Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears

By TODD LEWAN, AP National Writer
Sat Jul 11, 3:38 pm ET

Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he'd bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with this objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.

It took him 20 minutes to strike hacker's gold.

Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.

‘C Street’ group tied to Ensign is linked to yet another secretive group

The powerful and secretive group known as the Fellowship Foundation or the “Family” is quickly gaining notoriety, due to its links to two scandal-plagued Republicans, Senator John Ensign of Nevada and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

According to the Washington Post, however, the Fellowship Foundation is itself linked to an even more secretive religious organization — Youth With a Mission (YWAM), whose Washington, DC branch owns the “C Street House” where Ensign has lived and where Sanford has participated in Bible study.

Fox's Napolitano fears hate-crimes law hurts free speech -- but ignores explicit language of bill

Judge Andrew Napolitano sat in as the guest host Wednesday on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, and featured a segment devoted to the notion that the hate-crimes legislation currently before the Senate might somehow be abused to undermine Americans' free-speech rights. His guest was David Rittgers of the Cato Institute.

There is, however, a problem right off the bat with their thesis: The bill in question -- the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (LLEHCPA) -- contains specific language designed to ensure that the bill is never construed in such a fashion:

Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by, the Constitution.

Any honest discussion of this aspect of the legislation would have to bring this language into consideration -- but it's never mentioned by either Napolitano or Rittgers.

Are Depressions Necessary?

The current crisis has revived an old debate about the utility of economic downturns.

Christopher Hayes | July 10, 2009

Economists, particularly those of the ascendant Chicago school of free market enthusiasts, were in a triumphant mood at the beginning of this decade. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in 2003, Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas went so far as to say that macro-economics -- with its focus on the stable maintenance of national economies -- could safely be retired. "The central problem of depression prevention," he said, "has been solved for all practical purposes."

But if the technical challenge of depression prevention has rudely announced itself unsolved, the current crisis has also reawakened a long-obscured, but far more profound debate about the very nature of cyclical capitalism. That is: Are economic contractions, like the one we're currently experiencing, a good thing?

Lawmaker won’t deny secret CIA program was ‘Cheney assassination ring’

Early Friday morning, MSNBC followed up on a theory posted Thursday on the Huffington Post which alleged that a secret CIA program shut down in June by director Leon Panetta could have been related to a purported effort led by Vice President Dick Cheney to assassinate intelligence targets abroad.

This past March, as RAW STORY reported, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the Bush Administration was running an “executive assassination ring” which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

G-8 Failure Reflects US Failure on Climate Change

by James Hansen

It didn't take long for the counterfeit climate bill known as Waxman-Markey to push back against President Obama's agenda. As the president was arriving in Italy for his first Group of Eight summit, the New York Times was reporting [1]that efforts to close ranks on global warming between the G-8 and the emerging economies had already tanked:

The world's major industrial nations and emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on significant cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.

Of course, emission targets in 2050 have limited practical meaning -- present leaders will be dead or doddering by then -- so these differences may be patched up. The important point is that other nations are unlikely to make real concessions on emissions if the United States is not addressing the climate matter seriously.

Building a Clean Energy Economy: The IMPACT Act

By Eric Lotke

Created 07/08/2009 - 11:17am

Home Feature Box:

Our Chance To Build The Clean Energy Economy [1]

As the battle to enact a clean energy bill moves to the Senate, there is a provision in the version of the bill that was recently approved by the House that should unite labor and environmentalists. Language in the House bill would create an economic development fund specifically designed to create jobs and manufacturing capacity in the green energy sector.

» Eric Lotke explains why we need to protect this provision in the clean energy bill [1].

» Bill Scher: Will Republicans back the climate bill? [2]

The Waxman-Markey Clean Energy and Security Act [3]squeaked through the House of Representatives late last week (219-212). Although some expressed doubts [4], many people consider the bill a terrific breakthrough [5]and important step in the right direction. But one unheralded addition to the Manager’s Amendment in the closing hours makes the bill even stronger and more important — the IMPACT [6]provision to support clean energy manufacturing in America.

