In Current US, We Reward the Liars and the Corrupt - First They Steal Your Schools: Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism (How the Nazis Enforced Their Regime?)

The first thing that impressed me (negatively) about the Obama regime was the choice of Arne Duncan, a Chicago-based advocate of anti-union charter schools (privatization) as Education Secretary. The whole idea of someone like this at the top of the US education pyramid spun my head around (reminding me of the need for a US political exorcist).

The second thing was all the ex-Goldman Sachs proles (shades - so to speak - of Hank Paulson's "socialism" of bankers' debts!).

And the third nail in the casket was Bob Rubin's boys, Geithner and Summers (and you already know my opinion of these crass minions).

Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven't Already?

Wed, 02/27/2013

 

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

 

A key role in the elite drive to privatize public education is being played by privately owned school “accreditation” agencies, which are immune from public scrutiny, and under the absolute thrall of pro-privatization forces like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation. Are you hearing stories in local corporate media about your school board being “dysfunctional” and your school systems accreditation threatened? It could mean the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation just want to replace them.

 

There's a not-so-secret campaign underway to privatize public education, an effort that is making unprecedented progress under the administration of Barack Obama. How is such a thing possible? Public education is supposedly a matter of local government, in the hands of thousands of school boards across the country, most of them chosen by local voters?

The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems.

 From these completely unaccountable positions, they are able to create convenient “crises” at will by making spurious and anonymous accusations against elected local school board members, and threatening to withdraw the accreditation of individual schools and entire districts. When such threats are made, a mayor or governor can appoint extra school board members or as in Georgia this week, replace school board members the voters have chosen with his own pro-privatization flunkies.

Here's how it works.

The federal Department of Education is forbidden to tell local school districts precisely what they can and cannot do or teach. But the Department of Education officially recognizes privately owned and operated “accreditation agencies” to decide whether a school, a school board or a school system are up to snuff. There are 6 of these accreditation agencies covering the 50 states, and three of these covering more than 20 states are under the umbrella of something called Advanc-Ed [2]. Being “private” and not-fpr-profit that Advanc-Ed's processes, educational policies, judgment calls and the rest are completely immune to public scrutiny.
 

Advanc-Ed's director of public information told Black Agenda Report on the phone that it was entirely funded by the nominal dues paid by school systems for the privilege of accreditation, and that those dues largely paid for its professional development activities, training education leaders, which meant principals, administrators, school board members, interested public officials, and probably members of local business communities who wanted to be more involved in local educational policies.

A little digging into the content of some of Advanc-Ed's professional development work revealed a number of other players. A typical one is the Center For Reform of School Systems [3], a not for profit largely funded by the deep pockets of a longtime major advocate of school privatization, the Eli Broad Foundation. CRSS also appears to be deeply involved in the US Chamber of Commerce [4]'s push to “influence” the boards of education in cities across the country.
 

The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. It was the Broad Foundation's consultants, along with the Walton Family and Gates and others, who actually wrote Race To The Top's voluminous guidelines, as well as many of the state level proposals that won the lion's share of funds under the program.
 

If you live in the metro Atlanta media market you've been bombarded with corporate media news coverage the last month or two of a looming crisis in the school system of suburban (and majority black) Dekalb County, pop. 700,000. The crisis is that the accrediting agency the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, part of Advanc-Ed, is threatening to withdraw accreditation for the county's entire school system.

You can pay careful attention to daily corporate media stories of the crisis for weeks on end without ever hearing what the specific accusations against the board members are. You hear that the board members just don't work together, that they fuss and fight, that they doze off in public meetings, that they may have hired relatives or mismanaged funds, but that they should just step down for the good of the children.

The reason news stories can't be any more specific about the accusations that threaten the accreditation of a large county school system is that Advanc-Ed's own report, based largely on anonymous sources, is just as vague, trivial and non-specific. Check it out here [5].
 

The accusations may be flimsy, but nothing has to be proven in a court of law. Their purpose is to justify provoking the useful crisis that disaster capitalism requires on the educational front to replace the board members and carry out policies that locally elected officials would not dare dream of.

In the last couple years, Georgia's notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that, suspending 6 of 9 school board members in the state's third largest school district after appointing a black Democrat flunky with no classroom bona fides whatsoever as county school superintendent.

Last year, the same breathless accusations about “not working together” bad manners and infighting were enough for the accreditation agency to threaten the city of Atlanta's public schools with loss of accreditation unless they went along with the wishes of its CEO, former BP executive Erroll Clark.

Clark also lacks any classroom experience, and once said in public that he learned all he needed to know about managing a large school district while on the board of BP. Atlanta's accreditation is still on probation. The year before, accreditation agencies sparked a year-long crisis by threatening the accreditation of another large majority black metro Atlanta county, Clayton.
 

It doesn't just happen in Georgia. The US Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation and other privatizers, in league with the Obama administration are trying the same thing in Seattle [6], and elsewhere around the country. If you hear chatter on corporate media about your local elected school board being “dysfunctional,” you're probably looking at a tentacle of the same beast working your own backyard. Beware. It doesn't mean your current elected school board is a paragon of educational virtue. It does mean that they're probably in the cross-hairs, maybe because they've dragged their feet on implementing this or that pro-charter or pro-privatization measure, maybe just because when the privatization goodies flow to the connected they are on the wrong team.
 

Essentially we have allowed privatizers, and not for profit bodies funded directly and indirectly by the privatizers to embed themselves in, to actually become the “authorities” which “certify” our school sysems. Neat trick.

Our public Department of Education sanctions them, and they do what DOE is legally prohibited from doing ---- take the stick to school systems to force the adoption of high stakes testing, common core, and related “run the school like a business” strategies, and ultimately, privatization.
 

It's time to take the discussion out of shallow waters like whether school closings are “racist” or not [7], and call the real names and frames of what's happening and how it's made to happen. We won't rescue public education, we have no hope of stemming the wave of high-stakes testing and privatization without killing these corrupt private accreditation agencies, and substituting some transparent, fair and bottom-up system of accrediting schools and school systems.

Congress did not approve Race To The Top, and its attendant wave of teacher firings, school closings and the like. But it's federal policy and it's happening. Lots of Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him.

But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn't stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top.

The role of privately owned, pro-privatization entities in school accreditation is an object lesson in how the most powerful office in the world can reach around Congress if it wants to, and enforce its will (and the will of the charter school sugar daddies) upon hundreds of local boards of education and hundreds of poor communities across the country. It's time to stand up and enforce some will of our own.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. A longtime Chicagoan, he now lives in exile near Marietta GA, where he is a state committee member of the Georgia Green party and a partner in a tech firm. Contact him via this site's contact [8]page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Sunday, Feb 24, 2013

Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism

 Friedmanites have created a market-based system of charter schools in Chicago, forcing many public schools to close 

By Kenzo Shibata 

In public policy circles, crises are called “focusing events” — bringing to light a particular failing in government policy.  They require government agencies to switch rapidly into crisis mode to implement solutions. Creating the crisis itself is more novel.

The right-wing, free market vision of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman informed the blueprint for the rapid privatization of municipal services throughout the world due in no small part to what author Naomi Klein calls “Disaster Capitalism.” Friedman wrote in his 1982 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, “When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”

In Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans’ infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools.

There aren’t any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder?

They create a crisis. 

Each year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) projects a billion dollar deficit. The announcement grabs headlines and the Board of Education announces that they must make serious cuts. These cutbacks are never at the top. The Board cuts education programs, after-school activities, and forces more classroom costs onto its employees.

School closings are announced tangentially to the deficit announcement. In years past, the manufactured budget crisis was used as an excuse to lay off teachers. People were fired, class sizes swelled to epic proportions and — after the budget was reconciled – CPS miraculously found a surplus. This past year’s final audited budget showed a surplus of $344 million.

The Chicago Board of Education announced that it must close “underutilized” schools and consolidate students into “receiving schools” to save the district from the projected deficit. The Board argues that some schools simply do not enroll enough students to stay open. A local teacher and parent published ten questions to Chicago Public Schools regarding how much can actually be saved by closing these schools. The Board’s responses revolved around the idea that previous administrations have let the problem get so bad they must act fast and close these schools or else the district will fall over a fiscal cliff – sorry wrong manufactured crisis – but you get the idea. 

So now we have a crisis. Schools closed and students shifted around the city. Many of them may have to cross gang territories to get to their receiving schools. School violence spikes. As Rahm Emanuel said in 2008, “You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” 

If only there were a solution “lying around” to attach to this crisis. 

At the end of 2012, the Chicago Board of Education approved additional charter schools. The Walton Family Foundation provided seed money for some of these schools. Charter school proliferation can take part of the blame for schools being “underutilized,” as they draw students from other schools, but the Board’s metric for calculating utilization is also suspect.

Charter schools become the “solution” lying around for parents who want to keep their students close to home in a school that will not be closed the following year. Many charter schools have been infused with additional resources, making their facilities look shiny and new. 

Parents, through the market-based “choice” system (which is revered by Friedmanites) may enroll their children in these new schools. That is unless their children have special needs, are learning English, or are simply bad at taking tests. Reuters recently published a report that showed how charter schools “cream” students to get the kids they want.

Charter schools that invest heavily in public relations campaigns and receive positive press, but when stacked against magnet schools, which are public schools (staffed by union teachers) with barriers to access, they do not outperform.

Students with special needs, limited English proficiency, or without a regular place to call home are forced to fight over limited resources in the public schools.

This scene is playing out at school closing hearings held by CPS, underwritten by the Walton Family Foundation. School communities are forced to make the case for keeping their schools open. At a recent meeting on Chicago’s north side, schools that take in homeless students from the blighted Uptown community were pitted against schools with programs that address special needs. Some observers likened the scene to the young adult novel-turned filmThe Hunger Games where children are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of the 1%.

In real-life, our rulers don’t bother to stick around and watch the fruits of their policy. But they’re more than happy to benefit. The Chicago elites’ charter schools are self-perpetuating gifts. The recent UNO Charter School Scandal shows how people connected to charters can dole out contracts to friends and family. The UNO network was the recent recipient of $98 million in state aid to build more schools. 

The head of UNO, Juan Rangel was co-chair of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s election campaign. Members of Rangel’s organization are now in the business of installing Illinois state representatives, the very people who hold the purse strings of these state grants. This is the face of the new municipal political machine.

Charter operators push back on any efforts of their staffs to unionize. When public schools close and charters open, teachers unions become weaker. Teachers unions are democratic institutions with ties to the communities they serve.  When the public is disempowered, the small patronage army of the mayor becomes more entrenched.
The sale of public schools to charter operators cannot be done slowly. The fast pace of crisis management obscures the graft from the public. UNO specifically needs to operate under these crisis management conditions.

UNO operates under $67,800,000 in outstanding debt. The $98 million state gift cannot be used to pay back this debt because it has been earmarked for capital projects, namely building or improving schools.  The only way to keep the UNO patronage train rolling is by continuously expanding and opening schools, with construction contractors serving as potential allies come election time.

The free-market think tank American Enterprise Institute recently praised this particular brand of charter school. The use of patronage in government hiring was a major argument Friedmanites used for privatizing public services. 

AEI praises UNO’s “assimilationist” philosophy of teaching immigrant youth so perhaps AEI finds more merit in diluting non-European cultures than in ending patronage. I’m not exactly sure where that fits into the free market orthodoxy, but then again the contradictions in the philosophy far from end there.

Friedmanites often criticize redistributive policies as “picking winners and losers.” From the manufactured schools crisis to the market-based solution of charter schools, it appears that the “free market” model picks winners and losers; the winners being the politically connected and the losers being the rest of us.

Polluting Ourselves To Death, DC's Stupid Game, Eyes Wide Shut On Iraq (This Is the Way In Which Unregulated Capitalism Works)

(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)


Is anyone else past their limit on hearing about the ongoing (and ignored or collusionally grossly misrepresented by the media) massive pollution of the USA USA USA?

And since the price of gas has recently skyrocketed after falling precipitously - from $3.25/gallon to $3.91/gallon in central NC - (for no reason other than some type of price manipulation), does anyone doubt that "we" are going into Iran as this is always the scenario that precedes the attack in order to convince the ignorant bystanders that we are going in to "solve" our energy shortage?

Polluted America

By Paul Craig Roberts (about the author)

OpEdNews 2/25/2013

Cross-posted from Paul Craig Roberts

In the United States everything is polluted.

Democracy is polluted with special interests and corrupt politicians.

Accountability is polluted with executive branch exemptions from law and the Constitution and with special legal privileges for corporations, such as the Supreme Court given right to corporations to purchase American elections.

The Constitution is polluted with corrupt legal interpretations from the Bush and Obama regimes that have turned constitutional prohibitions into executive branch rights, transforming law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of government.

Waters are polluted with toxic waste spills, oil spills, chemical fertilizer run-off with resulting red tides and dead zones, acid discharges from mining with resulting destructive algae such as prymnesium parvum, from toxic chemicals used in fracking and with methane that fracking releases into wells and aquifers, resulting in warnings to homeowners near to fracking operations to open their windows when showering.

The soil's fertility is damaged, and crops require large quantities of chemical fertilizers. The soil is polluted with an endless array of toxic substances and now with glyphosate, the main element in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide with which GMO crops are sprayed. Glyphosate now shows up in wells, streams and in rain.

Air is polluted with a variety of substances, and there are many large cities in which there are days when the young, the elderly, and those suffering with asthma are warned to remain indoors.

All of these costs are costs imposed on society and ordinary people by corporations that banked profits by not having to take the costs into account. This is the way in which unregulated capitalism works.

Our food itself is polluted with antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, and glyphosate.

Glyphosate might be the most dangerous development to date. Some scientists believe that glyphosate has the potential to wipe out our main grain crops and now that Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, Thomas Vilsack, has approved genetically modified Roundup Ready alfalfa, maintaining sustainable animal herds for milk and meat could become impossible.

Alfalfa is the main forage crop for dairy and beef herds. Genetically modified alfalfa could be unsafe for animal feed, and animal products such as milk and meat could become unsafe for human consumption.

On January 17, 2011, Dr. Don Huber outlined the dangers of approving Roundup Ready alfalfa in a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack. Huber requested that approval be delayed until independent research could evaluate the risks. Vilsack ignored Huber's letter and 10 days later, on January 27, deregulated Roundup Ready alfalfa, thus accommodating Monsanto's desire for monopoly profits that come from the company's drive to control the seed supply of US and world agriculture by approving Roundup Ready alfalfa.

Who is Don Huber, and why is his letter important?

Huber is professor emeritus at Purdue University. He has been a plant pathologist and soil microbiologist for a half century. He has an international reputation as a leading authority. In the US military, he evaluated natural and man-made biological threats, such as germ warfare and disease outbreaks and retired with the rank of Colonel. For the USDA he coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens Committee. In other words, he is high up in his scientific profession.

You can read online what Huber told the Secretary of Agriculture. Briefly, the outcome of many years of Roundup Ready GMO corn and soybeans has been a decline in nutritional value, the outbreak of new plant diseases resulting in widespread crop failures, and severe reproductive problems in livestock, with some herds having a spontaneous abortion rate that is too high to maintain a profitable business.

Glyphosate is a powerful biocide. It harms beneficial soil organisms, altering the natural balance in the soil and reducing the disease resistance of crops, thus unleashing diseases that devastate corn, soybean, and wheat crops, and giving rise to a new pathogen associated with premature animal aging and infertility. These developments, Huber told the Agriculture Secretary, "are threatening the economic viability of both crop and animal producers." The evidence seems to be real that genetically modified crops have lost their genetic resistance to diseases that never previously were threats.

There is evidence that the new pathogen is related to a rise in human infertility and is likely having adverse effects on human health of which we are still uninformed. Like fluoride, glyphosate might enter our diet in a variety of ways. For example, the label on a bottle of Vitamin D says, "Other ingredients: soybean oil, corn oil."

Monsanto disputes Huber's claims and got support for its position from the agricultural extension services of Iowa State and Ohio State universities. However, the question is whether these are independently funded services or corporate supported, and there is always the element of professional rivalry, especially for funding, which comes mainly from agribusiness.

The Purdue University extension service was more circumspect. On the one hand it admits that there is evidence that supports Huber's claims:

"The claim that herbicides, such as glyphosate, can make plants more susceptible to disease is not entirely without merit. Research has indicated that plants sprayed with glyphosate or other herbicides are more susceptible to many biological and physiological disorders (Babiker et al., 2011; Descalzo et al., 1996; Johal and Rahe, 1984; Larson et al., 2006; Means and Kremer, 2007; Sanogo et al., 2000; Smiley et al., 1992). ...  

Although some research indicates there is an increase in disease severity on plants in the presence of glyphosate, it does NOT necessarily mean that there is an impact on yield."

On the other hand, the Purdue extension service maintains its recommendation for "judicious glyphosate use for weed control." However, one of Huber's points is that weeds are developing Roundup resistance. Use has gone beyond the "judicious" level and as glyphosate builds up in soil, its adverse effects increase.

A submission to the Environmental Protection Agency by 26 university entomologists describes the constraints that agribusiness has put on the ability of independent scientists to conduct objective research. The submission, in which the scientists are afraid to reveal their names because of the threat of funding cutoffs, is included as an item in one of the bibliographical references below. Here is the statement:

"The names of the scientists have been withheld from the public docket because virtually all of us require cooperation from industry at some level to conduct our research. Statement: Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance, its management implications, IRM, and its interactions with insect biology. Consequently, data flowing to an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel from the public sector is unduly limited."

Monsanto is not only sufficiently powerful to prevent any research other than that which it purchases with its funding, but also Monsanto succeeded last year in blocking with money and propaganda the GMO labeling law in California. I would tell you to be careful what you eat as it can make you ill and infertile, but you can't even find out what you are eating.

You live in America, which has "freedom and democracy" and "accountable" government and "accountable" corporations. You don't need to worry. The government and responsible corporations are taking good care of you. Especially Obama, Vilsack, and Monsanto.

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments and is Contributing Editor to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. His columns can be found here.

Washington's Stupid, Destructive Game 

By Richard (RJ) Eskow (about the author)

The President is insisting on $100 billion in cuts to Social Security payments for the elderly and disabled -- an offer which Republicans have shrugged off but which he has placed back on the table again and again. Those offered cuts are accompanied by other proposed cuts to Medicare, which seem to include limitations on choice of medical providers.

Eyes Wide Shut on the Iraq War

 

The book cover for George Tenet's "At the Center of the Storm," co-written with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow

Ten years ago, as President George W. Bush and his administration were putting the finishing touches on their unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the mainstream U.S. news media had long since capitulated, accepting the conventional wisdom that nothing could -- or should -- stop the march to war.

The neocon conquest of the major U.S. news outlets -- the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the national TV news -- was so total that the Bush administration could reliably count on them as eager co-conspirators in the Iraq adventure rather than diligent watchdogs for the American people.

By now a decade ago, the New York Times had published Judy Miller's infamous "mushroom cloud" article about Iraq's aluminum tubes, the Washington Post's op-ed page had lined up in lock-step to hail Colin Powell's misleading United Nations speech, MSNBC had dumped Phil Donahue after he allowed on a few anti-war voices, and CNN had assembled a chorus of pro-war ex-military officers as "analysts."

Despite massive worldwide protests against the impending invasion, the U.S. news media only grudgingly covered the spectacle of millions of people in the streets in dozens of cities. The coverage mostly had a tone of bemusement about how deluded such uninformed folks could be.

The U.S. news media's consensus was so overwhelming that it may have freed up a few lesser outlets to publish some undeniable facts, which then could be safely dismissed and ignored.

Such was the case when Newsweek correspondent John Barry was allowed to publish the leaked contents of an interrogation of a senior Iraqi official who inconveniently disclosed that Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons years earlier.

A Real Crash As Fake Movies Honored (Argo and Zero Dark Thirty - Honored?) Positively Surreal!

(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)


Yes, this was written before the Oscar was trashed, but the reviews are dead on.

Don't miss the comments! They tell even more of the tale.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Oscar Prints the Legend: Argo's Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth

One year ago, after his breathtakingly beautiful Iranian drama, "A Separation," won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, writer/director Asghar Farhadi delivered the best acceptance speech of the night.

"[A]t the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians," he said, Iran was finally being honored for "her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics." Farhadi dedicated the Oscar "to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."

Such grace and eloquence will surely not be on display this Sunday, when Ben Affleck, flanked by his co-producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, takes home the evening's top prize, the Best Picture Oscar, for his critically-acclaimed and heavily decorated paean to the CIA and American innocence, "Argo."

Over the past 12 months, rarely a week - let alone month - went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched "Argo," a decontextualized, ahistorical "true story" of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir aptly described the film as "a propaganda fable," explaining as others have that essentially none of its edge-of-your-seat thrills or most memorable moments ever happened. O'Hehir sums up:

The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the “house guests” chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.

One of the actual hostages, Mark Lijek, noted that the CIA's fake movie "cover story was never tested and in some ways proved irrelevant to the escape." The departure of the six Americans from Tehran was actually mundane and uneventful. "If asked, we were going to say we were leaving Iran to return when it was safer," Lijek recalled, "But no one ever asked!...The truth is the immigration officers barely looked at us and we were processed out in the regular way. We got on the flight to Zurich and then we were taken to the US ambassador's residence in Berne. It was that straightforward."

Furthermore, Jimmy Carter has even acknowledged that "90% of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian [while] the movie gives almost full credit to the American CIA...Ben Affleck's character in the film was only in Tehran a day and a half and the real hero in my opinion was Ken Taylor, who was the Canadian ambassador who orchestrated the entire process."

Taylor himself recently remarked that "Argo" provides a myopic representation of both Iranians and their revolution, ignoring their "more hospitable side and an intent that they were looking for some degree of justice and hope and that it all wasn’t just a violent demonstration for nothing."

"The amusing side, Taylor said, "is the script writer in Hollywood had no idea what he's talking about."

O'Hehir perfectly articulates the film's true crime, its deliberate exploitation of "its basis in history and its mode of detailed realism to create something that is entirely mythological." Not only is it "a trite cavalcade of action-movie clichés and expository dialogue," but "[i]t’s also a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology."



Such an assessment is confirmed by Ben Affleck's own comments about the film. In describing "Argo" to Bill O'Reilly, Affleck boasted, "You know, it was such a great story. For one thing, it's a thriller. It's actually comedy with the Hollywood satire. It's a complicated CIA movie, it's a political movie. And it's all true." He told Rolling Stone that, when conceiving his directorial approach, he knew he "absolutely had to preserve the central integrity and truth of the story."

"It's OK to embellish, it's OK to compress, as long as you don't fundamentally change the nature of the story and of what happened," Affleck has remarked, even going so far as to tell reporters at Argo's BFI London Film Festival premier, "This movie is about this story that took place, and it's true, and I go to pains to contextualize it and to try to be even-handed in a way that just means we're taking a cold, hard look at the facts."

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Affleck went so far as to say, "I tried to make a movie that is absolutely just factual. And that's another reason why I tried to be as true to the story as possible -- because I didn't want it to be used by either side. I didn't want it to be politicized internationally or domestically in a partisan way. I just wanted to tell a story that was about the facts as I understood them."

For Affleck, these facts apparently don't include understanding why the American Embassy in Tehran was overrun and occupied on November 4, 1979. "There was no rhyme or reason to this action," Affleck has insisted, claiming that the takeover "wasn't about us," that is, the American government (despite the fact that his own film is introduced by a fleeting - though frequently inaccurate¹ - review of American complicity in the Shah's dictatorship).

Wrong, Ben. One reason was the fear of another CIA-engineered coup d'etat like the one perpetrated in 1953 from the very same Embassy. Another reason was the admission of the deposed Shah into the United States for medical treatment and asylum rather than extradition to Iran to face charge and trial for his quarter century of crimes against the Iranian people, bankrolled and supported by the U.S. government. One doesn't have to agree with the reasons, of course, but they certainly existed.

Just as George H.W. Bush once bellowed after a U.S. Navy warship blew an Iranian passenger airliner out of the sky over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 Iranian civilians, "I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are." Affleck appears inclined to agree.

If nothing else, "Argo" is an exercise in American exceptionalism - perhaps the most dangerous fiction that permeates our entire society and sense of identity. It reinvents history in order to mine a tale of triumph from an unmitigated defeat. The hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days and destroyed an American presidency, was a failure and an embarrassment for Americans. The United States government and media has spent the last three decades tirelessly exacting revenge on Iran for what happened.

"Argo" recasts revolutionary Iranians as the hapless victims of American cunning and deception. White Americans are hunted, harried and, ultimately courageous and free. Iranians are maniacal, menacing and, in the end, infantile and foolish. The fanatical fundamentalists fail while America wins. USA -1, Iran - 0. Yet, "Argo" obscures the unfortunate truth that, as those six diplomats were boarding a plane bound for Switzerland on January 28, 1980, their 52 compatriots would have to wait an entire year before making it home, not as the result of a daring rescue attempt, but after a diplomatic agreement was reached.

Reflecting on the most troubled episodes in American history is a time-honored cinematic tradition. There's a reason why the best Vietnam movies are full of pain, anger, anguish and war crimes. By contrast, "Argo" is American catharsis porn; pure Hollywood hubris. It is pro-American propaganda devoid of introspection, pathos or humility and meant to assuage our hurt feelings. In "Argo," no lessons are learned by revisiting the consequences of America's support for the Pahlavi monarchy or its creation and training of SAVAK, the Shah's vicious secret police.

On June 11, 1979, months before the hostage crisis began, the New York Times published an article by writer and historian A.J. Langguth which recounted revelations relayed by a former American intelligence official regarding the CIA's close relationship with SAVAK. The agency had "sent an operative to teach interrogation methods to SAVAK" including "instructions in torture, and the techniques were copied from the Nazis." Langguth wrestled with the news, trying to figure out why this had not been widely reported in the media. He came to the following conclusion:

We – and I mean we as Americans – don’t believe it. We can read the accusations, even examine the evidence and find it irrefutable. But, in our hearts, we cannot believe that Americans have gone abroad to spread the use of torture.

We can believe that public officials with reputations for brilliance can be arrogant, blind or stupid. Anything but evil. And when the cumulative proof becomes overwhelming that our representatives in the C.I.A. or the Agency for International Development police program did in fact teach torture, we excuse ourselves by vilifying the individual men.

Similarly, at a time when the CIA is waging an illegal, immoral, unregulated and always expanding drone execution program, the previous administration's CIA kidnappers and torturers are protected from prosecution by the current administration, and leaked State Department cables reveal orders for U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials, it is surreal that such homage is being paid to that very same organization by the so-called liberals of the Tinsel Town elite.

Upon winning his Best Director Golden Globe last month, Ben Affleck obsequiously praised the "clandestine service as well as the foreign service that is making sacrifices on behalf of the American people everyday [and] our troops serving over seas, I want to thank them very much," a statement echoed almost identically by co-producer Grant Heslov when "Argo" later won Best Drama.

This comes as no surprise, considering Affleck had previously described "Argo" as "a tribute" to the "extraordinary, honorable people at the CIA" during an interview on Fox News.

The relationship between Hollywood and the military and intelligence arms of the U.S. government have long been cozy. "When the CIA or the Pentagon says, 'We'll help you, if you play ball with us,' that's favoring one form of speech over another. It becomes propaganda," David Robb, author of "Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies" told The Los Angeles Times. "The danger for filmmakers is that their product — entertainment and information — ends up being government spin."

Awarding "Argo" the Best Picture Oscar is like Barack Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize: an undeserved accolade fawningly bestowed upon a dubious recipient based on a transparent fiction; an award for what never was and never would be and a decision so willfully naïve and grotesque it discredits whatever relevance and prestige the proceedings might still have had.*

So this Sunday night, when "Argo" has won that coveted golden statuette, it will be clear that we have yet again been blinded by the heavy dust of politics and our American mantra of hostility and resentment will continue to inform our decisions, dragging us closer and closer to the abyss.

***** ***** *****

* Yes, in this analogy, the equivalent of Henry Kissinger is obviously 2004's dismal "Crash."

*****

¹ The introduction of "Argo" is a dazzingly sloppy few minutes of caricatured history of Iran, full of Orientalist images of violent ancient Persians (harems and all), which gets many basic facts wrong. In fact, it is shocking this intro made it to release as written and recorded.

Here are some of the problems:

1. The voiceover narration says, "In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossadegh, the secular democrat, Prime Minister. He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people."

Mossadegh was elected to the Majlis (Iranian Parliament) in 1944. He did not become Prime Minister until April 1951 and was not "elected by the people of Iran." Rather, he was appointed to the position by the representatives of the Majlis.

Also, the United States did not have petroleum interests in Iran at the time.

2. After briefly describing the 1953 coup, the narrator says Britain and the United States "installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah."

Wow. First, the Shah's name was not Reza Pahlavi. That is his father's (and son's) name. Furthermore, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not installed as Shah since had already been Shah of Iran since September 1941, after Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran and forced the abdication of his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi.

During the coup in 1953, the Shah fled to Baghdad, then Rome. After Mossadegh had been forced out, the Shah returned to the Peacock Throne.

This is not difficult information to come by, and yet the screenwriter and director of "Argo" didn't bother looking it up. And guess what? Ben Affleck actually majored in Middle East Studies in college. Unsurprisingly, he didn't graduate.

The rest of the brief intro, while mentioning the torture of SAVAK, glosses over the causes of the revolution, but lingers on the violence that followed. As it ends, the words "Based on a True Story" appear on the screen. The first live action moment we see in "Argo" is of an American flag being burned.

Such is Affleck's insistence that "Argo" is "not a political movie."

Still, as Kevin B. Lee wrote in Slate last month, "This opening may very well be the reason why critics have given the film credit for being insightful and progressive — because nothing that follows comes close, and the rest of the movie actually undoes what this opening achieves."

He continues,

Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies — still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation.

And brilliantly concludes,

Looking at the runaway success of this film, it seems as if critics and audiences alike lack the historical knowledge to recognize a self-serving perversion of an unflattering past, or the cultural acumen to see the utterly ersatz nature of the enterprise: A cast of stock characters and situations, and a series of increasingly contrived narrow escapes from third world mobs who, predictably, are never quite smart enough to catch up with the Americans. We can delight all we like in this cinematic recycling act, but the fact remains that we are no longer living in a world where we can get away with films like this — not if we want to be in a position to deal with a world that is rising to meet us. The movies we endorse need to rise to the occasion of reflecting a new global reality, using a newer set of storytelling tools than this reheated excuse for a historical geopolitical thriller.

Were you worried that the epic Zero Dark Thirty was overlooked?

No?

Monday, February 25, 2013

by The Guardian

Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA and Film Critics Have a Very Bad Evening

by Glenn Greenwald

Just a few months ago, the consensus of the establishment press and the nation's (shockingly large) community of film critics was that Zero Dark Thirty was the best film of the year and the clear (and well-deserved) front-runner to win the most significant Academy Awards. "OK, folks, you can plan something else for Oscar Night 2013 . . . . Zero Dark Thirty will win Best Picture and Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow)," pronounced Time Magazine's Richard Corliss. "'Zero Dark Thirty' and Kathryn Bigelow won major critics' prizes on Sunday, confirming the Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller as an Oscar frontrunner," said Entertainment Weekly.

The film "looks like the movie to beat right now" as the critics' awards "landscape is dominated by Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty,'" reported the Washington Post's Jen Chaney.

But then political writers had begun to notice what film critics either failed to detect or just wilfully ignored. The film falsely depicted torture as instrumental in the finding of Osama bin Laden ("what is so unsettling about 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it", said the New Yorker's Jane Mayer). Beyond the torture falsehoods, it was a blatant vehicle for CIA propaganda, bolstering a worldview exclusively out of Langley ("This is not a coincidence. The CIA played a key role in shaping the film's narrative," reported BuzzFeed's Michael Hastings; the CIA "couldn't have asked for better product placement", said the New York Times' Timothy Egan; as a result, said The Atlantic's Peter Maass: "Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism"). In sum, said MSNBC's Chris Hayes, the film "colludes with evil" (a long but very partial list of writers, filmmakers, FBI agents and even government officials who similarly denounced the film is here).

The first sign that this fallout was harming the film was when its director, Bigelow, was not even nominated for Best Director. And now, on Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Zero Dark Thirty got exactly what it deserved: basically nothing other than humiliation:

"'Zero Dark Thirty,' about the decade-long US hunt for Osama bin Laden, has received more attention in the US Congress than it did at the Oscars on Sunday, amid political fallout over its depiction of torture and alleged intelligence leaks to the movie's makers. . . .

"Just three months ago, the thriller, which culminates in Osama bin Laden's killing by US Navy Seals, was a strong contender to pick up the biggest prize of Best Picture, as well as the Best Actress and Original Screenplay awards.

"By the end of Sunday night, however, it had picked up just one award – a shared Oscar for Sound Editing, which was a tie."

(I'm actually glad that it won essentially half of an award, for sound editing, as that's somehow more cruel than if it just won nothing).

This is a rare case of some justice being done. There's little question that the objections to its pro-torture depictions and CIA propaganda were what sunk the film. In explaining why its Oscar chances had all but disappeared, the Atlantic's Richard Lawson explained last month that as a result of the controversy, the film has "just become something vaguely taboo". That's a good thing, as it should be taboo. The film is unsurprisingly a box office success, earning in excess of $100 million. But still, it's both gratifying and a bit surprising to see that this CIA-shaped jingoistic celebration of America's proudest moment of the last decade - finding bin Laden, pumping his skull full of bullets, and then dumping his corpse into the ocean - ended up with the stigma it deserves.

In response to this controversy, both Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have compounded their original bad acts. Bigelow spent months literally pretending that the actual criticisms of her film did not exist and thus never addressed them. She instead chose to wage war on the obviously ludicrous strawman argument that absolutely nobody made: that merely to depict torture is to endorse it and that omitting torture would be to "whitewash" history. Nobody complained that the film depicted torture; the complaint was that it falsely depicted it as vital in finding bin Laden and thus portrayed it in a falsely positive light.

Meanwhile, Boal has been playing the McCarthyism martyr by pretending that the Senate is investigating his film over its pro-torture message. Such an investigation would indeed be odious, but it's a figment of Boal's imagination. To the extent the Senate has expressed any interest in investigating, it is not over the film's content but whether the CIA passed classified information about the bin Laden raid to Bigelow and Boal in order to get the film it wanted (though not dispositive, there is ample evidence to believe this). The investigation targets the CIA, not the filmmakers. For an administration that has waged its own war on whistleblowers by prosecuting and imprisoning them at record numbers, surely the CIA's abuse of classified information for the purpose of producing Hollywood propaganda merits a formal investigation, particularly since the government has vigorously resisted disclosure attempts in court from the media and advocacy groups on the ground that the bin Laden raid is classified.

From this controversy, the film critic community stood revealed as well. Objections to this film triggered an incredibly acrimonious reaction on the part of professional critics who, prior to the emergence of the controversy, had lavished the film with the most gushing accolades. One of the best essays on why that happened was from Reuters' culture critic Alissa Quart, who explained that the critics' anger over this film being "politicized" reflects a broader syndrome where political indifference is viewed as some sort of virtue:

"In the postwar decades, the best reviewers of the day saw addressing the politics within the cultural works they reviewed as part of their jobs. . . . Writers like [Mary] McCarthy, who was both a theater critic and a political writer, were more attuned to the ideological sources behind play and film, as they came up in the Depression and the war years, according to Hunter College Professor Richard Kaye, who is working on a project about McCarthy. After all, art was explicitly tied to politics within fascism as well as within communist states. Watching the power of ideology at work within fascism made writers more likely to combine politics with aesthetics. They understood the propagandistic potential of overwhelmingly dramatic popular entertainment."

"Today, in part because because popular art has largely been decoupled from politics, film critics tend to be narrower in their expertise. They are also operating in an America where 'partisan' and 'political' have been made to equal each other in a toxic way. Thus, critics and many political thinkers can't necessarily agree on a critical focus. . . .

"But if political writers do their job well, they understand something even more important: that ideological meaning and agendas are not incidental to thrilling films and cinematography. Why surgically remove politics from a discussion of a film's final quality, rendering the argument so purely aesthetic that it becomes low-brow decadent . . . . Ethical lapses or gaps in movies should be critiqued, along with bad performances or absurd storylines."

Another equally good discussion of the exposed mentality of film critics came from Jeff Reichert, himself a filmmaker and critic:

"If Bigelow and Boal want to insist they haven't made a movie that validates torture morally, that's fine. But to label it apolitical, as they have repeatedly done, either suggests willful mendacity or ignorance. Their film quite clearly stakes out a position on one of the more controversial political questions of the last decade in American politics, and soon it will be making its case several times a day on thousands of screens around the country. Greenwald's writings on the film may hyperventilate, but when one considers the scale of the historical rewrite we're about to witness, his pitched tenor is more forgivable. Maybe 'propaganda' isn't so far off the mark after all.

"If our critical culture handled films of this ilk with something other than kid gloves, we might not have to continually address these same, tired questions. . . . It's become all too commonplace for critics to float above the fray, and praise works they find aesthetically valuable and politically questionable (a replaying of the old Leni Riefenstahl debate again), but is this l'art pour l'art stance any way to watch movies? Isn't this just abdicating a crucial part of the critical act? Wouldn't we rather our film writers be morally engaged viewers rather than diffident aesthetes? . . . .

"Especially in light of how the filmmakers have spoken about their work, the problem with Zero Dark Thirty becomes less that it ends up making a forceful case for the efficacy of torturing human beings for national security - it's that one can easily walk away from the film doubting whether Bigelow and Boal have even realized that this is what they've done."

In an era where virtually everything the government does is shielded from disclosure, democratic accountability, and even the rule of law, films such as Zero Dark Thirty that purport to tell political stories are inherently highly political, likely to have an enormous impact on how political events are perceived. When blatant falsehoods are presented as truth on critical questions - by a film that touts itself as a journalistic presentation of actual events - insisting on apolitical appreciation of this "art" is indeed a reckless abdication.

That's particularly true when the film creates itself as a servant to political power: by itself, the CIA's heavy (and still unexamined) involvement in this film is a significant and disturbing development. The last thing America needs is more ways to celebrate and glorify US militarism, and the second-to-last thing it needs is Hollywood devoting its multi-million-dollar budgets and emotionally and psychologically manipulative tactics to propagating the CIA worldview as indisputable, inspiring truth. It's a very good thing that all of this did not go unnoticed or rewarded.

On Argo

The film that won most of the significant awards (including Best Picture), Argo, has received its own criticisms for false history and US/CIA propaganda; as but one example, see here from Iranian-American writer Nima Shirazi.

Whatever is true about that film showing events from three decades ago, the CIA was much more involved with and invested in Zero Dark Thirty; that's why it played such a significant role in how it was made.

(Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

more Glenn Greenwald)

Austerity ( the FauxConsensus?) Isn't Even Close To the Right Word (It's F A S C I S M!): Plan to Further Enrich the World's Wealthy, Privatize Medicaid in FL, and Take Over Once and For All

Well, it's certainly not Austerity for them (now is it?).

I like the way our American Everyman 'splains it.

And if you read to end of this essay you will understand how extreme wealth has deadened the "carriers."

The Opiate of the Disenfranchised

by willyloman

by Scott Creighton

First things first: let's stop calling this global neo-liberal class war "austerity". It's not austerity. When it was done to Chile in 1973 and Argentina and Poland and the Russia and all the others, it was naked class warfare... it's fascism. That's what it is.

And it's happening here as a direct result of what these financial oligarchs and their government stooges staged from 1998 (repeal Glass-Steagall and Commodities Modification Act) through 2008 (economic collapse of derivative bubble they created with sub-prime mortgages)

The Bush administration then implemented a nation-wide federal plan to "help" low-rated applicants with their down-payments on these sub-prime loans, effectively paying unqualified borrowers to become the fodder for their future demise.

They literally created "al Qaeda" in January of 2001 in a courtroom in New York based on the testimony of a known liar so they could stage a false flag event and use the "Global War on Terror" as the enforcement arm of their fascist agenda. 

This is economic warfare being waged after the implementation of economic terrorism. You talk about trade wars and currency wars being waged against other nations as warfare . . . this is the same thing but it's being waged against their own people.

In country after country we see the same thing: the fascist state rising from the ashes of social democracies here in the states, in Canada, Mexico, and all across Europe. 

While they ran their "experiment" in Chile, they had designs on doing the same thing here and in Western Europe and so they did. 

It's time we understood that these monsters will do what is needed, whatever that is, to see their vision of the new world order take shape. It's time we stopped kidding ourselves about a victory based on a few half-measures and comfortable resistance.

It will not be comfortable in the world they are planning and they will not let us comfortably avoid it. This is a global life or death struggle with the highest stakes imaginable for them.

It's time we sobered up and quit with the opiate of the disenfranchised and took a long hard look at the struggle we are already engaged in.

A one-trick pony?

Anyone else notice what Florida's one-trick Governor just did to the "progressives."

Nothing like wearing those labels lightly, is it?

Bill Black: 'It does not matter how many times austerity makes the crisis worsen; the austerians are a one-trick pony.'

The Plan to Enrich the World's Wealthy

By Bill Black, New Economic Perspectives

20 February 13

ohn Williamson, a Peterson Institute "senior fellow" coined the term "the Washington Consensus" at a conference in 1989.

Williamson joined the Institute in 1981 when it was founded by Pete Peterson, the Republican billionaire from Wall Street who has dedicated his life to proselytizing for lower taxes on the wealthy, stringent spending cuts in social programs, and privatizing Social Security – the unholy grail of Wall Street that would provide our largest banks with hundreds of billions of dollars in additional investment fees. Peterson has funded many groups to evangelize for these neo-liberal dogmas.

Williamson’s statement of the "ten" "principles" of what he chose to label "the Washington consensus" parallels Pete Peterson’s policies. Williamson, the Reagan administration and the IMF did not see these principles as being of equal importance. A paper by Williamson makes clear that the focus of the Washington Consensus was on Latin America.

Here is Williamson’s introductory paragraph, in full.

"No statement about how to deal with the debt crisis in Latin America would be complete without a
call for the debtors to fulfill their part of the proposed bargain by "setting their houses in order," "undertaking policy reforms," or "submitting to strong conditionality."

The question posed in this paper is what such phrases mean, and especially what they are generally interpreted as meaning in Washington. Thus the paper aims to set out what would be regarded in Washington as constituting a desirable set of economic policy reforms.

An important purpose in doing this is to establish a baseline against which to measure the extent to which various countries have implemented the reforms being urged on them."

The paragraph is critical to understanding the context of the creation of the Washington Consensus.

It was all about the Latin American "debt crisis." It was all about a quid pro quo.

The Washington Consensus was a consensus of creditors about how to deal with their debtors. Latin American debtor nations would be allowed to delay the repayment of their debts, but only if they "submit[ed]" to "strong conditionality" dictated by the Washington creditors. The creditors – the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and the largest U.S. banks – needed to develop a coordinated position on what to demand as their quid pro quofrom the Latin American debtors. The number one thing on their list from the beginning was austerity ("setting their houses in order").

The Washington Creditors were not willing to accept mere promises from the Latin America debtors. Williamson emphasized that a key purpose of creating an explicit Washington Consensus was to be able to use it as a scorecard to ensure that the Latin American debtor Nations were "submitting" fully to the Consensus’ requirements imposed by the Washington Creditors ("strong conditionality"). "An important purpose in doing this is to establish a baseline against which to measure the extent to which various countries have implemented the reforms being urged on them."

Williamson then (implicitly) acknowledged that the Washington Creditors’ ten principles bore three equivalents to an Achilles’ heel. First, he agreed that corruption could pervert the plan so that it would cause great harm. He admitted that the Washington Creditors had "at least some awareness" of this danger – a classic example of damning with faint praise. Williamson acknowledged that the Creditors who shared the Consensus believed that corruption in Latin America was "pervasive."

Williamson was implicitly admitting that the Creditors had committed the classic economics error (and the defining joke of the economics profession) by "assuming the can opener." The Creditors implicitly assumed that privatization, deregulation, and the protection of private property (Consensus principles 8-10) would not be perverted by "pervasive" corruption (and I would add, private "control fraud").

Second, Williamson acknowledged that there were many matters that Latin Americans considered to be vital to their well-being that the Washington Creditors deliberately ignored – even though Latin Americans correctly viewed them to be essential if the Patricians’ ten principles were not to cause harm.

"For better or worse, however, these broader objectives play little role in determining Washington’s attitude toward the economic policies it urges on Latin America. Limited sums of money may be offered to countries in return for specific acts to combat drugs, to save tropical forests, or (at least prior to the Reagan administration) to promote birth control, and sanctions may occasionally be imposed in support of democracy or human rights, but there is little perception that the policies discussed below have important implications for any of those objectives."

Third, Williamson grudgingly acknowledged that the Washington Creditors who created the fauxConsensus had disabling conflicts of interest because they were creditors of Latin American governments and were strongly motivated by their desire to impose policies that would maximize the repayment of their debts.

"Political Washington is also, of course, concerned about the strategic and commercial interests of the United States, but the general belief is that these are best furthered by prosperity in the Latin countries. The most obvious possible exception to this perceived harmony of interests concerns the US national interest in continued receipt of debt service from Latin America. Some (but not all) believe this consideration to have been important in motivating Washington’s support for policies of austerity in Latin America during the 1980s."

I want to know which Washington Creditors told Williamson that debtors and creditors have a "harmony of interests." They have a wonderfully droll sense of humor. The powerful love to take the position that "what’s good for GM is good for America, so it is no surprise that the Washington Creditors were sure that the positions they forcing Latin American Nations to "submit" to "best furthered … prosperity in the Latin countries." We have centuries of history proving that Washington Creditors are the people who know best the needs of Latin Americans and are passionately committed to serving the poor. Austerity is frequently the enemy of "prosperity."

Williamson then set out his ten principles. His first was austerity and he called it the "central" policy that the Washington Creditors had long insisted that Latin American Nations "submit" to through "high-conditionality programs." That phrase is code for harsh austerity likely to throw the Nation into receivership and emasculate the Nation’s sovereignty by agreeing to "submit" to its creditors’ demands.

Fiscal Deficits

"Washington believes in fiscal discipline. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long made the restoration of fiscal discipline a central element of the high-conditionality programs it negotiates with its members that wish to borrow. Left-wing believers in "Keynesian" stimulation via large budget deficits are almost an extinct species."

Williamson is an ultra-hawk on austerity. Even running a budget surplus may not suffice for Williamson:

"Unless the excess is being used to finance productive infrastructure investment, an operational budget deficit in excess of around 1 to 2 percent of GNP1 is prima facie evidence of policy failure. Moreover, a smaller deficit, or even a surplus, is not necessarily evidence of fiscal discipline: its adequacy needs to be examined in the light of the strength of demand and the availability of private savings."

Williamson did not distinguish between Nations with sovereign currencies that they allow to freely float and who borrow in their own currency and Nations without fully sovereign currencies. He and the Washington Creditors shared this lack of understanding of sovereign currencies, which led them to demand that Latin American Nations "submit" to austerity when that policy would be economics malpractice analogous to the medical malpractice of bleeding patients.

The Washington Creditors’ succeeded in getting most of Latin America to "submit" to austerity, deregulation, and privatization. The resultant scandals enraged tens of millions of Latin Americans and led to the election of many national leaders running on the promise to refuse to "submit" to the Washington Consensus. 

Neo-liberal economists and politicians, however, are prisoners of their pro-austerity dogmas. They repeatedly force nations back into recession or even depression. It does not matter how many times austerity makes the crisis worsen; the austerians are a one-trick pony. 

I believe that within five years we will see a series of political leaders elected in Europe on anti-austerity planks. The Washington Creditors’ Consensus is a leading cause of financial crises and human misery because of it self-destructive austerity and anti-regulatory principles. Austerity is the leading cause of the election of national leaders who promise that if elected they will stop "submitting" to creditors’ demands that they inflict austerity on their people.

Gov. Rick Scott’s Medicaid Flip: “Progressive” Victory in Privatizing Medicaid

February 21, 2013

by Scott Creighton

It's not about seeing the "progressive" light folks. It's about privatizing the entire Medicaid program here in Florida and giving more and more money to managed healthcare companies who will undercut the healthcare poor people receive. It's big money for the managed care companies and less healthcare for the poor of Florida. A "progressive" victory to be sure.

"Progressives" like Maddow and the Huffington Post are all a dither about Gov. Rick Scott's recent flip-flop on the Medicaid expansion part of the Obamacare project. Gov. Scott ran for office opposing that measure of the plan, not the unconstitutional mandate portion of it by the way. He said that it would increase the deficit monster needlessly so he opposed the plan to have the federal government pay for the increased Medicaid rolls in our little neo-liberal state.

