NightBlogger

Who’s being rescued? Are bailout funds being used as intended?
Dennis Kucinich: “Essentially what Secretary Paulson did the other day was to say we’re going to give the money to banks and maybe the banks will help millions of homeowners…Now you got money for bank consolidation, money for parties, money for bonuses….This is a dangerous moment for our country.”

Douglas A. McIntyre
24/7 Wall Street
The lame duck members of Congress are trying to get out of town. Their boxes are packed and they are leaving to join law firms in their old districts. Other members of the House just want a month or two off. The legislative leadership wants everyone to stay around for hearings and a vote on a $25 billion bailout of Detroit. After a lot of hard work, President Bush will veto the legislation. He has already signaled that the car industry is on its own. Paulson could have made the loans. The fact that they did not shows that the administration is not willing to get involved. Bush is heading back to Texas to run his old ball team, the Rangers. He will be driving a Honda.

YAHOO NEWS
With 71 days left in office, President Bush is less popular than President Nixon was at the time of his resignation, according to data released Monday by CNN and Opinion Research Corporation. The new poll, taken Thursday through Sunday, showed an approval rating of 24 percent and a disapproval rating of 76 percent. CNN released a chart showing presidential “disapproval” ratings in CNN or Gallup polls for each president dating back to Harry Truman. This list shows the percentage of Americans who disapproved of the way each president was handling his job.

Wired
When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won’t just get a new president; they might finally learn the full extent of George W. Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping. Since The New York Times first revealed in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on citizens’ overseas phone calls and e-mail, few additional details about the massive “Terrorist Surveillance Program” have emerged. That’s because the Bush administration has stonewalled, misled and denied documents to Congress, and subpoenaed the phone records of the investigative reporters.

Now privacy advocates are hopeful that President Obama will be more forthcoming with information. But for the quickest and most honest account of Bush’s illegal policies, they say don’t look to the incoming president. Watch instead for the hidden army of would-be whistle-blowers who’ve been waiting for Inauguration Day to open the spigot on the truth. “I’d bet there are a lot of career employees in the intelligence agencies who’ll be glad to see Obama take the oath so they can finally speak out against all this illegal spying and get back to their real mission,” says Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU’s Washington D.C. legislative director.

New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh already has a slew of sources waiting to spill the Bush administration’s darkest secrets, he said in an interview last month. “You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on January 20. [They say,] ‘You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.’” More

Jonathan Freedland
…that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won’t even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer.

How Bush might use it is a question that gained new force at the weekend, when US forces crossed the Iraqi border into Syria to kill Abu Ghadiya, a man they said had been funnelling “foreign fighters” allied to al-Qaida into Iraq. That American move has touched off a round of intense head-scratching around the world, as foreign ministers and analysts ask each other the time-honoured diplomatic query: what did they mean by that? To which they add the post-Nov 4 question: and what does it tell us about how Bush plans to use his final days in the White House?

You can choose from two versions. Call the first the “no big deal” theory. It holds that the Sunday raid was no more than standard operational procedure in the war on terror. Sure, it meant violating the sovereignty of an independent nation state, but that’s not so new: there was a similar incursion into Pakistan in September. Indeed, there may be more relevant precedents. A former official in the Bush administration confirmed to me yesterday that the US has lunged into Syrian territory several times before: it’s just that Damascus chose to keep quiet. In which case, the interesting question is why the Syrians went public this time.

In this “no big deal” version, Abu Ghadiya was simply too irresistible a high-value target to let slip away. “They saw something they wanted to hit and they hit it,” says one European diplomat resignedly. The most extreme version of this shoulder-shrugging account holds that the decision may not even have been taken at the political level, but in the field, by General David Petraeus. Not so implausible, since Bush in effect ceded command of the Iraq war to Petraeus a long while ago.

Nonsense, says the other school of thought. It is a massive deal to strike at a sovereign state in this way: in an earlier era, before 2001, we would have called it an act of war. Pakistan is no precedent, because in that case there was a degree of cooperation. Not now.

