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TODAY!!!
MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 4:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Mass outreach this week to build March 21 Demonstration:
Posters, flyers and stickers are available at the ANSWER office.
Call 415-821-6545 for convenient pick-up times. All are encouraged
to view outreach and talking to your neighbors as crucial
to building this action.
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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"Fund Education, Not War!"
Mass March to Rescue Education
Mon. March 16, 10am-2pm
Join the ANSWER contingent at the Mar. 16th march and rally.
Call 415-821-6545 or look for the ANSWER banner at the demonstration, "Fund Education, Not War!
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March against the war on March 21
Dear friends,
During his presidential campaign, Obama's popularity surged with the promise that he would bring the troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But his recently announced plan would continue the illegal occupation indefinitely. It would leave up to 50,000 troops in that war-torn country for who knows how many years. And it would delay the withdrawal of the first batch of troops to 19 months.
"When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, 'get out,' and everyone's gone. But that is not going to happen," said a senior military officer.
This plan doesn't "leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war", as Obama claimed during his Congressional address of Feb. 24. Instead it entrenches the U.S. in a brutal counter-insurgency war that helped to bankrupt our country and sends an endless stream of Americans to continue dying and killing.
The U.S. government, the American people, and the Iraqi people need to hear our voices of opposition on March 21.
Last week, Sec. of Defense Gates and President Obama announced their plan to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan - that's a 50 percent increase - despite the fact that the Department of Defense has no exit strategy. And the U.S. is expanding the covert war run by the CIA inside neighboring Pakistan.
We cannot afford another quagmire.
Please join us in Washington, SF, and LA on March 21.
Go to www.pentagonmarch.org for more information
Meanwhile the U.S.-funded occupation and blockade of Gaza continues after an assault in which 100's of civilians were killed and even a United Nations school was not spared from the onslaught of human rights crimes and violations of international law.
The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine are struggling to rid themselves of deadly, racist occupations. We need to unite in the realization that the movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine is the same as the movements in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us stand together with each other and with them, and say:
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, occupation is a crime!
The people of the world need to hear from Americans that we are against the racist U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. We have an historic responsibility to raise our voices and be heard, to march with our banners held high and be seen, demanding
Bring ALL the troops home NOW!
Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
End U.S. support for the occupation of Palestine!
No war on Iran or Pakistan!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with a broadening alliance of 100's of coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to mobilize people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.
Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.
For updated information about buses and the national March 21 coalition, which includes labor unions, peace and anti-war groups, veterans and community groups and more, see: www.pentagonmarch.org
These actions will remind the nation and the world that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to stop the wars.
The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.
The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.
For more information about the National Assembly please visit: www.natassembly.org
March 21, in D.C., will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins-representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed-will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.
From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).
A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479
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Donate to Courage to Resist
A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister
Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
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Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Household Wealth Falls by Trillions
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/business/economy/13wealth.html?ref=us
2) Highway robbery in Texas? Town's police seize valuables from black motorists
By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune
Thursday, March 12, 2009
http://www.bostonherald.com
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/southwest/view.bg?articleid=1158132
3) Obama Signals Readiness to Further Militarize Drug War with Potential Deployment of National Guard to Mexico Border
March 13, 2009
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/13/obama_signals_readiness_to_further_militarize
4) CIA report: Israel will fall in 20 years
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:44:41 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=88491§ionid=351020202
5) With Two Wars, U.S. Begins to Rethink an Old Doctrine
"...the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."
By THOM SHANKER
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/washington/15military.html
6) $100 Billion the Country Could Use
Editorial
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/opinion/14sat1.html
7) Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves
By EVO MORALES AYMA
Op-Ed Contributor
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/opinion/14morales.html
8) U.S. Strike Kills 21 in Pakistan, Officials Say
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/asia/14drone.html?ref=world
9) Obama Says He Will Review Request for Guard on Border
By GINGER THOMPSON
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/politics/14border.html?ref=world
10) American Injured in Clash at Israeli Barrier
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/middleeast/14westbank.html?ref=world
11) Bad Economy Leads Patients to Put Off Surgery, or Rush It
By KEVIN SACK
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/14surgery.html?ref=us
12) Tales From Torture's Dark World
By MARK DANNER
Op-Ed Contributor
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15danner.html
13) A.I.G. Paying $165 Million in Bonuses After Federal Bailout
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and PETER BAKER
March 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/16aig.html?hp
14) At A.I.G., Good Luck Following the Money
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15gret.html?hp
15) Has the Economy Hit Bottom Yet?
