Addington and Cheney Implicated Definitively (Hurrah for ACLU!)

I have to admit it. I'm flabbergasted that this reporting has emerged (even if it's only within the blog world for now) within the first quarter of Obama's presidency. After seeing his administration fold/bow to greater realities/follow the true plan (however you describe the manipulations of public policy by the Dems under Rethug pressure since Inauguration Day), you've got to admit that it's like experiencing your very own localized earthquake to read that the data are appearing that define what Gonzo (no, not HST) the Goonzo did at the behest of Dick Cheney's right hand, David Addington (and obviously under the direction of the one true Dick guiding US policy). And thus his quick exit (stage right) many moons ago. Blue Gal has a nice exposition at her blog which is worth your while to grok it in all its fullness. Short. Sweet. Laser-edged.

"Our own" is the Constitution of the United States, and the rule of law, including international law, for which it stands. It's not something Dick Cheney can pay John Yoo to write IN A FUCKING MEMO to conduct illegal TORTURE to support an illegal war.

And how about that ACLU? I've supported this fine organization for over 30 years and forgot until today that I had been holding my breath in wonderment at the progress of their Freedom of Information request. (Emphasis marks were added - Ed.)

NPR is reporting today that significant new information has emerged per an ACLU FOIA request directly tying Alberto Gonzales, in his role at White House Counsel, to the torture of Abu Zubaydah. This confirms ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan's account in last week's Senate hearing that Zubaydah was subject to torture from at least April to June of 2002 (when Soufan left the interrogation team). NPR reports that contractor James Mitchell was in regular contact with the White House in the spring of 2002. One source with knowledge of Zubaydah's interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA's counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration's legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation. A new document is consistent with the source's account. The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah's black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day. "At the very least, it's clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site," says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. "But there's still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process." As Spencer points out, Gonzales wasn't in the DOJ, the CIA, State, or any other agency where he would have had the power to direct the actions of any other agency. He was the president's lawyer, period. And yet, he appears to have been the point of decision-making for torture pre-torture memos. But, obviously, he wasn't acting alone. We have at least a hint of which senior officials (besides Gonzales) were driving this process from a description in Barton Gellman's Angler, in which he describes how legal policy was shaped early on after 9/11, and the individuals involved:

By the afternoon of September 11, Addington had made contact with Timothy Flanigan, the deputy White House counsel. Flanigan's boss, Alberto Gonzales, was stranded in Norfolk . . . . No matter. His deputy was the one Addington wanted . . . . Flanigan was in the Situation Room on September 11. When Addington reached him from the bunker, Flanigan patched in the Justice Department Command Center across town. There he found a young attorney named John C. Yoo.... Responding to a request from Flanigan, Yoo wrote two weeks after the al Qaeda attacks that no law "can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.". . . . . . Addington, working almost invariably through proxies, requested OLC opinions on subjects calculated to elicit broad replies. Addington insisted on strict secrecy, preventing the circulation of drafts to agencies that might challenge Yoo's analysis. With the rulings in hand, the vice president's counsel wrote the regulations, directives, and executive orders that changed events . . . . Gonzales became the interpreter and salesman of new legal theories to Bush, without whose signature nothing big could happen. Thus formed the core legal team that Cheney oversaw, directly and indirectly, in the years after September 11. "Addington, Flanigan, and Gonzales were really a triumverate," recalled Bradford A. Berenson, then an associate White House counsel. "Gonzales had the relationship with the president. Addington had the relationship with the vice president. And Flanigan, as a former OLC head, had the legal expertise. It was a flying wedge of staffers backed up by the president and the vice president, and it doesn't get much better than that." It's easy to see how, using Yoo's "president as king" formulation, the president's lawyer could become the point person for the CIA in authorizing torture, particularly if, as Lawrence Wilkerson and others have alleged, that the vice president was pushing for the use of torture on Zubaydah. This actually isn't the first time Gonzales has been linked to the authorization of torture. Go back to his confirmation hearings for Attorney General when it was reported that Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday . . . . Current and former officials who talked about the memorandum have been provided with firsthand accounts about how it was prepared. Some discussed it in an effort to clear up what they viewed as a murky record in advance of Mr. Gonzales's confirmation hearings. Others spoke of the matter apparently believing that the Justice Department had unfairly taken the blame for the memorandum. A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Tuesday that while Mr. Gonzales personally requested the August opinion, he was only seeking "objective legal advice and did not ask the Office of Legal Counsel to reach any specific conclusion." Right. That revelation led to some tough questioning for Gonzales in his confirmation hearings. During which we now know he committed perjury:

Read the rest here. And try not to gasp too loudly at the ease of the process (and the mostly perfunctory signing off on it that must have occurred by those in the know in the loyal opposition) that led to the sure demise of our constitutional system of government. Suzan P.S. When will the show trials begin? ___________________

We Rule - You Don't. Get Over It! (And Get Ready for the Little Ones)

Heard in the public library. "He knows his Mama don't play."

