously irritated Rogers said he found it disgusting that Enderle would suggest he could be bought for any price.

"Maybe you can be bought," Rogers said. "You can't buy me. Apparently, you go cheap."

Rogers and Enderle found no common ground in the third and most contentious of three candidate forums Tuesday night at Cleary University's Johnson Center in Genoa Township.

...For most of the forum, Enderle-- a former schoolteacher-- lashed out at Rogers for using "scare tactics" on subjects ranging from the debt cliff to the demise of Medicare due to the Affordable Care Act.

Rogers referred to Enderle's verbal attacks as "arm-flailing and finger-pointing that does not fix one problem in Washington, D.C."

...Responding to questions from Daily Press & Argus Metro Editor Mike Malott, the two staked out mostly disparate positions on all major topics:

Social Security/Medicare: Rogers supports the Ryan plan for Medicare reform, saying a failure to act will bankrupt Medicare in 2024 and Social Security by 2050. He stressed that the Ryan plan will not cost current senior citizens a dime and will give future generations a choice in health-care coverage.

Enderle defended the president's plan, citing projected savings for senior citizens.

In a shot at Rogers' campaign funders, he asked, "Are we working for the pharmaceutical companies or are we working for our constituents?"

Affordable Care Act: Rogers said that Obamacare could be repealed while still providing popular features such as coverage for young adults, coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and eliminating coverage caps.

Obama's plan, he said, has already escalated into a cost of $2.6 trillion. "We have no idea how to pay for that," he said.

He said "you don't want your federal government running your health care."

Enderle said the Affordable Care Act would bring down costs by producing healthier citizens.

He also stressed that access to health care should be a basic right.

"I want to see Medicare for every citizen of the United States."

Tax increases and the national debt: Rogers said he is a flat-tax advocate and that he would favor tax reform that might eliminate loopholes.

Enderle said the tax system should be "equitable" and is in favor of a progressive tax structure that will tax the so-called 1 percent at a higher rate.

...At the close of the debate, Enderle asked Rogers to schedule two more debates, one in Oakland and one in Ingham. Afterward, Rogers said his schedule would determine if he would comply.

Mike Rogers freely admits to being an advocate for Paul Ryan's highly toxic Austerity Agenda that has failed so miserably across Europe. Lance Enderle is a proponent of Prosperity Economics and you can help him on the Americans For Real Prosperity page.

Get A GOP Committee Chairmanship And Win a Free Pass To Reelection From Steve Israel

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Blue America isn't counting on the DCCC-- we're running this ad in dozens of WI-01 newspapers

This is a list of the current chairmen of the House's standing committees. The bolded chairmen represent districts that Obama won in 2008 and is expected to win again in November.
• Agriculture- Frank Lucas (R-OK)• Appropriations- Hal Rogers (R-KY)• Armed Services- Buck McKeon (R-CA)• Education and the Workforce- John Kline (R-MN)• Energy and Commerce- Fred Upton (R-MI)• Budget- Paul Ryan (R-WI)• Financial Services- Spencer Baucus (R-AL)• Foreign Affairs- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)• Homeland Security- Peter King (R-NY)• House Administration- Dan Lungren (R-CA)• Intelligence- Mike Rogers (R-MI)• Judiciary- Lamar Smith (R-TX)• Natural Resources- Doc Hastings (R-WA)• Oversight and Government Reform- Darrell Issa (R-CA)• Rules (R-CA)- David Dreier (R-CA)/Pete Sessions (R-TX)• Science, Space and Technology- Ralph Hall (R-TX)• Small Business- Sam Graves (R-MO)• Transportation and Infrastructure- John Mica (R-FL)• Veteran's Affairs- Jeff Miller (R-FL)• Ways and Means- Dave Camp (R-MI)
We've been making the point all cycle that, for various reasons, "ex-Blue Dog/New Dem Steve Israel-- founder of the ultra secretive let's-all-us-insiders-be-friends-and-get-rich-together Center Aisle Caucus (which pledges to never try to defeat fellow members-- has had a strict hands off policy when it came to targeting powerful senior Republicans. If the Democrats don't take back the majority-- in the light of a likely Obama landslide against Romney and voter rejection of GOP extremism and obstructionism-- it will be because of Israel's blundering. He may well be the reptile Nancy Pelosi boast he is, but his reptilian instincts have only been brought to bear against progressive Democrats and a few unheralded, powerless Republican backbenchers and assclowns.
In 2010 the Republicans were very serious about taking over the House, far more so than Israel is today. The NRCC-- their version of the DCCC-- suited up for total war early on and they decided to not just go after weak struggling freshmen who had won in the Democratic wave year of 2008, many of whom had come in on President Obama's coattails, but to also go after very senior Democrats, some of whom had been in office "forever" and who were powerful, heavily-financed committee chairmen. So it wasn't just backbencher weak links like freshmen Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Travis Childers (MS), Suzanne Kosmas (FL), Bobby Bright (AL), Michael McMahon (NY), Harry Teague (NM), and Kathy Dahlkemper (PA), but also powerful old warhorses like John Spratt (SC), the Budget Committee Chairman, first elected in 1982 and Ike Skelton (MO), the Armed Services Committee Chairman, first elected in 1976.