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15vikas.html?hp
16) Administration Is Open to Taxing Health Benefits
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15health.html?hp
17) Arrests of 3 Dissidents in Ulster Killings Stir Riots
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/world/europe/15ulster.html?hp
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1) Household Wealth Falls by Trillions
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/business/economy/13wealth.html?ref=us
In the last few months, most Americans have felt poorer. Now they have the numbers to prove it.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that households lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of recordkeeping by the central bank.
For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1 trillion, or about 18 percent. Though the numbers do not yet reflect it, the decline in the stock market so far this year has probably erased trillions more in the country's collective net worth.
The next biggest annual decline in wealth came in 2002, when household net worth fell 3 percent after the collapse of the technology bubble. The most recent loss of wealth is staggering and will probably put further pressure on the economy because many people will have to spend less and save more.
Most of the wealth was lost in financial assets like stocks, which tumbled at the end of last year. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, for instance, fell 23 percent in the fourth quarter. The value of residential real estate, the biggest asset for most families, fell much less - $870 billion, or about 4 percent.
Even the richest among us have become a lot poorer. This week, Forbes magazine published its list of the richest people in the world. At No. 1, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, still had $40 billion to his name, but that was down $18 billion. The wealth of Warren E. Buffett, the investor whose company Berkshire Hathaway had a rare bad year, tumbled $25 billion, to $37 billion.
The loss of wealth is concentrated among the most affluent Americans, in large part because they own more stocks and bonds than the rest of the country. Only about 50 percent of households own stock, and many of them own relatively small sums in retirement accounts.
As a result of their greater wealth and higher incomes, the affluent tend to spend a lot more than their share of the population would imply. The top 20 percent of income earners spend more than the bottom 60 percent of income earners, according to calculations by Tobias Levkovich, the chief United States equity strategist at Citigroup.
"When their wealth is mauled, they are not particularly interested in spending," Mr. Levkovich said.
The Fed report released on Thursday also showed that total borrowing and lending increased at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter, mostly as a result of increased borrowing by the federal government to finance its operations and various bailouts of the financial system. The government's borrowing increased at an annual rate of 37 percent.
But borrowing by households dropped 2 percent. Lending to businesses was up 1.7 percent. Recent surveys of loan officers by the Fed have shown that companies have been drawing down lines of credit that were established in the past, and that only a small fraction of the lending to the private sector is through new loans, which are much harder to obtain than in recent years.
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2) Highway robbery in Texas? Town's police seize valuables from black motorists
By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune
Thursday, March 12, 2009
http://www.bostonherald.com
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/southwest/view.bg?articleid=1158132
TENAHA, Texas - You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it - at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.
That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.
More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with or convicted of any crime.
Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled state highway connecting Houston with several popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking, and they call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.
"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of 1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."
But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, aimed primarily at African-Americans who have done nothing wrong.
Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens," asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas.
The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are being singled out.
According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.
"If used properly, it's a good law enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."
David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.
But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly - and discovered all but one of them were black.
"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "Every one of these people is pulled over and told they did something, like, 'You drove too close to the white line.' That's not in the penal code, but it sounds plausible. None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable."
In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it - such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.
Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering - and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.
The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered presigned and prenotarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to fill in a description of the property being seized.
Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children - a mixed-race family - were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in east Texas in April 2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in a left-turn lane.
After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana. Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037 that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car - and then threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective Services if the couple didn't agree to sign over their right to their cash.
"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright said. "They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give them our cash and get the hell out of there."
Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney, Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology. The couple remains plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.
Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the federal lawsuit, including Shelby County District Attorney Linda Russell and two Tenaha police officers, responded to requests from the Chicago Tribune for comment about their search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try to fix what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday he introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law - and ultimately Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law enforcement officials will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and convicted in a court.
"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police salaries - and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a bad guy to lose your property."
(c) 2009, Chicago Tribune.
Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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3) Obama Signals Readiness to Further Militarize Drug War with Potential Deployment of National Guard to Mexico Border
March 13, 2009
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/13/obama_signals_readiness_to_further_militarize
President Obama is considering deploying National Guard troops along the border with Mexico in response to the escalating drug war. More than 7,000 people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence in the last year. Much of the drug-related violence in Mexico has been fueled by the ability of drug cartels to purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the United States. We host a roundtable discussion with Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy, NYU professor and author Greg Grandin, and Paul Helmke of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy. Her latest article is called "Drug War Doublespeak."
Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU and author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. His forthcoming book is Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Related Links
"Drug War Doublespeak" by Laura Carlsen
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama is considering deploying National Guard troops along the border with Mexico in response to the escalating drug war. In his most direct comments so far on Mexico's fight against drug cartels, Obama told reporters from regional newspapers, quote, "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense." But Obama ruled out any immediate military move.
More than a thousand people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence this year. 6,000 people died last year. Vice President Joe Biden highlighted the threat posed by drug traffickers this week when he announced Gil Kerlikowske as the new drug czar.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Since the beginning of last year, there have been nearly 7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico. If we had said that years ago, we would have looked at each other like we were crazy. But 7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico. Violent drug trafficking organizations are threatening both the United States and Mexican communities.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US military is ready to help Mexico in its fight against drug cartels with some of the same counterinsurgency tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mullen made the comment after meeting with high-ranking Mexican officials in Mexico City. Mullen said he emphasized the Pentagon's readiness to provide new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance help, such as unmanned drones to spy on drug gangs, especially along the US border.
His comments came in the wake of a report issued by US Joint Forces Command late last year that grouped Mexico with Pakistan as a state that could undergo a "rapid and sudden collapse." Last Sunday, during an interview on Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the US military will increase its support of Mexico.
ROBERT GATES: I think we are beginning to be in a position to help the Mexicans more than we have in the past. Some of the old biases against cooperation with our-between our militaries and so on, I think, are being set aside.
DAVID GREGORY: You mean providing military support?
ROBERT GATES: No, providing them with-with training, with resources, with reconnaissance and surveillance kinds of capabilities, but just cooperation, including in intelligence.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a House subcommittee considered the Department of Homeland Security's request for additional border security funding in light of the increasing violence. This is Jayson Ahern, Acting Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection.
JAYSON AHERN: So far, that kind of violence has been contained in Mexico, but we certainly do not want to see it spill over in the United States. And to that end, we have developed very detailed contingency plans to maintain control of the border as we move forward. While in recent years we've certainly focused on threats coming into the United States, Secretary Napolitano has made it clear that southbound enforcement, keeping guns and money out of the hands of criminals in Mexico, will be a priority for us. To this end, we'll dedicate additional personnel and technology to combat this threat, and we're finalizing our enhanced operational plans at this time.
JUAN GONZALEZ: For its part, Mexico recently announced it will send a total of 7,000 soldiers and federal police officers into the border city of Ciudad Juarez, where 1,600 people died last year in drug-related violence. Ciudad Juarez is located across the US border from El Paso, Texas. In a recent visit to El Paso, Texas Governor Rick Perry called for 1,000 US troops to be deployed to protect the border. But the mayor of El Paso, John Cook, has expressed concern about militarizing the border.
MAYOR JOHN COOK: Soldiers are trained to kill. That's what their job is. The job of the Border Patrol is different; it's to protect the border. So, just the training that goes into it and understanding what the law is, understanding who has a right to be in certain places, is not something that soldiers usually pay much attention to. They set up a perimeter, and they defend it, and they kill anybody who comes into their territory. I don't really want that to happen in the city of El Paso. I don't want our border militarized.
AMY GOODMAN: Much of the drug-related violence in Mexico has been fueled by the ability of drug cartels to purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the US. According to law enforcement officials, 90 percent of the guns picked up in Mexico from criminal activity are purchased in the United States. Last month, fifty-four Congress members wrote to President Obama backing Mexican calls to enforce a ban on the imports of assault weapons, which are often shipped to Mexico.
For more, we're joined by three guests. But we're going to begin in Las Cruces in Mexico-New Mexico with Laura Carlsen. She's the director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program for the Center for International Policy. Her latest article is called "Drug War Doublespeak." She's joining us by video stream.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Laura.
LAURA CARLSEN: Thank you, Amy. Thank you for the invitation.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Your piece is called "Drug War Doublespeak," and you start by talking about the "blitzkrieg of declarations from US government and military officials and pundits [...] claming Mexico was alternately at risk of being a failed state [and] on the verge of a civil war." What do you think is actually happening there?
LAURA CARLSEN: Well, we've been very surprised at this barrage of statements recently. And there are two reasons, basically. A lot of the talk has been focused on Mexico's national security threat. Mexico has a very serious problem with violence, and that's a predictable result of the drug war model that's being applied, but it is not a threat to US national security.
When we started to look at some of these articles talking about spillover of Mexican violence into the United States, what we found is that there's no evidence of that whatsoever at this point. The articles begin talking about the violence in Mexico, some of the worst cases. Then they jump to declarations by public officials, and there's no evidence of what's actually happening in the United States, because we simply don't have that. In the case of using statistics, like there's a lot of talk about the number of kidnappings in Phoenix, it turns out that many times those statistics are spurious, and they have no backup. They've been invented, or they've been twisted in many cases.