This was a deliberate act, calculated to send a series of messages. First, to the Syrians, reminding them who’s boss in the region and strong-arming them to do more to crack down on al-Qaida.

Second, to the Europeans who have been moving towards a rapprochement with Damascus. Nicolas Sarkozy may have invited President Assad to Paris and David Miliband may have been hosting the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, in London this very Monday, 24 hours after the raid - but no matter. Bush gets to remind both these uppity Europeans who’s in charge.

Third, the president could have been sending a message to his own administration. Perhaps this was a memo to his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who had dared meet Muallem at the UN just last month in a meeting that apparently she requested. If so, it would fit with the pattern of wildly mixed signals that has emanated from the administration in recent months. Two days before Rice sat down with Muallem, for instance, Bush had used his UN address to denounce Syria as a state sponsor of terror. Might Sunday’s raid have been the president’s attempt to reassert himself against a senior staff all but denuded of its hawks? Rumsfeld, Bolton and Wolfowitz are long gone; the more emollient Robert Gates is at defence, widely tipped to continue under a President Obama. In these last days, Dick Cheney has only himself for company.

However we are meant to read it, the attack on Syria looks a lot like a parting shot from Bush, an end-of-the-movie reminder of what this long and bloody saga has been about. A small operation, causing eight deaths, it nevertheless captures much of the Bush ethos that has ruled the globe these past eight years. It was unilateral; it trampled on state sovereignty; and it relied on force as a first, not last, resort. As a souvenir of the Bush era, it would be hard to top.

But it may not be the final act. For we have not yet entered the twilight zone proper. That will come only when polls close next Tuesday. When the transition begins, all kinds of surprises are possible.

Spool back 20 years, to the dying days of the Reagan administration. In January 1989, the president officially recognised the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people. It was a farewell gift to Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush: the old man took the flak so that the new president would not have to.

In December 1992, Bush himself proved rather less helpful to his replacement, saddling Bill Clinton with the deployment of US forces in Somalia, an episode whose humiliating conclusion badly hobbled Clinton thereafter.

Eight years ago, it was Clinton’s turn. He sweated until his final hours in office trying to close a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, who seemed then to be just inches apart. The legacy was the Clinton parameters, still regarded as marking the basic contours of any future agreement for Israel-Palestine.

So what will emerge from the twilight of George W Bush? Most diplomats are bracing themselves. “They’re not going to sleep,” says one senior British official. The optimists hope for a repeat of Reagan and Clinton, something that helps Middle East peace. It’s true that Rice and Bush have been eager for a breakthrough, if only to have a presidential legacy untainted by Iraq. Perhaps Israel and the Palestinians might initial a provisional document, proof that their labours since Bush’s Annapolis summit of 2007 have not been entirely fruitless.

But the bad timing that has cursed the Middle East so often has struck once again. Israel is entering an interregnum of its own, following Tzipi Livni’s failure to form a coalition. It’s hard to believe an interim, caretaker administration could forge a peace deal.

That leaves other options. Bush could ape Reagan and decide to speak to Hamas. More likely would be a shift in policy that helps future peacemaking efforts: he might, for instance, declare that any changes to the 1967 borders must be equal, with Palestinians compensated inch for inch for any West Bank land conceded to Israel. Or he could look further afield in the region, contradicting himself and Sunday’s raid, by reaching out to Syria. Or, as some hawks fear, he could step up the tentative dialogue with Iran. A symbolic gesture would be to open a US visa section in Tehran.

Of course, Bush may be thinking of a parting gift more in keeping with the record of the last eight years. He and Cheney might decide, what the hell, we have one last chance to whack Iran - and let the new guy clear up the mess. Not likely, but possible. For in the twilight zone, anything can happen.

Jerry Mazza
Online Journal
Let me not keep you in the dark. As Wikipedia states, our money supply has three large components. M1 is physical currency circulating in the economy plus demand deposits (checking accounts). This measure is used by economists to try and quantify the amount of money in circulation. M1 is the most liquid measure of money supply since it only contains cash and assets quickly usable for conversion to currency. Hang in.