Of course, to put this in perspective, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which "American national security" — defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth — is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy. Its bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios (perfect for our 24/7 media to pounce on) in which something truly catastrophic is always about to happen to us, and every "situation" is a "crisis." In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, the result can be a feeding frenzy in which doomsday scenarios pour out. Though we don’t recognize it as such, this is a kind of everyday extremism.

Tom Engelhardt, author and founder of TomDispatch relates that what we have here is a failure to communicate (an "Empathy Gap"). As one of the best writers on foreign policy today, he is a source of information that I have trusted for many years without any regrets. I think you also will want to bookmark his site. (Emphasis marks were added - Ed.)

A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: "In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition." And nobody thought it was strange at all. In fact, it’s the sort of thing you can read just about any time when it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It’s just the norm on a planet on which it’s assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called "foreign aid," now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince. Last week as well, in a prime-time news conference, President Obama said of Pakistan: "We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state." To the extent that this statement was commented on, it was praised here for its restraint and good sense. Yet, thought about a moment, what the president actually said went something like this: When it comes to U.S. respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty, this country has more important fish to fry. A look at the historical record indicates that Washington has, in fact, been frying those "fish" for at least the last four decades without particular regard for Pakistani sensibilities. In a week in which the presidents of both Pakistan and Afghanistan have, like two satraps, dutifully trekked to the U.S. capital to be called on the carpet by Obama and his national security team, Washington officials have been issuing one shrill statement after another about what U.S. media reports regularly term the "dire situation" in Pakistan. Of course, to put this in perspective, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which "American national security" — defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth — is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy. Its bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios (perfect for our 24/7 media to pounce on) in which something truly catastrophic is always about to happen to us, and every "situation" is a "crisis." In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, the result can be a feeding frenzy in which doomsday scenarios pour out. Though we don’t recognize it as such, this is a kind of everyday extremism. Being Hysterical in Washington As the recent release of more Justice Department torture memos (which were also, in effect, torture manuals) reminds us, we’ve just passed through eight years of such obvious extremism that the present everyday extremity of Washington and its national security mindset seems almost a relief. We naturally grasp the extremity of the Taliban — those floggings, beheadings, school burnings, bans on music, the medieval attitude toward women’s role in the world — but our own extremity is in no way evident to us. So Obama’s statement on Pakistani sovereignty is reported as the height of sobriety, even when what lies behind it is an expanding "covert" air war and assassination campaign by unmanned aerial drones over the Pakistani tribal lands, which has reportedly killed hundreds of bystanders and helped unsettle the region. Let’s stop here and consider another bit of news that few of us seem to find strange. Mark Lander and Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times offered this tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: "President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive." Imagine that. Almost daily. It’s this kind of atmosphere that naturally produces the bureaucratic equivalent of mass hysteria. In fact, other reports indicate that Obama’s national security team has been convening regular "crisis" meetings and having "nearly nonstop discussions" at the White House, not to mention issuing alarming and alarmist statements of all sorts about the devolving situation in Pakistan, the dangers to Islamabad, our fears for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, and so on. In fact, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy of McClatchy news service quote "a senior U.S. intelligence official" (from among the legion of anonymous officials who populate our nation’s capital) saying: "The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse, and no one has any idea about how to reverse it. I don’t think ‘panic’ is too strong a word to describe the mood here." Now, if it were the economic meltdown, the Chrysler bankruptcy, the bank stress tests, the potential flu pandemic, or any number of close-to-home issues pressing in on the administration, perhaps this would make some sense. But everyday discussions of Pakistan? You know, that offensive in the Lower Dir Valley. That’s near the Buner District. You remember, right next to the Swat Valley and, in case you’re still not completely keyed in, geographically speaking, close to the Malakand Division. I mean, if the Pakistani government were in crisis over the deteriorating situation in Fargo, North Dakota, we would consider it material for late night jokesters. And yet, in the strange American world we inhabit, nobody finds these practically Cuban-Missile-Crisis-style, round-the-clock meetings the least bit strange, not after eight years of post-9/11 national security fears, not after living with worst-case scenarios in which jihadi atomic bombs regularly are imagined going off in American cities. Keep in mind a certain irony here: We essentially know what those crisis meetings will result in. After all, the U.S. government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions — to support Pakistani military dictatorships or, in periods when civilian rule returns, pour yet more money (and support) into the Pakistani military. That military has long been a power unto itself in the country, a state within a state. And in moments like this, part of our weird extremism is that, having spent decades undermining Pakistani democracy, we bemoan its "fragility" in the face of threats and proceed to put even more of our hopes and dollars into its military. (As Strobel and Landy report, "Some U.S. officials say Pakistan’s only hope, and Washington’s, too, at this stage may be the country’s army. That, another senior official acknowledged Wednesday, ‘means another coup.’") In the Bush years, this support added up to at least $10 billion, with next to no idea what the military was doing with it. Another $100 million went into making that country’s nuclear-weapons program, about which there is now such panic, safer from theft or other intrusion, again with next to no idea of what was actually done with those dollars. And now the Obama administration is rushing to create a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund that will be controlled by General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command. If Congress agrees — and in this panic atmosphere, how could it not? — there will be an initial rushed down payment of $400 million to train the Pakistani military, probably outside that country, in counterinsurgency warfare. ("The fund would be similar to those used to train and equip Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and police, Petraeus said.") Doomsday Scenarios Oh, and speaking of extremism, the ur-extreme statement of the last few weeks came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was treated like the most ho-hum news here. In congressional testimony, she insisted that the situation in Pakistan — that Taliban thrust into Swat and the lower Dir Valley — "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world." Umm… Okay, the situation is unnerving — certainly for the Pakistanis, the large majority of whom have not the slightest love for the Taliban, have opted for democracy and against military dictatorship with a passion, and yet strongly oppose the destabilizing American air war in their borderlands. It could even result in the fall of the elected government or of democracy itself — not exactly a rare event in