These two powerful chairman easily outspent their GOP opponents:•John Spratt ($2,497,633)- Mickey Mulvaney ($1,510,414)•Ike Skelton ($3,107,552)- Vicky Hartzler ($1,351,176)
But there was something else these two races had in common. McCain had beaten Obama in each district the year before. In SC-05 McCain won with 53% (while Spratt beat his Republican opponent 62-37%) and in MO-04 McCain won with 61% (at the same time Skelton beat his Republican opponent 66-34%). Astounding numbers! So what changed? What made popular local politicians like Spratt and Skelton, both of whom used their committees to bring home the bacon to the district, suddenly so vulnerable? There were several factors, of course, but one was that the NRCC actually went after them and went after them for real.
Their replacements as committee chairs have been nothing short of tragic for the United States. These are the people who are coming up with the destructive ideas and legislation that has been causing so much misery in this country-- and that voters expect Democrats to protect them from. Paul Ryan took over as Budget Committee chairman and Buck McKeon took over as Armed Services Committee chairman. Interestingly, each is from a district Obama won-- albeit narrowly-- in 2008. Obama beat McCain 49-48% in CA-25 (McKeon's district) and Obama beat McCain 51-48% in WI-1 (Ryan's district). The two Republican incumbents will also easily outspend their Democratic opponents this year. But the real tragedy is that the defeatist DCCC refuses to target either of these powerful-- yet extremely vulnerable-- incumbents. Ryan and McKeon could both be beaten and replaced by progressive Democrats Rob Zerban and Lee Rogers. But, unlike a surging NRCC in 2010, a mealy-mouthed and very creepy DCCC, led by careerist and corporate whore Steve Israel, more concerned about electing conservative Democrats than about taking out odious Republicans, has convinced itself that it can't win in either of these districts. The DCCC is dead wrong.
McKeon is on the verge of defeat-- with or without the DCCC-- based on local politics. And in Wisconsin, Ryan has come to symbolize the national discontent with an anti-social, reactionary, right-wing vision that mixes up the interests of struggling American working families with the demented precepts in Ayn Rand novels enjoyed by adolescents with stunted intellectual growth.
So does it matter that the DCCC refuses to take on powerful Republicans? They made sure that there wouldn't even be an opponent for Boehner this year by sandbagging and sabotaging Justin Coussoule, the Democrat who ran against him in 2010. And they're furiously ignoring Wayne Powell's valiant-- albeit uphill-- efforts to unseat Eric Cantor this year. But taking on McKeon and Ryan are jobs the Democratic grassroots should demand of the DCCC. For whatever Byzantine reasons Nancy Pelosi thought she had to appoint an "ex"-Blue Dog like Steve Israel to head the committee, she should replace him before it's too late and the country is relegated to another two years of heinous Republican congressional domination. Recently another poll was released showing that more than half the voters now understand that the House Republicans are deliberately hamstringing efforts to resuscitate the economy in order to bolster their chances of defeating President Barack Obama. It isn't only Boehner and Cantor who are responsible for that agenda. Republican committee chairs like Ryan and McKeon are carrying it out. They must be stopped. But Steve Israel is blocking attempts to stop them.
Look at that list up top. How many of these Republican policy makers do you think the DCCC is targeting? Exactly one, a pathetic loser, Dan Lungren (whose new district would have been won by Obama 51-46% and who heads the least important committee on the whole list, a powerless, internal housekeeping committee). The GOP heavies-- Ryan, McKeon, Rogers, Upton, Kline, Issa, King, Camp, Mica... Steve Israel might have never heard of any of them. Except Peter King; we know Israel heard of him because they made a deal long ago to help keep each other in Congress. They have contiguous Long Island districts and have exchanged neighborhoods so King would have more Republicans and Israel would have more Democrats. And America gets stuck with two exceptionally bad entrenched congressmen. But other than King, there's been a lot of speculation about why exactly Israel is protecting all the GOP heavyweights. Is the fix in from his Wall Street donors? Is he just a gutless wonder? Who knows the motivations. The results, though, are sickening.