M2 is MI + time deposits, savings deposits and non-institutional money-market funds. M2 is a wider category of money than M1. It’s also used to quantify the volume of money in circulation and to explain economic conditions. M3 is the biggie. It’s M2 + M1 + large deposits, institutional money-market funds, short-term repurchase agreements, and other larger liquid assets. It’s the broadest measure of money used to estimate total supply of money in the economy.

The Fed used to publish data on all three money descriptors. But for some strange reason (couldn’t be saving money as they claimed because they never save money), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve discontinued publishing data on M3 (which contain all data on M1 + M2 =M3) on March 23, 2006. M3 also included balances in institutional money funds, repurchase liabilities issued by depository institutions and Eurodollars held by US residents at foreign branches of US banks, in fact at all banks in the United Kingdom and Canada.

In other words, M3 tracked what the fat cats were doing with their bucks. You have to think, why would the Fed do this? Of all three categories, M3 was your best bet to track inflation, i.e., to monitor what the Free-Market’s “Invisible Hand” was picking from your pocket through inflation, sometimes called “the hidden tax” because that’s just what it is. When the government runs off some extra funny money rest assured it’s to spend it. And you get the tab.

It would be, as InflationData.com editor Tim McMahon described it, “like writing checks from an account that was empty.” You would end up in the slammer. Nevertheless, that’s what the criminal Fed (and the government) is doing when it creates money out of air. To see the result, go back to Wiki’s Money Supply and scroll down to “Money Supplies Around the World,” the United States chart for M1, M2, M3 since 1959. You will see the widest expansion of dollars is in M3. You might ask yourself where were all the big bucks going.

Also of interest at Wikipedia’s Money Supply is to scroll down to “Bank Reserves at Central Bank,” which discusses how a central bank can ease the flow of money by purchasing government securities in the open market, or tightening the flow by selling securities on the open market and pulling in money. Also, along with that control, up until the 1970s, the government said that banks had to keep a fraction on deposit of what they loaned out. Let’s say that would be $1 on every $10 dollars. This was to prevent a total freeze-up in case of a run on banks, like the one in 1929.

“However,” as Wiki says, “in the 1970s [the Nixon Era] the reserve requirements on deposits started to fall with the emergence of money market funds, which require no reserves. Then in the early 1990s [the GHW Bush era], reserve requirements were dropped to zero on savings deposits, CDs, and Eurodollar deposits. At present, reserve requirements apply only to “transactions deposits“ — essentially checking accounts. The vast majority of funding sources used by private banks to create loans are not limited by bank reserves. Most commercial and industrial loans are financed by issuing large denomination CDs. Money market deposits are largely used to lend to corporations who issue commercial paper. Consumer loans are also made using savings deposits, which are not subject to reserve requirements. These loans can be bunched into securities and sold to somebody else, taking them off of the bank’s books.” Call that the beginning of the end.

“Therefore, neither commercial nor consumer loans are any longer limited by bank reserves. Since 1995 the amount of consumer loans has steadily increased, while bank reserves have generally remained constant . . .” Here, too we find the blueprint for disaster, which actually occurred in the Savings and Loan debacle,” beginning in the Reagan Era, 1981, ending in the GHW Bush era, 91-92. I leave that fiasco for your perusal. The point of it all has to do with Free Market deregulation of bank lending rules and the lack of lending transparency.

Hiding the growing debt

Returning to March of 2006, McMahon points out the US Trade deficit was running about $800 billion annually, meaning we were spending that much more in foreign markets than we were taking in for our exports. We were shipping billions extra overseas, mainly to China, in return for Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices, or, as Wal-Mart currently says, “Live well. Save money.” Sure. McMahon points out the Chinese weren’t buying our goods to lower our trade deficit. Instead they were saving half their GDP (gross domestic product), which would have been about half of $1.1 trillion a year.

The US only tucks away about 13 percent of its GDP (that is government, business and personal) earnings. But Chinese households tuck away about 30 percent of earnings while US households save less than zero. We’ve actually been spending .4 percent more than we earn every year. So, if you wonder what the Chinese have been doing with all the extra bucks, they’ve been buying back our debt, that is in the form of US government Treasuries. In doing that, they’re actually loaning us the money to buy more stuff. So, the big reason to stop publicly tracking M3 was not to advertise that fact.