the annals of recent Pakistani history. It’s undoubtedly unnerving as well for the American military, intent on fighting a war in Afghanistan that has spilled disastrously across the open border. (As Pakistan expert Anatol Lieven wrote recently: "The danger to Pakistan is not of a Taliban revolution, but rather of creeping destabilization and terrorism, making any Pakistani help to the U.S. against the Afghan Taliban even less likely than it is at present.") In other words, it’s not a pretty picture. If you happen to live in the tribal borderlands, or Swat, or the Dir Valley, squeezed between the Taliban, the Pakistani Army, whose attacks cause great civilian harm, and those drones cruising overhead, you may be in trouble, if not in flight — or you may simply support the Taliban, as most of the rest of Pakistan does not. If you happen to live in India, you might start working up a sweat over what the future holds on the other side of the border. But all of this is unlikely to be a "mortal threat" even to Islamabad, the Pakistani military, or that nuclear arsenal American national security managers spend so much time fretting about. It is certainly not a "mortal threat to the security and safety of our country." So here’s a little common sense. If Pakistan poses a mortal threat to you in New York, Toledo, or El Paso, well then, get in line. Believe me, it will be a long one and you’ll be toward the back. Despite constant reports that lightly armed Taliban militants are only 60 miles from the "doorstep" of Islamabad, Pakistan’s national capital, and increasing inside-the-Beltway invocations of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran, you’re unlikely to see a Taliban government in Islamabad anytime soon, or probably ever. As one unnamed expert commented recently in the insider Washington newsletter, the Nelson Report, "I find it troubling that we are hyping the ’security situation’ in Pakistan. Pakistan is not being taken over, the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] is. This has been happening since 2004." Mind you, when Vice President Joe Biden said something extreme about flu precautions — don’t take the subway! — the media didn’t hesitate to laugh him off stage. When Hillary Clinton said what should be considered the equivalent about Pakistan, everyone treated it as part of a sober national-security conversation. Of course, when it comes to hysteria, nothing helps like a nuclear arsenal, and in recent weeks nuclear doomsday scenarios have broken out like a swine flu pandemic, even though a victorious Taliban regime in Islamabad with a nuclear arsenal would undoubtedly still find the difficulties of planting and detonating such devices in American cities close to insurmountable. By the way, for all our kindly talk about how the poor Pakistanis just can’t get it together democracy-wise, the U.S. has a terrible record when it comes not just to promoting democracy in that country, but to really giving much of a damn about its people. In fact, not to put too kindly a point on things, Washington has, over the past decades, done few favors for ordinary Pakistanis. Having played our version of the imperial Great Game first vis-a-vis the Soviets and, more recently, a bunch of jihadist warriors, we are now waging a most unpopular and destabilizing air war without mercy in parts of that country, and another deeply unpopular war just across its mountainous, porous border. And this brings us to perhaps the most extreme aspect of the mentality of our national security managers — what might be called their empathy gap. They are, it seems, incapable of seeing the situations they deal through the eyes of those being dealt with. They lack, that is, all empathy, which means, in the end, that they lack understanding. They take it for granted that America’s destiny is to "engineer" the fates of peoples half a world away and are incapable of imagining that the United States could, in almost any situation, be part of the problem, not a major part of its solution. This is surely folly of the first order and, year after year, has only made the "situation" in Pakistan worse. . . . To complete our picture of this over-the-top moment, we have to leave the heated confines of Washington and head for California’s China Lake. That’s where the U.S. military tests some of its advanced weapons. On April 20th, Peter Pae of the Los Angeles Times reported the following: "A 5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread is being quietly tested in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles as the military searches for more deadly and far more precise robotic weapons for modern warfare." This tiny missile called the Spike will someday replace the 100-pound Hellfire missiles mounted on our Predator and more advanced Reaper unmanned aerial drones flying those assassination missions over the tribal lands of Pakistan. New weaponry like this is invariably promoted as being more "precise," and so capable of causing less "collateral damage," than whatever we’ve been using; that is, as an advance for humanity. But in this case, up to 12 of these powerful micro-weapons will someday replace the two Hellfires now capable of being mounted on a Predator, which means a future drone will have to come home far less often as it cruises the badlands of the planet looking for targets. According to Pae, this new development is considered a "milestone" in weaponizing robot planes. Chillingly, he quotes Steven Zaloga, a military analyst with the Teal Group Corporation as saying, "We’re sort of at the same stage as we were in 1914 when we began to arm airplanes." Not only that but the Spike may someday soon be mounted on a new generation of more deadly drones, one of which, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Avenger or Predator C, is already being tested. It will be able to fly 50% faster than the Reaper and at up to 60,000 feet for 20 hours before returning to base. In other words, the decisions to be made in future panicky "crisis" meetings in Washington, when "American security" once again faces a "mortal threat," are already being predetermined in the Mojave desert and elsewhere. In the Pentagon’s eternal arms race of one, a major vote is being cast at China Lake for future Terminator wars. In a crisis mood of desperation, we tend to fall back on what we know. This, too, plays into Washington’s national-security extremism. By now it should be obvious enough that the military approaches to Afghanistan and Pakistan (or the newly merged Af-Pak battlefield) have been in the process of failing for years. Take just our drone wars: they are not only killing significant numbers of civilians, but also destabilizing Pakistan’s tribal lands — military and civilian officials there have long begged us to ground them — and so creating an anti-American atmosphere throughout that country. Recently, former advisor to Gen. David Petraeus and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told Congress: "We need to call off the drones… Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior al-Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism… The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population." Sage advice. If President Obama temporarily suspended the Bush-era drone war, which his administration has recently escalated, it would represent a start down a different path, one not already strewn with the skeletons of failed policies. And while he’s at it — and here’s a little touch of extremism by American standards — why not declare a six-month moratorium on all drone research of any sort, a brief period to reconsider whether we really want to pursue such "solutions" ad infinitum? Why not, in fact, call for a six-month moratorium on all weapons research? A long Pentagon holiday. Militarily, the U.S. is in no danger of losing significant military ground globally by shutting down its R&D machine for a time, while reconsidering whether it actually wants to lead the planet into a future filled with Spikes and Avengers. If, however, nothing else was done, at least the president should order his national security team to calm down, skip those crisis meetings on Pakistan, tamp down the doomsday scenarios, and try to take a few minutes to imagine what the world looks like if you’re not in Washington or the skies over our planet. Are there really no solutions anywhere that don’t need to be engineered first in our national capital? [Note: You could easily drown in the tsunami of recent semi-hysterical pieces about the Pakistan or Af-Pak situation. Fortunately, I have Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Paul Woodward's The War in Context, and Antiwar.com to depend on to help me sort through the crucial reportage of this moment. What would I do without them?]