Buck McKeon-- Charged With Keeping America's Biggest Moochers Shelling Out Cash For The GOP

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The man behind the curtain

This week Frank Rich rethought a post of his from April, Sugar Daddies: The Old Rich White Men Who Are Buying This Election. It sounded dire and scary when I read it last spring... hideous, sociopathic and very dangerous plutocrats like Harold Simmons, David and Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, Irving Moscowitz, Steven Lund, Bob Perry, Peter Thiel, Jerry Perenchio, Robert Rowling, Foster Friess, William Dore, Philip Geier, Julian Robertson, Robert Mercer, Harlan Crow, Edward Conard, Paul Edgerley, John Paulson, Frank VanderSloot, Paul SInger... most of them financial predators angry that Democrats want to protect consumers from their deprecations. The names bolded are hedge fund managers, leveraged buy-out crooks and stock manipulators. Each has given at least a million dollars to the GOP this year, some much, much more. Now Rich is wondering if maybe the expected impact of the sugar daddies was overhyped.

It may turn out that many, including me, were more worried about the post–Citizens United wave of money from the Kochs and Adelsons than we had to be because (a) Romney proved an even weaker candidate than anyone imagined (which is saying something), and (b) he’s so weak that those pulling the strings of the super-PACs (e.g., Karl Rove) may in desperation start shifting money away from the national ticket to salvage troubled GOP Senate candidates. The most important political story so far this week was on the front page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal: It cites example after example of pro-Romney super-PAC expenditures failing to get the job done. Obama is up nearly ten points in Michigan and eight points in Pennsylvania even though right-wing super-PACS have spent $18 million on TV spots in those two states (more than twice the amount spent by the Obama campaign and a pro-Obama super-PAC combined). In North Carolina, the race is still close despite nearly $34 million in pro-Romney spending there (nearly 50 percent more than Obama forces have spent). Democratic Senate candidates are ahead in Ohio, Florida, and Virginia despite similarly huge pro-GOP super-PAC outlays in those races. As I wrote in my piece about attack ads, the quality of the ads matters, and Romney’s ever-shifting campaign strategy may have made it impossible for anyone on his side to come up with a devastating “Daisy” ad. And at this late point, the audience may be too desensitized to respond to one in any case. (Just go to a swing state and turn on the television for an hour; the volume is shocking.) Money’s biggest role in the final weeks may be on the ground, not on the air-- an advantage for the better-organized Obama.

Thursday Dan Eggen explained, technically, why all that money flowing from the avaricious billionaires into Romney-backing SuperPACs isn't as nearly as effective as the money Obama has coming in.

As the presidential campaigns step up the pace of their multimillion-dollar spending sprees, President Obama has a little-noticed strategic advantage that gives him more control over the money he has raised.

While Mitt Romney relies heavily on massive amounts of cash held by the Republican Party and interest groups, Obama has more funds in his own campaign coffers. That allows him to make decisions about where and how to spend the money and to take better advantage of discounted ad rates, which candidates receive under federal law.

In one Ohio ad buy slated to run just before the election, for example, Obama is paying $125 for a spot that is costing a conservative super PAC $900.

The imbalance could prove crucial over the next six weeks, when the candidates and their allies are expected to burn through about $1 billion worth of advertising in battleground states and deploy thousands of staffers and volunteers to drum up votes. With $1.5 billion already spent on the White House race, the final barrage will help determine whether Romney can turn around his fortunes and defeat the incumbent.

Boehner appointed McKeon chairman of the House Armed Services Committee for exactly one reason: McKeon is a dependable shill who could be counted on to shake down arms makers and war contractors for Republican Members of the House. That's his job. McKeon is the #1 recipient in the whole Congress (both Houses) of blood money from the arms makers and military contractors. So far this cycle he's taken in $481,850-- not counting what he was able to extort from the companies for his wife's ridiculous and failed California state Assembly run, which saw national defense corporations donating to a state legislative race for the first time in history. All that cash was pure, unadulterated bribery for McKeon. He's also the #1 recipient in the whole Congress ($186,500) of war industries PAC cash.
McKeon's crooked PAC has raised closed to half a million dollars so far this cycle and the biggeste dcontributors include every big weapons maker in America: General Electric, General Dynamics, Boeing, BAE Systems, Lockhead Martin, Nortthrop Grumman, DynCorp, EADS, General Atomics, Alliant Techsystems, Honeywell, Raytheon... You get the picture. Most of this money goes into McKeon's pockets by way of payments to his wife, children and other relatives. But he also doles out checks to other Republican candidates (as well as $5,000 to Boener, who has no opponent). Among the Republicans who McKeon wrote PAC checks to are disgraced war criminal Allen West (FL), Joe Coors (CO), Mike Coffman (CO), Charlie Bass (NH), Frank Guinta (NH), Brian Bilbray (CA), Richard Tisei (MA), Adam Hasner (FL), Mia Love (UT), Todd Young (IN), Dan Lungren (CA), and dozens more. And McKeon also directs his Military Industrial Complex finaciers to write checks for less powerful and more needy Republican backbenchers-- hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. Every cent of that money is paid many times over by taxpayers who foot extravagent bills for weapons systems that factors all the bribes into the pie.
McKeon is also fellow Mormon Mitt Romney's point person with the arms industry and he's helped Romney wring $395,932 out of the sector so far. This week former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren penned an OpEd for TruthOut, Meet the Welfare Queens of the 1%: The Moochers Mitt Missed Work for the Pentagon. Like everyone else talking about Mitt Romney these days, his kick off point is Romney's secretly recorded remarks dispargaing 47% of Americans as moochers and deadbeats. He says that if "Romney were to broaden his focus, he would find that there are welfare queens beyond his imaginings. In the last four years, Wall Street moguls such as Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein have reaped tremendous public scorn for their outsized paychecks, so their transgressions are not exactly a secret. At least in theory, however, bankers operate private enterprises not dependent on the taxpayer (that is, in good years when the government is not bailing them out)." He was just getting warmed up.