Manufacturing is critical for both the American economy and our move to energy independence. America lost nearly a third [7] of its manufacturing jobs since 2000, accelerating a downward trend [8]that started in the 1980s. The production of goods represented nearly half of America’s gross domestic product in 1960, but it’s below 10 percent of GDP today. These were the rock-solid middle class jobs that built America into an economic powerhouse, and spread the prosperity to our people as a whole.

Nobody Knows What Nanoparticles Do -- Yet They Are in Your Food, Cosmetics, and Toys

By Carole Bass, E Magazine
Posted on July 11, 2009, Printed on July 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141212/

It's a beautiful summer day. You pull on your stain-resistant cargo shorts and odor-resistant hiking socks, gulp down an energy-boosting supplement, slather yourself with sunscreen and head out for a ramble in the woods. Are you poisoning yourself? When you get home, you jump in the shower and toss your clothes in the wash. Are you poisoning the environment? Maybe.

Your sunscreen, energy drink and high-tech clothing may be among the 800-plus consumer products made with nanomaterials: those manufactured at the scale of atoms and molecules. Sunscreen that turns clear on the skin contains titanium dioxide, an ordinary UV-blocker in extraordinarily small particles. Odor-eating socks are made with atoms of germ-killing silver. Supplement makers boast of amazing health effects from swallowing nanosolutions that are completely untested for effectiveness or safety. And that stain-repellant clothing? The manufacturer won't even tell you what nanomaterials are in it.

When Will The Recovery Begin? Never

by Robert Reich

The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the V shape.

Unfortunately, V-shapers are looking back at the wrong recessions. Focus on those that started with the bursting of a giant speculative bubble and you see slow recoveries. The reason is asset values at bottom are so low that investor confidence returns only gradually.

Secret Program Fuels CIA-Congress Dispute

Democrats Accuse Agency of Pattern of Withholding Information From Lawmakers

By Paul Kane and Ben Pershing
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 10, 2009

Four months after he was sworn in, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta learned of an intelligence program that had been hidden from Congress since 2001, a revelation that prompted him to immediately cancel the initiative and schedule a pair of closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill.

The next day, June 24, Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees of the program and the action he had taken, according to Democratic and Republican members of the panels.

Where's Pentagon 'terrorism suspect'? Talking to Karzai

Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: July 07, 2009 07:48:20 PM

KABUL, Afghanistan — Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil spends his days going from one high-level official meeting to another with the swagger of a tribal elder, advocating for the needs of Kunar province, his home region.

Each encounter — with President Hamid Karzai, with Karzai's chief of staff or with one of Afghanistan's other presidential candidates — begins the same: They thank him for his honorable service to the people of Kunar.

Despite those endorsements, the Pentagon says that Wakil is among 74 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who've returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release from the island prison camp.

Public Option Enemy No. 1

You've probably seen the ads. Ominous voice-overs warn you about how health care reform "could put a bureaucrat in charge of your medical decisions, not you." A massive bulldozer with "government-run insurance plan" written on the side crushes your health care "choices." Canadians and Britons relay horror stories of their experiences dealing with health care in those nightmarish socialist dystopias.

The ads are the product of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign designed to derail health care reform—especially what's been dubbed the "public option," which would set up a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. The man behind this ad blitz is the person who might be Public Option Enemy No. 1: one-time hospital executive and longtime Republican donor Richard Scott.

Paul Krugman: The Stimulus Trap

As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.

Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship. There’s now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.

I’ll talk about that trap, and how he can escape it, in a moment. First, however, let me step back and ask how concerned citizens should be reacting to the disappointing economic news. Should we be patient and give the Obama plan time to work? Should we call for bigger, bolder actions? Or should we declare the plan a failure and demand that the administration call the whole thing off?

Why the FBI Squelched an Investigation of a Post-9/11 Meeting Between White Supremacist and Islamic Extremists

By Mark Levine, AlterNet
Posted on July 9, 2009, Printed on July 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141161/

The recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum serves as a stark reminder to us all that murderous racial and religious hatred still endures in America. One would expect the FBI to infiltrate and prosecute individuals and organizations that threaten domestic terrorist acts. But as this investigative report details, the large FBI bureaucracy, from the bottom to the very top, may well be more concerned with covering up its agents' own illegal misconduct than it is with actually protecting Americans from terrorist attack.

If the leader of the White Supremacist Organization was uncomfortable meeting the brown-skinned supporter of the Islamic terrorist group in Florida, he tried not to show it. After all, the two men had a common agenda, and in the up-coming War Against the Jews, the Islamic Extremist had agreed, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." It was January 2002 -- a mere four months after 9-11 -- and both men were intent on following up on that deadly terrorist attack with a "summit meeting" to discuss how their respective organizations could cement an alliance to cause more death and destruction in the United States and around the world.

Hundreds of Thousands of Workers Will Lose Unemployment Benefits Soon

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted on July 10, 2009, Printed on July 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141190/

WASHINGTON -- When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don't want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we're starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided -- and pretty scared -- capital, but from within the Obama administration itself. In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession -- an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it's wise to start preparing another stimulus package.

Three Reasons We Need an Economic Wake Up Call

By Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post
Posted on July 7, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141156/

The June Unemployment Numbers. The green-shoots school was expecting that the rising rate of unemployment would continue to slow, as it did in May. But instead the number spiked back up. A total of 467,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, and OECD economists project that U.S. unemployment will still be in double digits as late as 2011.

The 9.5 percent official figure -- the worst since 1983 -- conceals even worse news. The number of long-term unemployed is at record levels. This is the only recession since the Great Depression in which the job loss wiped out all the job growth of the previous recovery. As our friends at the Economic Policy Institute report.

What Religious Progressives Bring To The Party

By Sara Robinson

Created 07/08/2009 - 2:21pm

I spent several days over last weekend as a volunteer webworker covering the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly [1] in Salt Lake City. These annual confabs are always a highlight of the summer for me as a UU. They're also one of the best shows going if you want to remember, all the way down, what it means to be liberal in America -- or understand, once again, why religious liberals are so critically important to the ultimate success of the progressive project.

There are a lot of theories of change; but like many of us, I'm particularly drawn to the one that says that if you want to change reality, you start by changing the story. Worldview, narrative, discourse, framing, whatever word you want to use for it -- the stories we tell about how reality works are the frameworks through which we set priorities, evaluate the good and the bad, establish value, and make meaning. And those priorities, evaluations, values, and meanings in turn drive the more concrete political decisions we make about how we solve problems and invest our resources -- and thus determine what kind of world we actually end up making.

10 Dangerous Household Products You Should Never Use Again

By Sustain Lane

Posted on July 9, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141196/

You would never cross the street without looking both ways, walk alone down a dark alley alone at three a.m., or tell your child to accept rides from strangers. So why let hazardous, toxic, and even carcinogenic chemicals into your home everyday?

The message driven home for millions of Americans each day via TV and internet commercials is this: No need to scrub or scour. With just one squeeze of the spray bottle, you can wipe away dirt, grime, and bacteria.

Are Our Markets Being Manipulated by 'Rogues' or Firms?

There’s New Evidence to Suggest That Crime in the Financial Markets Is Rife

by Danny Schechter

Everyone has heard of the Wikipedia but not everyone knows about the Investopedia, a Forbes website, that monitors finance for market players. One of the issues it is concerned about is market manipulation, actions by rogue and not so rogue players who, working alone or together, unduly influence the way our supposed "free" markets function.

It is a fascinating source of information for the uninitiated who hear the daily reports on the ups and downs of the Dow and believe that somehow it is all part of the natural order of the universe.

It isn't.

The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation

By Dean Starkman, The Nation
Posted on July 9, 2009, Printed on July 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141182/

On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.

"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.

Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin, documents show

By Gareth Porter
Published: July 8, 2009
Updated 13 hours ago

Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary’s legacy

Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.

The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

After just four months, media figures ignore economists to declare stimulus a failure

July 07, 2009 7:41 pm ET

SUMMARY: Media figures have used a recent comment by Vice President Biden -- that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" -- to suggest that the economic recovery package is a complete failure, rather than noting the assessment by economists then and now that the legislation does not go far enough and that further stimulus spending may be necessary.

What happened to those bad bank assets? So far, nothing

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In March, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled a Public-Private Investment Program in which the government and private firms would bid together to purchase toxic assets from banks, freeing them to increase lending and help revive the economy.