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thanks to Blue Gal for the link to one of the best antiwar essays I've read recently. Allison Krause's sister, Laurie, has written a totally amazing memorial at her blog about her sister's murder at Kent State which is a subject dear to my heart. I lost my waitressing job in college over the black armband I insisted on wearing after the massacre at Kent State. That night after joining a group who were trying to determine the proper response to the national events, I was recruited to be one of the leaders on the first bus (paid for by the widow of the poet Randall Jarrell) to travel from my NC campus to D.C. to protest this state police action against peacefully marching antiwar students, and to plead with Congressional representatives to stop funding the war in Vietnam. I'll never forget Senator Fritz Hollings (SC) (who was instrumental in desegregating Clemson University (my Father's alma mater) as Governor when others in the South were fighting desperately to remain as all-white institutions) telling me how sorry he was and his personal thoughts about the people who ran the national guards. Fritz later spoke about his "Cambodian moment" that turned him against the war on Iraq. Thank you, Blue Gal. It was wonderful to read Laurie's healing words. In light of the first essay, I thought you might be interested in reading José Miguel Alonso Trabanco's essay in which he attempts to increase our awareness about the "Prospects of a New Cold War" with Russia. And whom do you think would benefit most from that course of action? It's the same group of "the best and the brightest" folks!

"We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one" - Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev In his 1997 book entitled The Grand Chessboard American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that if Russia ever attempted to launch its own defense pact, it would include, "at most", Belarus and Tajikistan . . . . Twelve years later, his list turned out to be incomplete. Moreover, the attempts being made in order to enhance the Russian-led CSTO's actual power projection capabilities and the efforts undertaken to bring the organization's members closer together is something Brzezinski failed to anticipate and it seems that the latest developments concerning CSTO demonstrate that his triumphalism was premature.

Isn't almost all triumphalism? Suzan ____________________

Enjoy Yourself! It's Blogroll Amnesty Day!

As Driftglass (h/t for the truly patriotic graphic!) reports for those of us new to the celebration of Blogroll Amnesty Day:

Blogging is about writing and community. It is the oldest of wines in the newest of skins, so whether you want to sell soup or change the world, you'd better be able to do more than shout "Buy My SOOP!" or "Fuck You!" into a box canyon. You'd better be able to build a clean, compelling narrative about the world as it is, as it should be, and how to get from here to there. You'd better be able to find or make a community that shares your vision. And you'd better be able to stock an armory with vision and vocabulary sufficiently clear and powerful that any fellow traveler can pick them up, point them in the right direction and not blow their toes off. Blogging is about crafting the word and passing the word using a medium seemingly designed by God Almighty to insure maximum inclusion and democratization, which is why when a cartel of some of the Left's most prominent A-List bloggers who had built their name and modest fortunes pushing the highly we're-all-in-this-together message of "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" decided to purge their rolls of all us icky little low-traffic ankle-biters, the general reaction was "WTF!?" It still is. Because if blogging is about writing and community, then the very last thing a real blogger would ever do is "bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain".

Drifty has a dynamite list of smaller blogs at his site (as does Blue Gal), which you should click on over and take a stroll with when you have time. My picks (and I do not guarantee the size of these mighty blogs) are: darkblack distributor Cap NY Rawrahs Urantian Sojourn Comrade Physioprof That's Why So kick back and give a little luv to the links of smaller blogs. Suzan _____________________________

How About Some "Linky Luv?"

Thanks be to Blue Gal for the invitation to share "linky luv" with small(er) blogs on February 3, 2009! As I am perplexed to find blogs smaller than mine, I would like to suggest that you read the superb blogs listed in the blogroll at the bottom of my site. Granted, some are larger than you may crave, but give some luv to the small ones for today. You won't regret it! Luv to all (and thanks for playing)! Suzan ______________________

British Gas, Israel to freeze Hamas out of $4b. gas deal

Please click on the above link (if you're of a mind) and vote for our buddy and one of the finest blasters-of-all-that's-wrong-in-the-world/writers in Blogtopia - D R I F T G L A S S - for Best Individual Blogger!!!! B L U E G A L has been nominated for Best Liberal Blogger, so please head on over to that voting booth and pull the lever for her also. (And now back to our original programming . . . .) This article was published in July of 2007. Issue sound familiar? No wonder they are bombing Gaza to hell and back. (And you thought the timing was coincidental to the changing of the guard?) I'm guessing they just couldn't wait to get their hands on the moolah (or destroy the rest of that small area where the last Palestinians were crouching). Can anyone say "C H E N E Y?" (Some editing was necessary and emphasis marks were inserted - Ed.)

Israel and the British natural gas company BG Group PLC will move ahead with controversial plans to drill for natural gas in the Gaza Marine field, despite Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip last month, The Jerusalem Post learned on Thursday. The two sides have arrived at an "understanding" that will transfer funds intended for the Palestinian Authority's Palestinian Investment Fund into an international bank account, a BG source told The Post. "Both Israel and BG intend that until the PA is able to remove Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, the money will be held in an international bank account," the source said. "Neither side wants the money to go to fund terror-related activities." According to the plan, BG will drill for natural gas 36 kilometers off of the Gaza coast, in an area that was designated as PA territory following the Oslo Accords. The gas will then flow four km underwater in a pipeline 850 meters below the surface to an Ashkelon refinery. The field, which BG purchased in 2000 and to which Hamas now claims rightful ownership, contains 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas worth an estimated $4 billion, with Israel set to become the sole consumer of the resources. "I cannot deny that Israel and BG are making attempts at arranging a payment plan to accommodate the PA [and completely exclude Hamas]," an official in the Infrastructure Ministry said, while adding that along with officials from the Finance Ministry, negotiations are still underway, despite the shaky security situation in Gaza. Ronen Moshe, the Infrastructure Ministry spokesman, claimed, however, that he doesn't know anything about an "understanding" between BG and Israel regarding payments to the PA, but did say that right now the two sides are negotiating over the price that Israel will pay for the gas. Similarly, the spokesman's office in the Finance Ministry claimed no knowledge of any "understanding" between Israel and BG concerning the transfer of funds to an international account, while the Prime Minister's Office said nothing new has happened since the cabinet decided earlier this year to form a negotiating team to meet with BG representatives. According to the original bilateral arrangement between Israel and the PA, some 60 percent of the revenues from the sale of the gas will go to BG; 30% will go to BG's partner in the deal, the British energy company CCC, and 10% of the revenue, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is to be designated for the PA's Palestinian Investment Fund, under the auspices of the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. "However, now that the PA is no longer in control of the Gaza Strip, or the marine area off of its coast, Israel, should it purchase the gas, would no longer be making payments to the PA, but rather would have to pay Hamas," explained the BG source. Israel is obviously opposed to the money ending up in the hands of Hamas, and British law mandates that should a British organization enter into any sort of negotiations with a terrorist group, that organization's leaders will be brought to trial and may be sentenced to jail, the source said. "Therefore, Israel and BG have come to a new understanding of transferring the money into an international account - allowing the deal to go through," he said. The deal appears to exclude Hamas from receiving any of the revenues from the gas sales. Hamas, meanwhile, intends to ask for changes in the agreement with BG, Bloomberg reported two weeks ago. "It is unreasonable that the owner of the gas, Palestine, gets 10% only," Mohammed al-Madhoun, the director of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya's office, told the Palestinian Information Center, a Hamas Web site. "The government has no problem cooperating with the British gas company but only after modifying some points of the 1999 contract." Earlier this week, Finance Ministry Accountant General energy coordinator Uri Shusterman confirmed that a dispute over prices is the official cause for the delay in the signing of a contract with British Gas, and that statement was the first comment by a government official about the negotiations with BG Group. "Despite the disagreement, the government is determined to buy gas from the company's reserves offshore from Gaza, as an alternative to Egyptian gas," said Shusterman. He added that Israel is seeking to diversify its supplies of gas, which it now buys domestically and also from Egypt, in order to ensure a competitive market. He noted that the country planned to buy 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from BG over 12-14 years. "It's critical that Israel come to an agreement now with BG, because the longer it waits to sign, the more likely it is that gas prices are going to rise even further and the less likely it is to begin receiving gas at its desired 2011 target date," said BG. Once Israel and British Gas arrive at an agreement, the project will take three years to complete. "Right now there is nothing in the water, as soon as we can, we need to build a gas rig, get the drill ready and build the pipeline," said the BG official, adding that he hoped the two would finish the negotiations and sign an agreement within the next week. "There are already clear intentions as to how to handle the Hamas situation, and plans have already been worked on regarding the construction of the pipeline, now we just need to finalize a price," he said. Israel began talks with BG in February 2006 and said in May of that year that it expected to buy 1.5 billion cubic meters of gas from BG annually starting in 2009. Soonafter, BG broke off talks with Israel and said that it preferred bringing gas to Egypt to be liquefied and then shipped by tankers to the US, Europe and the Far East. The talks resumed in July 2006 and in April of this year the cabinet voted 21-to-three to grant a negotiating team formal permission to hold talks with BG on the purchase of gas from the Gaza Marine field. Included among the three opposed to the deal was Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said at the time of the vote that he was concerned about the likelihood that revenues transferred to the PA would ultimately end up funding terrorist activities, a concern that was shared by Ariel Sharon when he was prime minister. Lieberman did not return calls for comment on the latest development. Separately, BG is also facing a petition by the Israeli company Yam Thetis, whose natural-gas reserves off the Mediterranean coast are currently the country's sole source of the fuel. The company is asking a court to block the government's plan to buy the gas that BG plans to drill.

Suzan _________________

Why Wouldn't He Be "So Gracious," What With All His Crimes Overlooked and/or Forgiven and Osama Buried and Forgotten?

As Bushy slowly (can you believe it?) walks away, you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. Could he be more of a joke - a farce actually - tragic certainly for the people (like the murdered innocents in Gaza) who bear the brunt of the consequences of his actions, his rule, but sharing nothing of what defines a true tragedy (and it has been a real tragedy without end so far for the rest of the world, and certainly the financial world, as well) - but as for him - just a joke? We used to be told that as a society we lock up criminals so they can't do any more damage - unless they happen to come fully protected (in our now mafia-ridden political world) and full of boyish charm as we've learned lately. Ask anyone connected to the in-group in D.C., and you will be told what a great guy he is personally, and how it was too bad but he only did what he thought was "right." Then you remember the video you saw on TV of Obama shaking his hand among a group comprising the other ex-Presidents, and all of them laughing and having a grand time on camera for the audience's enjoyment. How did the very people who caused so many new prisons (not really needed for the admittedly very large previously created criminal class) to be built (many by Halliburton/KBR) miss this simple irony (if this were the plan all along as it seems now)? The rest of us viewing this clownfest on TV every evening until January 20, 2009, are not missing anything. The following tale of the imminent collapse of the American Empire has many messages, subliminal and otherwise. (I apologize for the length of it, but it's actually about twice that length when you click on the link. You won't enjoy reading it one bit, but you will be well remunerated intellectually.) One unpleasant message that I clearly remember coming through pretty early in this historic scandal is the one encapsulated in the expression on Ken Lay's wife's face when she whined on TV about losing a couple of their houses as penance for being careless (or ignorant) about the fate of her husband's company (Enron) and the savings of his employees. To me she didn't really seem that concerned, only a little bit piqued. My guess at the time was that she wasn't more worried because her other houses were overseas. Today, it seems like a sure bet. After hearing finally on the "Evening News" that Obama was overwhelmingly gratified about Bushy's "so gracious" demeanor during his visit to the White House (where he got to rub elbows with the other Bushy one and be photographed smiling broadly between the two), all I could think was "Well, why wouldn't he be quite open and generous to a fault to be allowed to be "gracious" to his successor (although thinking of the word "grace" associated with this thug made me gag)? After all, he's leaving completely unscathed by any type of accounting (let alone the legally required impeachment and trial for his admitted crimes) for his bloody reign, and as a special Bushy bonus, he even gets to continue playing the role of President to the dead end of his two-term rule as if he never knew anything about any criminality "going on here" at all. (For your sake, don't miss the top chart showing the true credit crisis at the time of the first $750 billion request. Do you see a historically threatening credit crisis?) (More later on this and other ongoing criminal conspiracies.) Blue Gal provided some spot-on reporting yesterday that a rightwingnut (obviously a FOX News fan) was beating Driftglass in the vote totals for Best Individual Blogger for the 2008 Weblog Awards, and that her soon-to-be-famous quote on that day's chicken scratches was that she was going to miss Boosh and that even people on the left should be impressed at his generosity to Obama during the transition. That they should deal with it.

"I. Love. Boosh. Deal with it. I think we’ll miss him, in many ways, when he departs and even you folks on the left should be somewhat impressed (if you can be at all generous) at the predictably classy, gentlemanly way he is having his administration assist in the transition to Obama."