[T]here is no dispute about the status of major Pentagon contractors, their utter dependency on government, and their outsized profiteering. Lockheed Martin, the largest contractor, receives about 85 percent of its revenues from US Government contracts. Government sales accounted for more than 90 percent of revenue to Northrop Grumman, the fourth largest contractor, during the last three years.

Unlike the cases of Dimon or Blankfein, I doubt one American in a thousand knows who Wes Bush is. The CEO of Northrop Grumman, he made over $26 million last year, exceeding JPMorgan Chase's payout to Dimon, the highest paid bank CEO. In fact, the chiefs of the five largest Department of Defense (DoD) contracting firms hauled in $107 million combined, more than the top five bank CEOs (who limped in with a mere $75 million altogether). Yet somehow, this form of income redistribution through the medium of government manages to bounce off the consciousness of people like Romney and his supporters like Swedish peas off an Abrams tank.

Indeed, as I have argued more comprehensively elsewhere, the public rarely notices how much the DoD budget contributes to an upward redistribution of income from the many to the relatively few. The Washington, DC, suburbs are a notable example of this. At a time when median income and net worth have fallen nationally, income in DC's surrounding counties has surged, with seven of the ten richest counties in the nation now lying in the Washington region.

While government employees are well-compensated, there are statutory limits to their pay, so they do not account for the explosion of 5,000-square-foot McMansions, gated communities, and similar gaudy excrescences in the capital's outer suburbs. This phenomenon has gone hand-in-hand with the last decade's explosion in the contracting out of government services and the huge and uncompetitive profit margins this process generates-- particularly in DoD, but also Homeland Security and government-wide information technology.

Yet the peculiar sociology of the military-industrial complex paradoxically allows for a government-dependent population that disproportionately thinks of itself as small-government conservative and heavily votes GOP. This is particularly true in outer-suburban counties like Loudoun that are rural enough to maintain the illusion of a free Jeffersonian yeomanry among the many contractor personnel living on their sham estates in what was once Virginia's horse country.

In addition, the Pentagon budget is a net drain on jobs nationally, rather than a net creator. A dollar spent on road building, health care or just about any other employment activity creates more jobs than a dollar appropriated to DoD. And while the military budget generates a few pockets of prosperity, such as the DC suburbs or San Diego, it draws money out of more congressional districts than it benefits.

It will be fascinating to see the howls of dismay from defense contractor executives if, on January1, 2013, Congress really does walk the country over the so-called "fiscal cliff" and the Pentagon budget faces cuts. And what would be their reaction to a modest proposal to cushion the blow to our troops in the field by forcing these executives to take a pay cut? Why should a company that receives more than, say, two-thirds of its revenue from government pay its executives more than the $400,000 annual salary that the President of the United States receives? Any more than that would simply demonstrate the kind of grasping dependency on taxpayers that Mr. Romney abhors.

And, yes, of course Wes Bush has given directly to McKeon-- something like $7,000 in the last few years-- even apart from the massive bribes he has authorized that Northrup Grumman pays McKeon for services rendered.

But perhaps all the billionaire cash isn't going to work because most Americans are fed up with right-wing ideology. The polls all indicate the whole country-- outside Wall Street, the Old Confederacy, the Mormon states and Fox News' poor brainwashed viewers-- are rejecting the whole GOP schtik, from the forced ultrasounds to all the bigotry to the voodoo economics. And that's all they've got... except this. They've got this: