The Week the IAEA Applied a Double Standard

By: Gareth Porter – Truthout

In 2004, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed that a member state had violated its Safeguards Agreement by carrying out covert uranium conversion and enrichment activities and plutonium experiments for more than two decades. The nature of certain of those enrichment activities, moreover, raised legitimate suspicions of interest in a nuclear weapons program.

The state was found to have lied to the IAEA even when it began investigating these suspicious activities, claiming that its laser enrichment research did not involve any use of nuclear material.

If that sounds like a description of Iran's troubled relationship with the IAEA up to 2004, that's because it bears striking resemblance to it. In fact, however, it is a description of the deception of the IAEA by the government of South Korea.

There was just one major difference between the South Korean and Iranian cases: Iran never enriched uranium at a level that could only represent an interest in nuclear weapons, but South Korea did.

Yet the IAEA treated Iran as a state to be investigated indefinitely, after failing to give South Korea even a slap on the wrist.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the two cases were the subject of IAEA reports issued within the same week in November 2004.

Three months before the report on its nuclear activities was published, South Korea admitted doing everything in violation of its Safeguards Agreement that Iran was found to have done up to 2003.

In the early 1980's, South Korea had carried out uranium conversion in a facility that was kept secret from the IAEA. It had also secretly extracted plutonium from a hot cell, and had carried out at least 10 covert uranium enrichment experiments from 1993 through 2000 using undeclared natural uranium metal.

South Korea had used 3.5 kg of natural uranium metal for its unreported enrichment experiments; Iran had used 8.0 kg of natural uranium for the same kind of experiments.

But by far the most important finding by the IAEA was that, during a series of covert experiments in uranium enrichment using atomic vapor laser isolate separation (AVLIS) in 2000, Korean scientists enriched the uranium to 77 percent. South Korea finally admitted that experiment in its August 2004 declaration to the IAEA.

"Not only did they have an undeclared uranium-enrichment program, but they were actually making something close to bomb-grade, so you have to conclude someone wanted to develop a capability to make nuclear weapons," said David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security after the Korean violations were revealed.

Despite covert activities that could only be reasonably interpreted as evidence of an intention to develop nuclear weapons, however, Seoul was given what amounted to a free pass. .

After its August 2004 confidential admission to its covert activities, South Korea mounted an aggressive diplomatic offensive, aimed at avoiding any legal consequences.

First, South Korean officials put pressure on IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei not even to disclose the enrichment in his report to the Governing Board. The South Koreans threatened to undermine El Baradei's reelection bid, according to a Nov. 25, 2004 Washington Post story.

El Baradei was well aware that South Korea's ally, the George W. Bush administration, was seeking to oust El Baradei, because of his refusal to conform to U.S. policies toward Iraq and Iran.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration had made no secret of the fact it wanted the IAEA Board of Governors to call for Iran to be reported to the U.N. Security Council.

U.S. officials understood that the South Korean covert enrichment and other violations were, if anything, worse than those of Iran. At least some officials were prepared to support a resolution in the IAEA Governing Board to send Korea's case to the Security Council in order to establish a precedent that could then be applied to Iran, according to the Post story.

But the British, French and Germans were negotiating with Iran on an agreement under which Tehran would maintain its suspension of uranium enrichment, and they were threatening to send the Iranian file to the Security Council if Iran did not agree.

Given those negotiations, El Baradei felt no need to write a report that would be the basis of a resolution from the IAEA Board of Governors in late November 2004 to refer the South Korean case to the U.N. Security Council.

El Baradei's Nov. 11, 2004 report on South Korea confirmed that enrichment had gone as high as 77 percent but did not raise the obvious question of whether its covert nuclear activities had been military-related.

It recounted without comment the South Korean authorities' explanation that both the plutonium and uranium enrichment experiments had been "performed without the knowledge or authorization of the Government".

Given the fact that South Korea had admitted that the covert uranium
enrichment had been carried out by no less than 14 government scientists, an IAEA investigation was obviously in order. But the report gave no hint that there was any need to find out who had authorized it and why.

In effect, El Baradei's report on South Korea effectively eliminated the issue from the agency's agenda.

Three days after the report, Iran reached agreement with the Europeans on a
voluntary suspension of enrichment and more negotiations. Since there was no chance of getting the Iranian case referred to the U.N. Security Council,
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the South Koreans at a meeting in Chile
that the United States was now prepared to "accept Seoul's explanation" for
its covert enrichment to bomb-grade levels.