I would like to "deal with it" by having an impeachment proceeding and trial before the following puts a real crimp in my (life)style (emphasis marks and some editing were added - Ed.):

Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what? To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing. In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer. In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was. Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud. What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasn’t just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many others doubted Mr. Madoff’s profits or assumed he was front-running his customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted that even some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have suspected that they were the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasn’t all that hard to see that the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end. The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many. A lot has been said and written, for instance, about the corrupting effects on Wall Street of gigantic bonuses. What happened inside the major Wall Street firms, though, was more deeply unsettling than greedy people lusting for big checks: leaders of public corporations, especially financial corporations, are as good as required to lead for the short term. Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. Not immediately, perhaps. But a few quarters of earnings that lagged behind those of every other Wall Street firm would invite outrage from subordinates, who would flee for other, less responsible firms, and from shareholders, who would call for his resignation. Eventually he’d be replaced by someone willing to make money from the credit bubble. Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest. . . . These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it. This is a subject that might be profitably explored in Washington. There are many questions an enterprising United States senator might want to ask the credit-rating agencies. Here is one: Why did you allow MBIA to keep its triple-A rating for so long? In 1990 MBIA was in the relatively simple business of insuring municipal bonds. It had $931 million in equity and only $200 million of debt — and a plausible triple-A rating. By 2006 MBIA had plunged into the much riskier business of guaranteeing collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s. But by then it had $7.2 billion in equity against an astounding $26.2 billion in debt. That is, even as it insured ever-greater risks in its business, it also took greater risks on its balance sheet. Yet the rating agencies didn’t so much as blink. On Wall Street the problem was hardly a secret: many people understood that MBIA didn’t deserve to be rated triple-A. As far back as 2002, a hedge fund called Gotham Partners published a persuasive report, widely circulated, entitled: “Is MBIA Triple A?” (The answer was obviously no.) At the same time, almost everyone believed that the rating agencies would never downgrade MBIA, because doing so was not in their short-term financial interest. A downgrade of MBIA would force the rating agencies to go through the costly and cumbersome process of re-rating tens of thousands of credits that bore triple-A ratings simply by virtue of MBIA’s guarantee. It would stick a wrench in the machine that enriched them. (In June, finally, the rating agencies downgraded MBIA, after MBIA’s failure became such an open secret that nobody any longer cared about its formal credit rating.) The S.E.C. now promises modest new measures to contain the damage that the rating agencies can do — measures that fail to address the central problem: that the raters are paid by the issuers. But this should come as no surprise, for the S.E.C. itself is plagued by similarly wacky incentives. Indeed, one of the great social benefits of the Madoff scandal may be to finally reveal the S.E.C. for what it has become. Created to protect investors from financial predators, the commission has somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors. (The task it has performed most diligently during this crisis has been to question, intimidate and impose rules on short-sellers — the only market players who have a financial incentive to expose fraud and abuse.) The instinct to avoid short-term political heat is part of the problem; anything the S.E.C. does to roil the markets, or reduce the share price of any given company, also roils the careers of the people who run the S.E.C. Thus it seldom penalizes serious corporate and management malfeasance — out of some misguided notion that to do so would cause stock prices to fall, shareholders to suffer and confidence to be undermined. Preserving confidence, even when that confidence is false, has been near the top of the S.E.C.’s agenda. IT’S not hard to see why the S.E.C. behaves as it does. If you work for the enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it. The commission’s most recent director of enforcement is the general counsel at JPMorgan Chase; the enforcement chief before him became general counsel at Deutsche Bank; and one of his predecessors became a managing director for Credit Suisse before moving on to Morgan Stanley. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the whole point of landing the job as the S.E.C.’s director of enforcement is to position oneself for the better paying one on Wall Street. At the back of the version of Harry Markopolos’s brave paper currently making the rounds is a copy of an e-mail message, dated April 2, 2008, from Mr. Markopolos to Jonathan S. Sokobin. Mr. Sokobin was then the new head of the commission’s office of risk assessment, a job that had been vacant for more than a year after its previous occupant had left to — you guessed it — take a higher-paying job on Wall Street. At any rate, Mr. Markopolos clearly hoped that a new face might mean a new ear — one that might be receptive to the truth. He phoned Mr. Sokobin and then sent him his paper. “Attached is a submission I’ve made to the S.E.C. three times in Boston,” he wrote. “Each time Boston sent this to New York. Meagan Cheung, branch chief, in New York actually investigated this but with no result that I am aware of. In my conversations with her, I did not believe that she had the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violations.” How does this happen? How can the person in charge of assessing Wall Street firms not have the tools to understand them? Is the S.E.C. that inept? Perhaps, but the problem inside the commission is far worse — because inept people can be replaced. The problem is systemic. The new director of risk assessment was no more likely to grasp the risk of Bernard Madoff than the old director of risk assessment because the new guy’s thoughts and beliefs were guided by the same incentives: the need to curry favor with the politically influential and the desire to keep sweet the Wall Street elite. And here’s the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us here in the first place. Say what you will about our government’s approach to the financial crisis, you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have