The M3 went up an annualized 9.4 percent back in 2006 in the first quarter and 17.2 percent by the fourth quarter. Why would the Fed want to deal with it when it could bury it? I’m sure Mr. Greenspan must have felt shocked and terrible about it, but the pain we’re feeling now didn’t come yesterday, out of the blue, with the phony bailout. We’ll be once again bailing out the M3 types, not the M1s or M2s, when the derivative bomb hits. And, after paying the “hidden inflation tax” we’re being served up deflation, recession and a “once in a lifetime economic tsunami” for dessert. Jolly-o!

Nice going Greenie. I hope you and all your pals enjoy buying up our pensions’ bonds and securities, devalued real estate, subprime mortgages, and going to the Cote D’Azur for a few years to get away from it all. This could get really ugly. Or will it be to the Caymans, to those stashed offshore, tax-free accounts, frosted Daiquiris and Caribbean sunshine. But don’t worry. The lynch mob will be here when you get back.

The thing is you could have loosened up the M1 money supply, as my economist friend Dick Eastman says, to ease the purchasing power on that overpriced gasoline and food, that is, while your friends in the club lived high on the hog, sucking up the good times. And, at the same time, we have your good buddy Hank Paulson lining the pockets of his banker friends, hedge fund managers, derivative devils, short-sellers, long-in-the-tooth elites like the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and even foreign princes.

Yes, with great sleight of hand, we’ve enabled the stock market to bring us Black Friday with Black Monday, and the volatility of the Perfect Storm, ironically the great liquidity crisis. And our latest $700 billion in tax money paying for all the high rollers to stay high and dry, while we scuffle in steerage, just waiting for the Titanic to hit the iceberg, and to see who gets into the lifeboats. Yes, Mr. Greenbacks, you did a great job of outpacing inflation and debt with obfuscation. The Wizard of the Fed has turned out to be just another felon-in-waiting, along with Dennis Koslowski, the maybe not-so-dead Ken Lay, hopefully Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, as well.

The disaster dream team

There are others worth a quick mention, the Chinese-speaking New York Federal Reserve Bank President, Timothy Geithner, ex Henry “China Opener” Kissinger’s protégé. Then there’s Goldman sacker John Alexander Thain; Dr. Gerald Corrigan, chairman of Goldman Sachs Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group, actually in charge of creating the risks and fiascos; BlackRock’s former manager of $1.2 trillion in assets, Ralph L. Schlosstein; BlackRock CEO and co-founder Larry Fink, who pioneered mortgage-backed securities (let’s hear it for this genius); John Pickel, president of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, et al. [Included is an explanation of Securitized Mortgaged Lending and a lovely diagram].

Forgive me if I’ve missed some names, like Mario Draghi, Bank of Italy’s governor, former Goldman sack; or even Joshua Bolten, current White House chief of staff from Goldman.

With a dream team like this, it’s not surprising Goldman Sachs missed the shock of the securitized mortgage collapse and actually showed a 79 percent rise in profits. In fact, back when Paulson was an economist for Goldman, he was outraged that the Chinese had only 4 percent of their capital coming from organized capital markets, when elsewhere two-thirds of capital came in from the usual suspects’ capital markets. The Ultimate Sacker is even encouraging Chinese peasants these days to sell off their hard-won land and move to the cities to work in the slave labor palaces of Wal-Mart’s everyday low-prices.

On and on it goes, including that fact that our shocked Mr. Greenspan (along with Goldman’s Lawrence Summers) was being investigated in September of 2001 for illegal gold transactions, specifically for selling Federal Reserve Gold to friendly Wall Street financiers at below market prices at that time. And wait, what about all that gold that disappeared in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s north tower on the 11th of that month?

So it goes, everything into the rabbit hole, no longer published like the M3 reports, more razzle-dazzle from the folks that brought you today’s mayhem, which was another controlled demolition of our economy, not just a matter of some bad mortgages. By the way, those “bad mortgages” were estimated by Paul Craig Roberts, in his “The Bailout and the Smell Test” to be no more than 10 percent of all the mortgages issued in that time frame.

Feel used, feel abused, feel like someone pulled the plug from your life? The answer is yes, yes, yes. But don’t let it disable you. Be strong. Suck it up. Fight back with the truth. We can’t let these vandals take the beachhead of the economy and gobble up the country we live in and love. There will come a time and you will be asked to act. So be ready, patriot. It’s coming, and not at a local theater near you, but in the streets and on the barricades.

Max Keiser on current (Laundering) $700 Bn Bailout
Max Keiser: “Remember, these congressmen all are huge stock owners in all these banks and corporations. American congress has been co-opted by the corpocracy in America; I don’t really believe that they are speaking absolutely in the best interest of the American people; they’re speaking in their own self interest. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi, for example, have huge stock positions in the very companies that are suppose to be subjected to some kind of oversight….” Max says there will be NO election in November. See Video

Anthony M. Freed
Your Mortgage or Your Life
I don’t remember ever thinking that the insane double-digit increases in the value of my home every Quarter would last forever. I do remember the press extolling all the virtues of investing in a second home or investment property. I remember Home Depot and Lowes exploding, and hours of television programming being dedicated to home improvement, real estate investing and ultra-risky property flipping. And I especially remember my Wells Fargo loan officer here in town spending an inordinate amount of time explaining why I should not put that 20% down payment on our new house, but instead should invest it through Wells. He set me up with a PMI account that gave me .25% off of my mortgage rate. He showed me, in great detail using multiple company-produced marketing materials, how I could take my $50K and invest it with Wells and I would receive even more of a discount on my rate. If I had done so, like so many did, I would never have been able to refinance my mortgage from the ARM I was in, and I would have lost a lot of money in the stock market. More

Mike_Stathis
Altogether, we have had eight years of no gains in real median wages, flat stock market returns, and minimal net new jobs. Despite what you have heard, after adjusting for debt spending, population growth and realistic adjustments to the GDP deflator, there have only been 3 or 4 quarters of GDP growth since 2005. If you adjust for military, government and minimum wage positions – i.e. jobs funded by tax payers and jobs that don’t pay anything - there have been absolutely no net new jobs. Bush’s largest gains have been with inflation, oil and food prices, debt, trade deficits, bankruptcies, foreclosures, and healthcare costs. If an assembly of the world’s leading economic strategists were to design the most destructive economic disaster possible, they could not match the results of Bush’s tenure. Even the most loyal Bush supporters will admit he has been an absolute disaster – that is if they’re being honest. America is now more dependent on foreign nations than ever – not only for oil, but also credit and manufactured goods. More

Thu, 09/04/2008 - 13:19 — rich2010
Surge or Purge?

The most complete exposition of a social myth often comes when the myth itself is waning – Robert M. MacIver

As hurricane Gustav petered out from Category 2 to Category 1 status I had the dubious opportunity to view what might be a much larger crisis for not only New Orleans, but the entire US, the Republican National Convention. Viewers were spared the words from on high, as Cheney/Bush canceled their speeches to convince the American public of the efficacy of their own leadership. Their bloody presences were substituted with the visage of Cindy McCain and Laura Bush. The latter’s face appears to be made of some sort of space age plastic, and looked remarkably life-like. The creepiest part of their joint performance was their attempt of make amends for the Katrina disaster by appearing to care about Gustav’s effects on the Gulf coast’s residents.

Katrina was spun to the American public as a natural disaster, but anyone familiar with event knows that it was the biggest engineering failure in the history of the world, save Chernobyl. Both FEMA and the Bush administration were aware of the levee failures for 24 hours before the information was shared with anyone associated with emergency services in Louisiana. The Federal response was delayed by a week while the Bush administration wrested signing authority from Louisiana’s democratic governor Kathleen Blanco in order to issue a sole source contract for cleanup to…you guessed it, Halliburton.

As a result of these Federal “business” decisions, over 1600 American citizens, mostly poor and black died, and US taxpayers were saddled with $100 billion dollars in losses. Their blood was dried on the hands of the Bush Administration and Army Corp of Engineers before the ink was applied to the contract for Halliburton. Luckily no one noticed the blood of the Katrina victims because it blended in so well with that of American soldiers, and Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, and Somali soldiers and citizens. All this blood, shed in just under eight years with nothing to show, save the trials of Osama Bin Laden’s driver.

Now in the waning days of the Cheney/Bush administration, the dream of Pipelinestan is failing on all fronts. In Iraq the vaunted democratic speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has served little more than aid and abet the failing illegal resource wars. The Cheney/Bush policy of pushing through a hydrocarbon law to open up Iraq’s oil deposits to exploitation by Exxon/Chevron/Arco/BP has been defeated last week by an oil services contract awarded by the Iraqi government to China. So much for being greeted as “liberators”. Great Britain occupied Iraq in 1929 with the intent of controlling the oil resources. Their failed efforts resulted in the death of the pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency. Nearly 80 years later it is difficult to make an argument against the US dollar following the downward trajectory of the pound.

Cheney/Bush maintains the myth that 47,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan will stave off the return of the Taliban spawned by the Pakistani ISI, who were spawned by the CIA. They ignore the fact that 300,000 Russian troops were unable to “pacify” the Afghanis. Nor were the British troops during the Opium Wars motivated by the Great Game. Students of history understand that the last person to accomplish this task was Alexander the Great over 2300 years ago. Somewhere Osama Bin Laden is smiling from beyond the grave.

Now Americans faces the visage of John McCain, who is offering up more of the Cheney/Bush smorgasbord of death, destruction and debt spawned by the most incompetent implementation of a foreign policy since the inception of American republic.

As an alternative to Obama’s alleged lack of experience McCain has selected Sarah Palin, mother of five, including a pregnant 17 year old (now that’s pro-life) for his V.P. Palin who hired a lobbyist while mayor of Wasilla to garner Federal earmarks is now apparently anti-earmarks. She supported the bridge to nowhere, before declaring her opposition to it. She has also run a 527 group to raise money for disgraced Senator Ted Stevens. She also has something in common with her fellow Alaska Republicans Ted Stevens and Doug Young, as she is under investigation by the Alaska legislature for the firing of the Alaska’s top public safety officer over his refusal to fire a state trooper, who is the ex-husband of her sister. Latest word is that a private attorney has been hired to defend against her charges of abusing the powers of the office of the governor. More

Paul Craig Roberts
It was obvious to anyone with any sense—which excludes the entire Bush Regime and almost all of the “foreign policy community”—that the illegal and gratuitous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon civilians with US blessing, would result in the overthrow of America’s Pakistani puppet. The imbecilic Bush Regime ensured Musharraf’s overthrow by pressuring their puppet to conduct military operations against tribesmen in Pakistani border areas, whose loyalties were to fellow Muslims and not to American hegemony. When Musharraf’s military operations didn’t produce the desired result, the idiotic Americans began conducting their own military operations within Pakistan with bombs and missiles. This finished off Musharraf. More

On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president - now premier - Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding “Orange” revolution in Ukraine. “They lied to me,” Putin said bitterly of the United States. “I’ll never trust them again.” The Russians still can’t fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West.

American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 [1] of Moscow’s “sheer diabolic brilliance” in Georgia, while Colonel Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled on August 14 [2], “The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians, but now and then they vomit up a genius … the empire of the czars hasn’t produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin.” The superlatives recall an old observation about why the plots of American comic books need clever super-villains and stupid super-heroes to even the playing field. Evidently the same thing applies to superpowers. The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. More

CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush sent a stern warning to Russia on Saturday that it cannot lay claim to two breakaway provinces in neighboring Georgia, a U.S. ally, and said there was no room for debate on that point. The Russian foreign minister said Thursday that Georgia could “forget about” getting back the two separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Medvedev also met with their leaders in Kremlin this past week, raising the prospect that Moscow could absorb the regions even though the territory is internationally recognized as being within Georgia’s borders. Bush disputed the claim that two areas may not be part of Georgia’s future. They are of Georgia now, he said at the ranch, and reaffirmed that they are within recognized borders. There is “no room for debate on this,” the president said. More

George Galloway talks to a caller about an impending attack on Iran.

American News Project: Washington’s neocons are alive and well, advising both John McCain and President Bush. Now many are saying Bush should permit Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities after Election Day before the new president takes office. ANP investigates as we chase down John Bolton, Bill Kristol and Frank Gaffney to see how far ahead these hawks are thinking. And a new report says the whole plan could backfire. See Video

Thinkprogress.org
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran. In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources. More

Rep Baldwin: Impeachment Hearings Necessary

Kucinich Impeachment Battle No Longer So Quixotic
Video by the American News Project

President Bush has asserted executive privilege to protect information that a House panel has subpoenaed on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, the White House said Wednesday. A House committee chairman, meanwhile, held off on a contempt citation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who sought the privilege claim, as a courtesy to lawmakers not present. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, rejected Mukasey’s suggestion that Vice President Dick Cheney’s FBI interview on the subject should be protected by the privilege claim. More

Raw Story
A federal court has issued two rulings, the New York Times reports: One favoring President Bush’s indefinite detentions of “enemy combatants,” and another granting one of said “enemy combatants” the opportunity to challenge his detention in court. The court effectively ruled that President Bush has the same right to indefinitely detain a civilian on American soil as he does an enemy soldier on a battlefield. More

Rachel Maddow reports on the possibility of the Bush administration being prosecuted for war crimes. Jonathan Turley weighs in.

“How many more hearings do we need to have to prove this administration has violated the Constitution, taken the law into its own hands, and condoned torture?” asked Kucinich, D-Ohio, author of some three dozen articles of impeachment. “These articles of impeachment are about accountability,” Kucinich said in an interview. “I think our country is at risk. We’re setting a terrible precedent for future administrations if we choose to turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by this administration. “We need to send a message to the next President that if he conducts himself in a similar capacity it would be met with a response from the Congress that you are going to be held to account. … There is a point at which you reduce Congress to a debating society.” Last month, Kucinich stunned colleagues when he introduced an impeachment resolution on the House floor and then spent nearly five hours reading the 35 articles, alleging that President Bush was guilty of a wide range of crimes. More

Times Online
President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official. Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support. Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets. More

Christopher King
As provocation, I would have thought that a much better example was the approval recently given by the US Congress for a USD 400 million package for clandestine operations against Iran. More an act of war, really. Clandestine operations apparently means supporting terrorist groups, subversion, sabotage, kidnapping and assassination within Iranian territory. What would be the USA’s reaction if, say, China were to openly allocate similar funds and undertake similar activities against the USA? After years of American intervention in its affairs, sponsored war against it together with current lies and threats, Iran’s missile test seems a very sensible and modest defensive measure.

This is reminiscent of the USA’s attitude to water-boarding. It’s merely “enhanced interrogation” when the USA does it but if anyone else waterboards a US citizen, President Bush will seek the death penalty. Surely, this says something about the president’s mentality and American ethics.

Still considering provocation, however, wasn’t Israel’s recent rehearsal of an attack on Iran provocative? No? Or the USA’s agreement with the Czech Republic for the installation of a missile system component on Russia’s border? Condoleeza Rice says that these missiles won’t be aimed at Russia and I think that she’s right. The purpose of this missile system is puzzling because Condoleeza’s statement that it protects the US and European Union from Iran and other rogue states is obviously nonsense. Militarily, it’s useless. However, if it can irritate Russia into retaliatory missile deployment and cold-war rhetoric, this gives multiple perceived benefits for the USA:

► Ability to blame Russia for more military spending, giving profits for firms such as Haliburton
► Ability to sour relations between the EU and Russia and disrupt further rapproachment
► Distract from US violence in the Middle East by giving Europeans problems nearer home to worry about
Read More