The program's still not operating.

Thomas Frank: When Newspapers Peddle Influence

A revealing scandal at the Washington Post.

Some time last week the Washington Post issued a flier advertising a "salon" on the health-care issue. Over dinner at the home of the paper's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, participants were promised "a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds."

The paper's executive editor and its "health-care reporters" would be there too, but not in a "confrontational" capacity, you could rest assured. Everything would be safely "off-the-record." And you could "bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table" for a mere $25,000.

Even in Washington, it's unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to "alter the debate," as the Post's flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city's scourge of public corruption -- the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others -- seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

Howard Dean: "This Is Ridiculous. We're 60 Years Behind the Times" on Fixing Health Care

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 8, 2009, Printed on July 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141129/

During the 2004 presidential primaries, the conventional wisdom among Howard Dean's energized supporters was that the over-the-top conservative attacks on the Vermont governor reflected the degree to which the right feared his nomination. With his blunt, plainspoken populism, the argument went at the time, Dean represented a threat to the Bush administration's prospects for re-election that his more polished Democratic opponents lacked.

Five years later, and it may be the "disease care" industry -- now spending $1.4 million each and every day to lobby lawmakers against implementing significant health reforms -- that may be sweating Dean's simple, but uncompromising, brand of politics.

Goldman good but not that bad

By Julian Delasantellis

I've seen every single James Bond movie, a few on their opening morning in the theatres, but as for the eternal debate as to who - Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan or Craig - was the best Bond, I couldn't care less. I watch for the villains.

What a glorious gang they are. Suave, sophisticated, well spoken, all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing in their incredibly dastardly and ambitious plots, they seem quite the contrast with actors in today's world, Peter Principle incompetents who couldn't bomb the water even if they fell out of a boat. My favorites are Thunderball's Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a man so evil that he seemed to have an offscreen orchestra follow him around continually playing ominously threatening sounding overtures (also, I liked the part that he was called the "guardian" of Domino, Claudine Auger-yeah, right), and Alex Trevelyan (Sean Bean) of Goldeneye. Putting a rare bit of actual history in the plot lines, Trevelyan's story was that he was a descendent of the so-called Liensk Cossacks, nationalist, anti-communist Russians who fought for Hitler during World War II. This group was betrayed back to Stalin's most untender mercies by the West after the war, and Trevelyan, a former MI-6 agent, still burns for horrible revenge against a British society that gave him its class, manners and refinement in exchange for the murder of his parents.

Healthy examples

Plenty of countries get healthcare right.

By Jonathan Cohn | July 5, 2009

“I DON’T WANT America to begin rationing care to their citizens in the way these other countries do.”

That was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, speaking last month about healthcare reform. But it could have been virtually any other Republican, not to mention any number of sympathetic interest groups, because that’s the party line for many who oppose healthcare reform. If President Obama and his supporters get their way, this argument goes, healthcare in America will start to look like healthcare overseas. Yes, maybe everybody will have insurance. But people will have to wait in long lines. And when they are done waiting in line, the care won’t be very good.

Typically the people making these arguments are basing their analysis on one of two countries, Canada and England, where such descriptions hold at least some truth. Although the people in both countries receive pretty good healthcare - their citizens do better than Americans in many important respects - they are also subjected to longer waits for specialty care and tighter limits on some advanced treatments.

Diagrams on Conservatism

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

- John Stuart Mill, 1866

Are there any national conservatives who are actually promoting policies that will remotely benefit the country? Currently, about all they're offering is a) obstructionism, and b) variations on the same old policies that proved highly profitable to a privileged few but catastrophic to the nation as a whole during the Bush administration - and most of the past 30 plus years.

Watch the Sunday news shows and you'll see, as DistributorcapNY puts it, "callous Neros to the right, evil Neros to the far right." And it's not as if national Democrats as a whole, too beholden to corporate interests, are that admirable, either.

Digby: Trigger Finger

So, the latest scuttlebutt is that Obama walked back Rahm's "trigger" comments to the Wall Street Journal today by saying that he still thinks a public option is the best way to get to serious health care reform.