pleased anyone except a handful of financiers. When Bear Stearns failed, the government induced JPMorgan Chase to buy it by offering a knockdown price and guaranteeing Bear Stearns’s shakiest assets. Bear Stearns bondholders were made whole and its stockholders lost most of their money. Then came the collapse of the government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both promptly nationalized. Management was replaced, shareholders badly diluted, creditors left intact but with some uncertainty. Next came Lehman Brothers, which was, of course, allowed to go bankrupt. At first, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve claimed they had allowed Lehman to fail in order to signal that recklessly managed Wall Street firms did not all come with government guarantees; but then, when chaos ensued, and people started saying that letting Lehman fail was a dumb thing to have done, they changed their story and claimed they lacked the legal authority to rescue the firm. But then a few days later A.I.G. failed, or tried to, yet was given the gift of life with enormous government loans. Washington Mutual and Wachovia promptly followed: the first was unceremoniously seized by the Treasury, wiping out both its creditors and shareholders; the second was batted around for a bit. Initially, the Treasury tried to persuade Citigroup to buy it — again at a knockdown price and with a guarantee of the bad assets (the Bear Stearns model). Eventually, Wachovia went to Wells Fargo, after the Internal Revenue Service jumped in and sweetened the pot with a tax subsidy. In the middle of all this, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. persuaded Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy distressed assets from banks — telling the senators and representatives that if they didn’t give him the money the stock market would collapse. Once handed the money, he abandoned his promised strategy, and instead of buying assets at market prices, began to overpay for preferred stocks in the banks themselves. Which is to say that he essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and a few others unnaturally selected for survival. The stock market fell anyway. It’s hard to know what Mr. Paulson was thinking as he never really had to explain himself, at least not in public. But the general idea appears to be that if you give the banks capital they will in turn use it to make loans in order to stimulate the economy. Never mind that if you want banks to make smart, prudent loans, you probably shouldn’t give money to bankers who sunk themselves by making a lot of stupid, imprudent ones. If you want banks to re-lend the money, you need to provide them not with preferred stock, which is essentially a loan, but with tangible common equity — so that they might write off their losses, resolve their troubled assets and then begin to make new loans, something they won’t be able to do until they’re confident in their own balance sheets. But as it happened, the banks took the taxpayer money and just sat on it. . . . There are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail. Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and, for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely subside. This is more plausible than it may sound. Sweden, of all places, did it successfully in 1992. And remember, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have already accepted, on behalf of the taxpayer, just about all of the downside risk of owning the bigger financial firms. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve would both no doubt argue that if you don’t prop up these banks you risk an enormous credit contraction — if they aren’t in business who will be left to lend money? But something like the reverse seems more true: propping up failed banks and extending them huge amounts of credit has made business more difficult for the people and companies that had nothing to do with creating the mess. Perfectly solvent companies are being squeezed out of business by their creditors precisely because they are not in the Treasury’s fold. With so much lending effectively federally guaranteed, lenders are fleeing anything that is not. Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.” In its latest push to compel confidence, for instance, the authorities are placing enormous pressure on the Financial Accounting Standards Board to suspend “mark-to-market” accounting. Basically, this means that the banks will not have to account for the actual value of the assets on their books but can claim instead that they are worth whatever they paid for them. This will have the double effect of reducing transparency and increasing self-delusion (gorge yourself for months, but refuse to step on a scale, and maybe no one will realize you gained weight). And it will fool no one. When you shout at people “be confident,” you shouldn’t expect them to be anything but terrified. If we are going to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, it makes more sense to focus less on the failed institutions at the top of the financial system and more on the individuals at the bottom. Instead of buying dodgy assets and guaranteeing deals that should never have been made in the first place, we should use our money to A) repair the social safety net, now badly rent in ways that cause perfectly rational people to be terrified; and B) transform the bailout of the banks into a rescue of homeowners. We should begin by breaking the cycle of deteriorating housing values and resulting foreclosures. Many homeowners realize that it doesn’t make sense to make payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of their house. As many as 20 million families face the decision of whether to make the payments or turn in the keys. Congress seems to have understood this problem, which is why last year it created a program under the Federal Housing Authority to issue homeowners new government loans based on the current appraised value of their homes. And yet the program, called Hope Now, seems to have become one more excellent example of the unhappy political influence of Wall Street. As it now stands, banks must initiate any new loan; and they are loath to do so because it requires them to recognize an immediate loss. They prefer to “work with borrowers” through loan modifications and payment plans that present fewer accounting and earnings problems but fail to resolve and, thereby, prolong the underlying issues. It appears that the banking lobby also somehow inserted into the law the dubious requirement that troubled homeowners repay all home equity loans before qualifying. The result: very few loans will be issued through this program.

And there's a lot more to this tale that I'm betting against all hope to the contrary that our new administration is not going to take on so readily either due to the campaign contributions that flowed in from these usual suspects, or just a lack of desire to be the party holding up the culprits for national edification and the ensuing legal consequences. Read the rest of this sorry story about what's happened to your financial and employment future here. Suzan __________________________