As right-wing politicians on three continents basked in the reflected glory of an ostensibly brilliant July 2 rescue of hostages held by Colombia’s FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, doubts have surfaced as to the real character of this operation. The freeing of Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian citizen and former presidential candidate, three US military “contractors” employed by the Northrop Grumman corporation and 11 other hostages has been exploited to refurbish the Bush administration’s discredited Latin American policy, to make a hero out of Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president implicated in drug trafficking and paramilitary massacres, and to boost the sagging popularity of France’s right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy. More

Gore Vidal: …Congress has never been more cowardly, nor more corrupt. All Bush has do is to make sure certain amounts of money go in the direction of certain important congressmen and that’s end of any serious investigation. After all, one of the bravest members of Congress is Denis Kucinich who brought the article of impeachment in to the well of the House of Representatives.

Bernard Weiner
The question is not whether Iran will be attacked, but by whom and whether the bombing will commence within the next several months or shortly after the November election. The U.S. for many months has made bellicose noises about thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions with force — complete with a virtual repeat of its pre-war propaganda campaign prior to “shock&awe” against Iraq. Israel is reported to have just carried out a military exercise practicing for an attack on Iran. Iran is letting it be known how destructive and unconventional its retaliation would be if it is bombed. What is going on?

Though one can decry it, at least one can understand why Israel, just a short missile flight from Iran, might want to take “pre-emptive” action against that country were it to possess nuclear-weapons capabilities. But what’s driving the neocons in the White House to push so insistently for an attack on Iran? It seems clear that Cheney and Bush want Iran’s nascent civilian nuclear program taken out now before it could become operational in a military sense five or ten years down the road. If this is true, why would the Administration have wanted to attack Iraq? More

Thinkprogress.org
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said that President Bush is more likely to attack Iran if he believes Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is going to be elected. However, “if the president thought John McCain was going to be the next president, he would think it more appropriate to let the next president make that decision than do it on his way out,” Kristol said, reinforcing the fact that McCain is offering a third Bush term on Iran. “I do wonder with Senator Obama, if President Bush thinks Senator Obama’s going to win, does he somehow think — does he worry that Obama won’t follow through on that policy,” Kristol added. Host Chris Wallace then asked if Kristol was suggesting that Bush might “launch a military strike” before or after the election:

WALLACE: So, you’re suggesting that he might in fact, if Obama’s going to win the election, either before or after the election, launch a military strike?

KRISTOL: I don’t know. I mean, I think he would worry about it. On the other hand, you can’t — it’s hard to make foreign policy based on guesses of election results. I think Israel is worried though. I mean, what is, what signal goes to Ahmadinejad if Obama wins on a platform of unconditional negotiations and with an obvious reluctance to even talk about using military force. More

By Ray McGovern
Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin. This time it will be largely the Air Force’s show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details.

Emerging from a 90-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush on June 4, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the two leaders were of one mind: “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. I left with a lot less question marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions, and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House.” More

In a front-page article headlined “Is McCain Like Bush? It Depends on the Issue,” the New York Times (6/17/08) managed to locate “striking differences” between Sen. John McCain and George W. Bush on several issues—in spite of contradictory evidence reported in the very same article about the two politicians’ overwhelming similarities on these very issues.

In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes that “on the environment, American diplomacy and nuclear proliferation, Mr. McCain has strikingly different views from Mr. Bush.” Yet Bumiller offers little evidence for these supposedly striking differences. In fact, on the environment, she points out that while McCain has called for limits on greenhouse gas emissions, he “has a mixed record on the environment in the Senate — he has missed votes on toughening fuel economy standards and has opposed tax breaks meant to encourage alternative energy.”

Meanwhile, despite Bumiller’s claim about McCain and Bush’s “strikingly different views” on diplomacy, an accompanying chart includes “Diplomacy with Iran and Syria” as an area where Bush and McCain “mostly agree. ” As the chart observed, “Like the president, Mr. McCain has ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria for now. Mr. McCain supported Mr. Bush when he likened those who would negotiate with ‘terrorists and radicals’ to appeasers of the Nazis, a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama.” More