That clearly signaled that the United States had decided against a resolution to send the South Korean case to the Security Council after the European agreement with Iran.

The subject of South Korea's violations of its Safeguards Agreement was
never raised again at an IAEA meeting. In 2007, an IAEA Safeguards report
said the agency was "able to clarify all issues relating to past undeclared
activities".

It offered no explanation for the enrichment to bomb-grade levels and the
obvious official falsehoods surrounding the activities, or for its own
acquiescence in it.

In contrast to El Baradei's lack of curiosity about the obviously suspect
official South Korean explanations for its bomb-grade enrichment, his report
on Iran, issued four days later, concluded that it would "take longer than
in normal circumstances" to "conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear
materials or activities in Iran".

The report suggested the IAEA would continue to pursue what it called "open source reports relating to dual use equipment and materials" in Iran. That meant that any technology, not matter how innocent, would now be treated as evidence of an Iranian covert nuclear weapons program.

The double standard of treatment of the South Korean and Iranian cases implied that the United States had hard intelligence that Iran had exhibited an interest in nuclear weapons, whereas South Korea had not.

However, the closest thing to such evidence in U.S. possession was a set of documents of uncertain provenance and authenticity.
On the other hand, nuclear physicists working in the Korean nuclear program, who had been recruited by the CIA, had reported in the mid-1970's that South Korea was carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The stark contrast between the treatment of the Iranian and South Korean cases by the IAEA Secretariat and its Board of Governors is the most dramatic evidence of a politically motivated nuclear double standard practiced by the agency and its Governing Board, dominated by the United States.

And as the episode showed, that double standard essentially reflected the political-military interests of the U.S. government.

Showdown: Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Take on FED in House Committee Today

By: Art Levine – Truthout Report

The fight by financial reformers to hold the secretive Federal Reserve accountable for its role in allowing Wall Street and big banks to spiral out of control - and then keeping secret how it bailed them out - faces its first major test today. The House Financial Services Committee will consider two competing amendments on auditing the Fed.

They can't come too soon. Earlier this week, for instance, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) even filed a lawsuit over the Fed's continuing refusal to disclose the financial institutions that have received federal funds in the last six months - and the terms, if any, of federal assistance.

One audit proposal offered by Reps. Ron Paul and Alan Grayson has garnered the backing of the leading reform coalition, the 200-group Americans for Financial Reform and over 300 House co-sponsors for an earlier version. The amendment by the libertarian Republican Ron Paul and Rep. Grayson demands unprecedented auditing of the Fed's actions and public exposure of which financial institutions get its money. As Heather Booth, the director of Americans for Financial Reform, puts it, "We need an audit of the Fed to examine what was the mismanagement of the economy before the meltdown, to look at the role of Chairman Benrnanke - and to see who has gotten what from the Fed and what they're doing with it."

She adds, "We know that lending isn't happening and bonuses continue to go up. So what's happened to the money?" Indeed, the $700 billion Wall Street bailout engineered by the Fed and Treasury Department is only a relatively small portion of $17.5 trillion in guarantees, loans and giveaways, as compiled from government documents by Nomi Prins, the investigative author of It Takes A Pillage.

The other Fed audit bill, offered by the liberal North Carolina Democrat Mel Watt (generally considered a "friend" of reform by Booth), considerably narrows the scope of any Fed decisions the General Accountability Office (GAO) could review. It also delays for at least a year disclosures of which financial institutions have received funds.

The reason for the more limited oversight in the Watt amendment is to protect the Fed's much-vaunted independence and avoid the dangers of Congressional politicization, Congressional supporters say. "It's already politicized," Booth counters. "The banks run it." Indeed, even the audit proposals under consideration don't change the governance of the Fed to make it more democratic and accountable.

The Watt amendment has been denounced by some watchdog groups, liberal economists and the progressive blogosphere as a sell-out designed to weaken oversight and draw votes from the tougher Paulson-Grayson amendment.
Dean Baker, the liberal economist, sarcastically declared in a column at TPM Cafe:

Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) is out to protect the independence of the Fed from the risk of an intrusive audit from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The risk comes in the form of a bill initiated by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson that calls for an audit of the Fed. The bill, which now has more than 300 cosponsors, would allow Congress to find out to whom the Fed lent more than $2 trillion through its special lending facilities, and under what terms. Congress would also be able to find out which countries were allowed to take advantage of dollar swaps at the peak of the financial crisis last fall.

Allowing our elected representatives to know what our central bank (the Fed) is doing with our money might seem reasonable, but not to Mr. Watt. He has proposed an alternative which would keep this information secret. According to Mr. Watt, the prospect of a full GAO audit poses a huge risk to the Fed's independent conduct of monetary policy.

It is not clear how a GAO audit precludes Fed independence, but we should know exactly what we could be putting at risk...
We would not be sitting here in the wreckage of an $8 trillion housing bubble, with 10.2 percent unemployment and 2 million foreclosures a year, without the Fed's independent monetary policy. We would not have seen the projections of debt soar by $6 trillion at the end of the next decade without the Fed's independent monetary policy.

Watt, in turn, has circulated a letter to colleagues under the headline "Increase the Transparency of the Federal Reserve," claiming, "While my amendment will certainly fall short of demands by those intent on destroying the independence (if not the existence) of the Fed, the critics of my amendment will have to concede... that my amendment will provide transparency of the Fed's financial operations that will be completely unprecedented."

But critics don't concede that, as the Huffington Post first reported, asserting that his amendment has exemptions that would limit the ability to examine such vital Fed functions as loans and liquidity arrangements. Under the Watt amendment, auditors would even be barred from examining such loans' impact on "reserves, the balance sheet or financial condition of a Federal reserve bank or the Federal Reserve System."

Moreover, the case for the Paul-Grayson amendment was underscored in a letter sent to the committee members on Wednesday by Americans for Financial Reform, signed by such leading member groups as the AFL-CIO and Public Citizen. "This audit would shed light on questions the Fed has so far refused to answer, including the names of financial institutions that have received special loans and the conditions under which those loans were made," the supporters said.

But Paul's backers also note the revisions that have been made to calm the concerns of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that too much internal decision-making would be exposed, although he also rejects the whole notion of any meaningful auditing oversight. "To shield policy discussions from political influence, the amendment exempts transcripts or minutes of meetings of the Board of Governors or the Federal Open Market Committee. It also provides for delayed release of audit information dealing with individual market actions," the reformers said.

Even so, Bernanke's attitude towards disclosing virtually anything the Fed does has essentially been to tell Congress to buzz off. Bernanke had told PBS, " "I don't think the American people want Congress running monetary policy." Maybe not, but they certainly want someone to look at the Fed's books as populist rage at the failures and waste of the bailout boondoggle have skyrocketed.

Indeed, the Senate and House are at odds over how much power to give the controversial Fed. The original Obama administration and Barney Frank reform proposals have aimed to strengthen the general regulatory role of the Fed (with the exception of supporting an independent consumer protection agency), while the Senate reform proposals under Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), have gone in the opposite direction. They seek to strip the Fed of much of its oversight role over banks and replace that function with a new super-agency.

All this comes at a time when the House Financial Services Committee is poised to finish its work on a package of reforms that could change the oversight of the financial industry. These range from loophole-laden derivatives reform to yesterday's backing of the power to break up firms that are "too big to fail" to a new consumer financial protection agency. Progressives critics contend, though, that many of the bills still haven't gone far enough, although liberals hailed the passage of the break-up power granted yesterday.

Previously, breaking up the big financial institutions if needed, favored by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, was just another item on the wish list of progressive bloggers and columnists such as Paul Krugman. It still doesn't mean that legislators are bringing back the repealed Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial banking and riskier investment divisions. Yet even a few months ago, with the Obama administration and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner opposing measures to preemptively shut down dangerous financial giants, few imagined we'd be reading stories like this in today's newspapers (via the Los Angeles Times):

Reporting from Washington - A House committee voted Wednesday to give the government extraordinary new power to break up large financial firms that pose a potential risk to the economy.

The proposal by Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) would allow regulators to break up such big companies before their failure becomes imminent. It goes beyond the powers requested by the Obama administration to seize large firms on the brink of failure should their collapse threaten to damage the wider financial system.

"I recognize this is extraordinary power. Hopefully it will never have to be used," Kanjorski said. It would be used only if other regulatory measures did not reduce the potential threat of "huge, megalopolis-like" companies failing, he said.
A new council of financial regulators would have authority to dismantle large operations. Under the plan, the forced divestiture of assets worth more than $10 billion could not take place without the Treasury secretary's approval. The forced divestiture of more than $100 billion would require consultation with the president.
The House Financial Services Committee voted 38 to 29 to add Kanjorski's proposal to legislation that would grant federal regulators so-called resolution authority to dissolve large financial firms teetering near bankruptcy.

If passed into law, the measure would render moot the controversy over the concept that some companies are too big to fail.

And, strikingly, with pressure from tough-minded regulators such as Sheila Bair of the FDIC and liberal advocacy groups, even the bills that contain industry-friendly loopholes have been strengthened in several ways in recent weeks. "Organizing works," says Heather Booth. These improvements include closing a loophole exempting foreign-traded derivatives from oversight. Moreover, Truthout has learned, an amendment being backed by Barney Frank will be introduced today that would force major financial institutions to pay up front a total capped at $200 billion for a "resolution authority," likely managed by the FDIC, to shut down huge failed companies.

That latter major pay-ahead reform is a direct result of the case made by Bair in toughening the resolution authority, so the federal government wouldn't have to essentially go begging to Wall Street firms to pay for winding down a competitor after it failed. As Bair said in testimony in October:
To be credible, a resolution process for systemically significant institutions must have the funds necessary to accomplish the resolution. It is important that funding for this resolution process be provided by the set of potentially systemically significant financial firms, rather than by the taxpayer. To that end, Congress should establish a Financial Company Resolution Fund (FCRF) that is pre-funded by levies on larger financial firms -- those with assets of at least $10 billion.
The systemic resolution entity should have the authorities needed to manage this resolution fund...We believe that a pre-funded FCRF has significant advantages over an ex post funded system... it avoids the pro-cyclical nature of requiring repayment after a systemic crisis.

As a result of such advocacy, the scope of proposed reforms is striking, though long overdue and hardly yet law in the face of strong industry opposition.

The biggest remaining problem, reformers say, is what they see as the weak, but improving, House approach so far to monitoring derivatives such as the shady "credit default swaps" - the bets that blew up Wall Street.

Even worse, The Nation magazine's William Greider has reported, key portions of the House Financial Services Committee's derivatives bill exempting certain businesses and trades from being monitored were apparently written directly by industry, although the hard evidence for that still isn't clear. Some House staffers also challenge that notion of industry influence: "We could give two shits what the big banks say," one aide says.

Neverthless, The Washington Post, even if a bit breathlessly, reports today on the ambitious proposals moving through Congress:As lawmakers on Capitol Hill inch closer toward overhauling the nation's fractured financial regulatory system, each hour of debate, each tweak of legal language, each tedious roll call carries the potential to generate colossal changes in the relationship between Washington and Wall Street.

One proposal, spearheaded by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) would usher in unprecedented scrutiny of the Federal Reserve by allowing auditors to examine every aspect of the central bank's actions. That measure could come to a vote in the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday, though its prospects for success remain uncertain.

Another provision, pushed by Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.), would empower federal regulators to dismantle financial firms before they grow so large that their failure could endanger the entire financial system -- even if those firms appear to be healthy and well-capitalized.

The proposals are among scores of ideas floated on bill after bill in recent months. Thus far, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has steered his version of financial reform through that legislative minefield, navigating past Republican opposition, unrelenting pressure from industry lobbyists and consumer advocates, and occasional discord among some Democrats -- all while trying to emerge with a bill that can both pass the entire House and still resemble the original blueprint.

He is moving closer to that goal.

Frank's committee so far has approved legislation to create a new agency to oversee mortgages, credit cards and other loans to consumers, as well as measures to oversee the largely unregulated derivatives market, improve investor protections and impose stricter rules on credit-ratings agencies.

Each issue required noteworthy concessions, always with the endgame in mind.
Yet that endgame won't be good enough if the final result is reform in name only. So while mainstream advocacy groups continue to press for tougher oversight, they also don't want to alienate potential Congressional supporters by denouncing legislators too harshly. Such pragmatic concerns don't worry critics who are still troubled by the shape of emerging legislation. As Greider said in a new column attacking the hypocricy of Goldman Sachs:

Goldman and the other big dogs of Wall Street are afflicted with the stink of greed, having harvested swollen fortunes from the calamity they caused for the rest of the country. [CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd] Blankfein made it worse by recently telling a British interviewer that, when you consider all the good things Goldman Sachs does for the economy, "we're doing God's work." God evidently rewards such good works up-front. Goldman executives expect to collect more than $20 billion in bonuses at year's end. The rest of the economy is still waiting for its reward.

To soften the sting, Blankfein announced the firm will devote $500 million to assist small businesses, either as loans or grants to help the little guys learn better managerial skills. More to the point, Blankfein spoke the words that financial titans have avoided. "I apologize." The firm, he acknowledged, did some bad stuff, though he did not say what...

Wall Street is belatedly responding to its public relations problem. But this is really a political problem because public anger is gathering force and focus and scaring the bejeesus out of Washington pols...

If Wall Street wants really to win back public respect, there is a more substantial gift it can make that does not involve money. Goldman Sachs and the other banking behemoths can take their foot off the Congress and free servile politicians to enact true financial reforms. Call off your lobbyists, let democracy function in behalf of the public interest, not yours.

Mass Shooting Indicates Breakdown of Military

By: Dahr Jamail - Truthout

At approximately 1:30 p.m. CST Nov. 5th, 2009, a soldier went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, killing 12 people and wounding at least 31 others, according to base commander Lieutenant-General Bob Cone.

Truthout spoke with an Army Specialist who is an active-duty Iraq war veteran currently stationed at the base. The soldier spoke on condition of anonymity since the base is now on “lockdown,” and all “non-authorized” military personnel on the base have been ordered not to speak to the press.

“A soldier entered the ‘Soldier Readiness Center (SRC)’ with two handguns and opened fire,” the soldier, who is currently getting treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) explained. “That facility is where you go just before you deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.”

The soldier named the gunman as Major Malik Nadal Hasan, and said he was about 40 years old. According to the soldier, Hasan was a member of the base’s Medical Evaluation Board, and worked there as a counselor.

At a news conference Thursday evening, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone said Maj. Hasan, who was shot four times, is alive and in stable condition at a nearby hospital where he is being guarded by military personnel.

“I can confirm Major Hasan was the gunman, and I actually saw him this morning,” the soldier explained. “I was over in the area doing some paperwork, and saw him at the facility. He seemed fine to me, and I spoke with one of my friends who had an appointment with him this morning. They said Major Hasan seemed OK to them too.”

The soldier believes that at least one Killeen Police Department officer was killed before the gunman was shot.

Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is the largest US military base in the world and contains up to 50,000 soldiers. It is one of the most heavily deployed bases to both Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the shooter himself was facing an impending deployment to Iraq.

The soldier says that the mood on the base is “very grim,” and that even before this incident, troop morale has been very low.

“I’d say it’s at an all-time low - mostly because of Afghanistan now,” he explained. “Nobody knows why we are at either place, and I believe the troops need to know why they are there, or we should pull out, and this is a unanimous feeling, even for folks who are pro-war.”

In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon that the shootings occurred in a place where “individuals were seeking help.”

“It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress,” Admiral Mullen said. “It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments.”

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones; stress that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other forms of self-destructive violent behavior as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude take place in Iraq.

Prior to the May incident, the last reported incident of this kind happened in 2005, when an Army captain and lieutenant were killed when an anti-personnel mine detonated in the window of their room at a US base in Tikrit. In that case, National Guard Staff Sgt. Alberto Martinez was acquitted.

The shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades does not come as a surprise when we consider that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008 Titled, “The Battle Within”, more than “43,000 service members -- two-thirds of them in the Army or Army Reserve -- were classified as nondeployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed” to Iraq.

Mark Thompson also has reported in Time magazine, “Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of US troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a "horrific outburst of violence". He added, "It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an army base on American soil."

Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had firsthand experience with the SRFC at Fort Hood, where he too was based.

“I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do that process is to deploy,” Agosto explained, speaking to Truthout near Fort Hood . “So the shooter clearly intended to stop people from deploying.”

Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan.

“I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I didn’t enter the building, but I didn’t go in because I was refusing the process,” Agosto continued. “It’s a pretty important place in my life, so it’s interesting to me that this happened there.”

Protesters Take their Rage to Wall Street

Enraged by the prospect of $700 billion of their taxes going to speculators, hundreds of protesters hit Wall Street on Thursday.

Enraged by the prospect of $700 billion of their taxes going to reimburse Wall Street speculators for their dubious investments, about 500 protesters paraded through Lower Manhattan's financial district Thursday afternoon, their chants of "You broke it, you bought it" reverberating through the narrow office building canyons and off the flag-draped wall of the New York Stock Exchange.

"I'm outraged," said Linda Greco, a 40-ish Brooklyn woman. "People are losing their homes. There's homeless people all over the city. The schools are falling apart. And they want to bail these pigs out? It's about time the people of this country woke up and took this country back."

Like many others, Greco learned about the protest from an e-mail tree that sprouted like kudzu on methamphetamine. "I must have gotten 10 to 20," she said.
The demonstration originated with an e-mail sent out Monday afternoon by Arun Gupta, an editor at the leftist Indypendent. "They said providing health care for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there's evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs," it read. "We need to act now while we can influence the debate. With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top? Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the 'toxic' mortgage-backed securities pay!"

"It tapped into an enormous reservoir of anger," Gupta told the crowd that gathered at the bull statue on Bowling Green. The e-mail inspired similar protests in almost 200 cities and towns, from Greensboro, N.C., to Henderson, Nev. Though phone calls and e-mails to Congress have been running nearly 1,000 to 1 against the bailout, he added, "it's clear that the fix is in."

"It's out-fuckin-rageous. They expect the public to bail them out?" said Rich Haber, 61, a retired Brooklyn bus driver. "I worked for the Transit Authority for 27 years, and I can't afford a house. I knew these mortgages were bogus."

Others offered similar vitriol. "Appalling," said Kate Powers, 39, an Obama supporter from Brooklyn. "Ridiculous," said Laura Skove, an 18-year-old student in an Obama T-shirt. "The government can't spend money on health care, but it can on Wall Street." "Highway robbery," said Annie V., part of a group holding up signs reading "N.Y. to Wall St. and the Bush Adm.: Drop Dead" -- echoing the legendary "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD" headline the Daily News ran in 1975 when then-President Gerald Ford refused to bail out debt-ridden New York City.

That fiscal crisis ended when the banks imposed harsh budget austerity on New York, forcing it to raise the subway fare by 43 percent while virtually eliminating maintenance, lay off police and close firehouses during an epidemic of crime and arson, and slash funding for schools and hospitals.

"They've been allowed to totally screw up and then get bailed out. I want to strangle every single politician," said Kevin Condon, a 30-year-old farm-stand worker from Brooklyn carrying a "Jump Without Your Golden Parachute" sign. Though he doesn't want to see the economy collapse, he said the crisis is an opportunity to dream of a different system, of smaller, more locally based commerce.

"Why isn't everyone in the street?" wondered Megan Fulton, 26, a Brooklyn graduate student. She held a sign asking the government to bail her out for the $93,000 she owes in student loans.

Older protesters had a feeling of deja vu. Davida Joyner, 51, of Harlem worked helping tenants administer abandoned buildings during the 1970s, then suffered a brain tumor and was out of commission for 20 years. "I woke up like Rumpelstiltskin," she said. "I saw all of this housing situation become unbelievable again." Sol McCants, 54, recalled the stock-market and savings-and-loan scams of the 1980s.

"These people are thieves and belong in jail," he said. "McCain's trying to make it look like he's doing a great thing, but he's not. That scumbag doesn't want to face the questions because he was behind the savings and loans."

The best thing that might come out of this crisis, he added, is that white voters might learn to "see their pockets" instead of blaming black and brown people for their problems. But if Obama is elected, people will have to nag him "like my wife tells me every other night to put the toilet seat down."

"I don't think the Democrats are much better," said Eva-Lee Baird, 68, of the Granny Peace Brigade -- noting that many of the Depression-era controls on imprudent investments were taken away under Bill Clinton.

"We need something like the New Deal," said James Trimarco, 30, of Brooklyn. "Put people to work doing actual stuff -- transportation and the environment -- instead of trading fictitious capital around the world."

Though Lower Manhattan is one of the most heavily locked down areas in the country -- the Stock Exchange is surrounded by an iron fence, the closest subway exit is barricaded off, and surrounding streets have concrete stanchions and raised metal sheets to block traffic, with guards and dogs in booths watching them -- police presence at the demonstration was surprisingly light, especially by the draconian standards of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.

Gupta attributed that to the "media feeding frenzy" surrounding the protest. "You think that while those fuckers are debating in D.C., they want pictures of protesters being beaten by cops being beamed around the world?" he asked.
Many Wall Street types greeted the protesters with contempt. "Just look at these people," sneered one broker as the march neared the Stock Exchange. Another group held a "Get a Job" sign in an office window, and one man dropped a few dollar bills out of his. They fluttered down short of the marchers, landing in a construction site.

Such contempt from the upper classes is nothing new to the lowly proles of Gotham. On Broadway near Wall Street is a stone slab commemorating billionaire real estate developer Harry B. Helmsley, "whose richness of spirit and love for New York helped build this great city." New Yorkers of a certain age and level of cynicism are more likely to remember Helmsley's late widow, Leona, a hotel magnate nicknamed the "Queen of Mean."

She achieved notoriety by leaving $12 million to her dogs -- more than she left to any of her grandchildren -- and telling her housekeeper that "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

----------

Steven Wishnia is a New York-based journalist and musician. The author of Exit 25 Utopia and The Cannabis Companion, he has won two New York City Independent Press Association awards for his coverage of housing issues. He is looking for a job.

Andrew Bacevich, America and the World

Friday 15 August 2008
By: Michael Winship, Truthout \ Perspective

In a letter written in 1648, Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor to both King Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina, counseled, "Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed."

The fighting between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia is an unnerving reminder of that, and of how quickly the balance of global power can be tilted from unexpected directions with barely a warning.

Some hawks and neo-cons called for NATO intervention or even suggested we send in Stinger missiles or the 82nd Airborne as a peacekeeping force. President Bush warned, "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Perhaps, but the reality of the early 21st century is that, in the short run, at least, the president's words ring hollow. In spite of past promises of support to Georgia, Russia is key to our efforts in the Middle East and our European allies are dependent on Russia for energy. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have both our military strength and our international credibility stretched perilously thin at a time when oil-rich Russia is reemerging as a superpower. We've boxed ourselves in.

It was in that light that I came upon the Oxenstierna quote the other night, while re-reading the late historian Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly," a knowing compendium, from ancient Troy to Vietnam, of the ways in which, given half a chance, those in power will steer their ships of state straight into the rocks. In the first chapter, she also quotes American President John Adams: "While all other sciences have advanced" - you can almost hear him sighing - "government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago."

Andrew J. Bacevich probably would agree with all of the above. The retired Army colonel, a West Point graduate, teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His latest book, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," explores our nation's current predicament, not just on the world stage, but here at home as well. He spoke with my colleague, Bill Moyers, on this week's edition of the PBS series, Bill Moyers Journal.

Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who's in power, which may be why those of both the left and right are eager to hear his views. Perhaps it's also because when he challenges American myths and illusions, he does so from a genuine patriotism forged in the fire of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and the death a year ago of his son, an Army lieutenant in Iraq. "The Limits of Power" is dedicated to the young man, but the senior Bacevich, a man of quiet, solid gravitas, holds his grief privately between himself and his family.

"Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington, DC, but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we the people want," he told Moyers. "And what we want, by and large is ... this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods. We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the books are balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year."

To that end, he says, "One of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years."

"... I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970's came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, compromised our freedom of action. How every president from Richard Nixon down ... declared, 'We're going to fix the problem.' [But] none of them did."

He continued, "The clearest statement of what I value is found in the Preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the Preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool's errand. I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with focusing on the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. To try to ensure that as individuals, we can have an opportunity to pursue our, perhaps, differing definitions of freedom, but also so that, as a community, we could live together in some kind of harmony. And that future generations would also be able to share in those same opportunities.... With the current crisis in American foreign policy, unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation will enjoy the opportunities that we've had is very slight because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth."

Bacevich believes, "The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress."

That imperial presidency, he says, "has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, really has worn very thin."

Iraq, Bacevich concludes, "was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaken. And we're never going to do this kind of thing again." This might, he thinks, "be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror [and] ... see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life."

Andrew Bacevich's words should echo down the corridors of Congress and the halls of the White House, no matter who becomes our next president.
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The full broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal will be devoted to Bill's conversation with Bacevich (check local listings) http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/about/airdates.html

, and further discussion will continue online at the Moyers Blog. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
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Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.