But it looks to me as if we are seeing the trigger being set up as the "compromise." I don't know that, of course, but it's highly doubtful to me that Rahm was totally off the reservation. But it would probably be a good idea to get the trigger off the table sooner rather than later. The trigger is a reform killer.

The Man Who Crashed the World

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

By Michael Lewis August 2009

Six months ago, I received an odd phone call from a man named Jake DeSantis at A.I.G. Financial Products—the infamous unit of the doomed insurance company, staffed by expensively educated, highly paid traders, whose financial ineptitude is widely suspected of costing the U.S. taxpayer $182.5 billion and counting. At the time A.I.G. F.P.’s losses were reported, it became known that a handful of traders in this curious unit had sold trillions of dollars of credit-default swaps (essentially unregulated insurance policies) on piles of U.S. subprime mortgages, but its employees hadn’t yet become the leading examples of Wall Street greed. And so this was before Jake DeSantis and his colleagues found themselves suburban-Connecticut outcasts, before their first death threats, before the House of Representatives passed a bill because of them (taxing 90 percent of their large bonuses), before New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced he was going after their paychecks, and before Iowa senator Charles Grassley said that A.I.G.’s leaders should follow the Japanese example and “either do one of two things, resign or go commit suicide.”

Senate turns aside new attempt to scrutinize Fed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve, facing growing pressure as it tries to heal the ailing economy, dodged a bullet on Monday when the U.S. Senate cast aside a new effort to increase scrutiny of the central bank.

On procedural grounds, the Senate blocked a bid to permit the U.S. comptroller general, who heads the investigative arm of Congress known as the Government Accountability Office, to audit the Federal Reserve system and issue a report.

The Green Shoots are Dead

The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection

by Dean Baker

The June US employment report [1] should convince even the determinedly ignorant that the time has come for another round of stimulus for the American economy. The economy is continuing to shed jobs and work hours at a very rapid pace. The unemployment rate is virtually certain to cross 10% by the end of the summer and will likely hit 11% before we are very far into 2010. This is a scenario much worse [2] than the Obama administration [3] had expected when it crafted its stimulus package. It is time for it to adjust its plans accordingly.

When the Obama administration put together its stimulus package in January, it was projecting that, in the absence of any stimulus, the unemployment rate would peak at just over 9% early in 2010. With the unemployment rate reaching 9.5% in June, they clearly underestimated [4] the size of the downdraft hitting the US economy [5].

Adding Up the True Costs of Two Wars

by Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes

Last week the U.S. "stood down" in Iraq, finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and towns -- the first step on the long path home. After more than six years, most Americans are war-weary, even though a smaller percentage of us have been involved in the actual fighting than in any major conflict in U.S. history.

But not so fast. The conflict that began in 2003 is far from over for us, and the next chapter -- confronting a Taliban that reasserted itself in Afghanistan while the U.S. was sidetracked in Iraq -- will be expensive and bloody. The death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan reached 5,000 in June. An additional 80,000 Americans have been wounded or injured since the war in Iraq began. More than 300,000 of our troops have required medical treatment, and Army statistics show that more than 17 percent of our returning soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Life, Liberty and Employer-Provided Health Insurance

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Independence Day is a time to reflect on the United States and to ask what it is that we really value about our country. Most people would probably list the freedoms that it has usually guaranteed to most members of society. The opportunities for economic success, while not as great as often touted, are nonetheless impressive.

However, some members of Congress were apparently celebrating our system of employer-provided health insurance last weekend. Or, at least that is what they want us to believe.

The Age of Paine

By Scott Tucker

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” the revolutionary pamphlet published in January 1776. Ronald Reagan quoted those words on July 17, 1980, when he addressed the Republican National Convention and accepted his party’s presidential nomination. Reagan led a coalition of corporate oligarchs, imperial crusaders and Christian fundamentalists to power, and to this day Reaganism remains the official gospel of the old guard in the Republican Party. The republican and social democratic ideals of Paine are long lost to many modern partisan Republicans and Democrats, but many memorable phrases of Paine still fill the mouths of career politicians.