But last night the now billionaire governor and former health company CEO/owner claims he has had a change of heart because "it's the law"

In reality, "the law" states that the states themselves have a choice as too whether or not they implement the plan. That's "the law"

While fake "progressives" like Maddow and the Huffington Post cronies are busy patting themselves on the back for the rightness of their cause being admitted by republican holdouts like Gov. Scott, they are missing the point... probably by design.

"Apparently, Republicans implicitly realize that the way to become more popular in 2013 is to move away from the right and closer to the mainstream -- which necessarily means embracing more progressive views." Maddow Blog

Fact is, the ONLY reason Gov. Scott changed his mind is because hours before his announcement, the federal government agreed to Florida's plan to completely privatize their federally funded Medicaid program.

The New York Times was a little more honest in their explanation as too why Gov. Scott changed his mind:

"Shortly before his announcement, the governor received word from the federal government that it planned to grant Florida the final waiver needed to privatize Medicaid, a process the state initially undertook as a pilot project. Mr. Scott, who is running for re-election next year, has heavily lobbied for the waiver, arguing that Florida could not expand Medicaid without it." New York Times

That's right. Gov. Scott agreed to the plan to expand the Medicaid rolls in Florida just after getting permission from the feds to privatize it.

"At least Rick Scott got his “1115 waiver” – which will let the state shuffle more of its Medicaid recipients into managed care plans. That’s not a highly original vision of reform. The waiver makes it the burden of the health plans to sand down the benefits that these patients receive to match the Medicaid program’s declining fortunes." Forbes

What this does effectively is give the managed healthcare organizations a free hand in denying services to the poor while cashing in on the "big guberment "dollars. How could some like the billionaire governor refuse that sweet a deal.

How sweet is it for the companies? JP Morgan has a note out this morning already estimating big bucks for shareholders of those companies.

JP Morgan is out with a research note this morning that estimates the largesse paid to the legitimate side of the state’s healthcare market.

On the plan side, assuming $500 in incremental revenue at a 2% margin, JP Morgan calculated that earnings per share would grow by $0.12 for Molina Health (NYSE:MOH); $0.11 for Centene Corp (NYSE:CNC); and $0.02 for Aetna (NYSE:AET). Forbes

Neo-liberal Tea Partier Gov. Scott thinks it's "A-OK" to add tons of new debt to the deficit monster, just so long as that cash goes to BIG BUSINESS.

This is the headline, this is the story. But NOTHING from the fake "progressive' left who are so busy patting themselves on the back they are likely to break their own arms in the process. Good thing they're the petty bourgeoisie and have decent insurance coverage . . . for now.

"5 Signs Extreme Wealth Deadens the "Empathy" and "Honesty" Parts of the Brain"

By Paul Buchheit

"The wealthy give plenty of excuses for our outrageously unjust society. They just go to show that extreme wealth can destroy your brain. As we try to grasp the reasoning behind cuts to life-saving programs while billion-dollar incomes and trillion-dollar profits are being made, we must understand that extreme wealth deadens parts of the brain. Empathy and honesty go first. Then rationality, as evidenced by some of the outlandish excuses given by the very rich for their abuses.

1. Excuses for Inequality: Here's what Goldman Sachs adviser Brian Griffiths said about it: "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." U.S. wealth distribution has become so extreme that nearly half of America has, on the average, ZERO WEALTH (debt exceeds assets). As for income, the richest 1% seemed to perform the impossible from 2009 to 2011, capturing MORE THAN 100% of the new income gains (income decreased for the other 99%). As irrational as it might seem to find an excuse for all this, the Heritage Foundation is up to the task, claiming that poor Americans are actually doing quite well with their TVs and air conditioners. Never mind that debt for the poorest quintile of Americans averages $27,000 more than their possessions.

2. Excuses for Bank Fraud: It seems unlikely that anyone would try to justify the lack of punishment for manipulating global interest rates and consorting with drug cartels. But excuses were readily available. Hyperbole made up for incomprehensibility. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned us that without a bailout the world economy would collapse "within 24 hours." Assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer added that with criminal charges "the entire banking system would have been destabilized." Others questioned whether crimes had really been committed, or whether the people in charge even knew what was happening. In any event, bank backers noted, the financial institutions were fined. Four weeks of profits. And a bank CEO said he was "profoundly sorry."

3. Excuses for a Dormant Minimum Wage: Despite the logic and fairness of sharing record profits with low-wage workers who helped to make it all possible, a minimum wage increase has long been rejected because of the claim that it will increase unemployment. This has been refuted again and again and again. Yet well-positioned people persevere, armed with the same excuse. Says Paul Ryan: "I think it's inflationary. I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing jobs from people who are the bottom rung of the economic ladder." The Economic Policy Institute calculated that a minimum wage increase would actually CREATE up to 100,000 jobs by the middle of 2014.

4. Excuses for Not Paying Taxes: Rather than excuses, corporate heads often take the more aggressive denial route with their comments:

- A GE spokesperson: "We are committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations." GE paid 0% from 2008 to 2010.

- An Exxon spokesperson: "..any claim we don't pay taxes is absurd...ExxonMobil is a leading U.S. taxpayer." Exxon paid 2% from 2008 to 2010.

But CEOs still manage to come up with creative excuses. Caterpillar's Doug Oberhelman blamed Illinois. He said the state has "created an environment that is unfriendly to business and investment." Caterpillar paid less than 1% in state income taxes from 2008 to 2010.

As for individual taxes, the wealthy hang onto the foggy (and discredited) notion that a higher tax rate on the rich somehow "hurts the economy." Numerous inventive excuses come with the estate tax, most of them recycled from other tax arguments. The estate tax is accused of slowing economic growth, destroying jobs, suppressing wages, discouraging saving, and promoting wasteful spending. Actual facts, meanwhile, come from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which notes that only the richest 2 in 1,000 estates pay any estate tax, at levels generally less than one-sixth of their values.

Excuses were even available for the special case of Facebook's part-owner Eduardo Saverin, who serendipitously landed Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard, used American resources to make billions, and then revoked his citizenship to avoid paying any tax at all. A Forbes writer called Saverin an "American hero" for quitting on America. The American Thinker said "The U.S. tax code is so oppressive that smart and successful people like Saverin are compelled to renounce citizenship.." Saverin's defenders might not be aware of an OECD report that ranked U.S. taxes among the lowest in the world.

5. Excuses for No Taxes At All: One might feel ashamed paying no sales tax on credit default swaps when low-income mothers pay 10% on winter clothes for the kids. But not the guys on Wall Street. At any mention of a financial transaction tax (FTT) they get testy: It will ruin our liquidity! It will hurt the economy! It's a sin tax! But an FTT is inexpensive to administer, proven successful in other countries, and capable of generating hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Perhaps it's only fair, in conclusion, to excuse the super-rich for their lack of empathy and honesty and rationality. They believe that their upward redistribution of wealth is showing everyone else the value of a little initiative and hard work. With such a spirit of free enterprise we can all aspire to the lofty goals of Charles Koch: "I want my fair share - and that's ALL of it."

- http://www.alternet.org/

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Paul Buchheit is the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

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