When the Iraq war, a broken health care system and a plunging economy gave the Democratic Party a political advantage, Barack Obama raised hopes and promised change. When Obama gave his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he too quoted Paine, this time from the first of 13 articles collected in “The American Crisis”—an article Gen. Washington ordered read to his troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 to fight the Hessian mercenaries of King George III: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.” Reagan and Obama each lifted some good lines from Paine for their own rhetorical purposes; but each likewise cared more for stagecraft than for the original script.

Noam Chomsky's Major Address at New York's Riverside Church, 6/12/09

Noam Chomsky actually managed to summarize many of the themes in his 100 books and nearly half-century of political activism at New York's Riverside Church last month. I've included links to the actual video on Yahoo, as well as to the entire program on CSPAN, which featured an introduction by Amy Goodman. Below also is a report published on "IndypendentMedia".

Paul Krugman: HELP Is on the Way

The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.

A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals — that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

Administration plans for end of ‘too big to fail’

Megabanks may be slimmed down, told to prepare plans for own demise

They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore.

Financial regulations proposed by the president would result in leaner and simpler institutions that don't carry the weight of the system on their marble columns.

Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara dies at 93

By ANNE GEARAN, AP National Security Writer
1 hr 5 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Robert S. McNamara, the brainy Pentagon chief who directed the escalation of the Vietnam War despite private doubts the war was winnable or worth fighting, died Monday at 93.

McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."

FDR's Second Bill of Rights and the Progressive Mission

by Vikingkingq
Sat Jul 04, 2009 at 02:08:53 PM PDT

Introduction:

In the spirit of the best 4th of July speeches, which like Frederick Douglass' peerless effort seek not to satiate with platitudes but rather to challenge and provoke, today I offer a reflection on America's past and its future.

At the end of "Resurrecting Henry George," I argued that a national housing assistance program would "help to make one more of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, "the right of every family to a decent home," a legal reality. I would argue, and I will argue in future posts, that the longer-term mission of the progressive movement in America is (and has unconsciously been) the realization of the Second Bill of Rights." So today I intend to explain what I meant.

Rumsfeld On Abandoning Geneva: 'All Of A Sudden, It Was Just All Happening'

By Justin Elliott - July 3, 2009, 6:03PM

Donald Rumsfeld has finally said he's sorry. Sort of.

In an interview with biographer Bradley Graham, the former secretary of defense says he has regrets about the administration's controversial detainee policy.

Taibbi: NYSE ends transparency to protect Goldman Sachs

The New York Stock Exchange quietly announced last week that it would end its practice of requiring companies to report all their program trading — a move that helps shield large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, from public scrutiny.

The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain, says Matt Taibbi, the journalist whose Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs’ role in asset bubbles over the past century has rocked the financial world.

Wall Street’s Toxic Message

When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz July 2009

Every crisis comes to an end—and, bleak as things seem now, the current economic crisis too shall pass. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ideas—over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World, among the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1.4 billion of whom subsist on less than $1.25 a day. In America, calling someone a socialist may be nothing more than a cheap shot. In much of the world, however, the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.

Frank Rich: Bernie Madoff Is No John Dillinger

THE judge condemned Bernie Madoff’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil.” The New York Daily News, whose publisher was a Madoff victim, chose “The Pariah” as its front-page headline and promised that the dastardly villain would suffer “everlasting consumption in the jaws of the devil.” The Times declared that the Madoff case, by attaching a human face to a financial meltdown that produced fear, panic and loss, had “put an entire era on trial.”

But for all this rhetorical thunder, Madoff’s 150-year sentence still seemed an anticlimax, as if the trial of the century had ended without a verdict. There was no national catharsis. The news landed with something of a thud. On the most-watched network newscast, “NBC Nightly News,” it received second billing to Day Four of updates on Michael Jackson’s death.

Madoff, it turned out, was no Public Enemy No. 1 to rival John Dillinger, the Great Depression thug at the center of Hollywood’s timely release this holiday weekend, “Public Enemies.” In the context of our own Great Recession, Madoff’s old-fashioned Ponzi scheme was merely a one-off next to the esoteric and (often legal) heists by banks and bankers. They gamed the entire system, then took the money and ran before the bubble burst, sticking the rest of us with that fear, panic and loss.