This is a real warning sign for us, because when we see an exaggerated threat assessment, as we're seeing right now in terms of spillover of Mexican violence to the United States, it's generally a prelude to militarization. And in fact, with Governor Perry requesting soldiers on the border and the National Guard, we're already seeing a buildup for that kind of militarization.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you also talk about, in your article, the Mérida Initiative that President Bush originally announced. What was that, and how has it faired?
LAURA CARLSEN: The Mérida Initiative was designed by President Bush in October of 2007, and essentially this is a drug war model. It's a copy of Plan Colombia, that we have six years and $6 billion of experience with and that the GAO itself has called a failure in stopping drug flows. It provides military equipment and US goods and services-no cash-to Mexico in order to supposedly reduce the power of the cartels. The first appropriations were 2008, and just last week the second appropriations, $300 million for Mexico in 2009, were passed.
The Mérida Initiative supports the offensive of President Felipe Calderon in Mexico, which, as I said, is this model of interdiction and enforcement that almost completely ignores the public health aspects of the drug problem. Since it's gone into effect, the US narcotics report itself reports that there's been a decrease in seizures, an increase in production, and most importantly, what we've already seen is this incredible increase in the violence. If last year's numbers were-the 2007 numbers were approximately 2,500 narco-related deaths. The figures for 2008 were 6,290. And they're going up. This violence is predictable: when you fight violence with violence, what you get is more violence.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to break, then come back. Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program at the Center for International Policy, she's near the border. She's in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her latest piece is called "Drug War Doublespeak." And then we're going to speak with the president of the Brady Center, talk about the guns that are coming over the border. And we'll be speaking with Professor Greg Grandin, who-his latest book coming out-he'll be talking about issues in Latin America. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by not only Laura Carlsen, who is here with us from Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is with the organization that looks at Mexico and Latin America. We're also-she's with the group called the Center for International Policy. We're also with Greg Grandin, professor of Latin America history at NYU. His new forthcoming book is called Fordlandia. Paul Helmke is with us, as well, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. He's joining us from Washington. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes, I'd just like to ask Laura Carlsen another question, on the question of whether there is success occurring in this drug war in Mexico. On the one hand, you see the administration praising President Felipe Calderon and his initiatives. On the other hand, you see a continued rise in the supposed production of various types of drugs in Mexico. And also, the role of the Mexicans who have been deported from the United States from prisons here in the United States after they serve terms, is there any indication that this is having an impact on the level of violence and of the upsurge in the drug trafficking in Mexico?
LAURA CARLSEN: Well, first of all, it's very frustrating to see the way that these multiple failures of the drug war model, that's been roundly criticized now by the United Nations in the drug war policy meetings in Vienna, as well as by a high-level commission called the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, are continuously spun as successes. It's completely unacceptable to ask a society to accept higher levels of violence as a sign that we're winning the drug war. There's an increasing level of civilians that are being caught in the crossfire between the 45,000 army troops that are in the streets in Mexico and the drug cartels who are fighting for plazas. So, this is very frustrating. We know that this model doesn't work, because it's been applied before. And we know that it's not working in Mexico now.
I don't think the deportees have as much to do with the rising violence as do deserters from the army. That's where there's a very serious problem. One of the items included in the Mérida Initiative, a number of them have to do with increased training for the army and police forces. What we know is that with the high desertion rates that we have in the Mexican army and the high levels of corruption in both the police and the army, much of that training is going to go straight to the drug cartels.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go right now to Washington, D.C. Our guest there is Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. These latest figures that we have just gone through, the number of weapons that are being used, something like 90 percent of them from the United States-your piece-your organization's piece, "America's Weak Gun Laws Are Fueling the Violence in Mexico"-how?
PAUL HELMKE: The folks in Mexico have figured out what criminals in the US figured out a long time ago: our weak and nearly nonexistent laws in the US are making it very easy for these guns to get to Mexico. Most Americans don't realize that we basically have very few laws on the book, almost none, restricting access to guns. And so, it's very easy to go to unlicensed dealers, who basically can sell any kind of gun without any kind of background check, particularly gun shows, particularly in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. They go to licensed dealers who are corrupt, and because Congress in effect shields them by keeping the information about where the records are, what the inventory is, who's in trouble, and making sure that ATF doesn't have the funding, that's where guns come from.
And the fact that we allow an unlimited number of guns, almost any kind of gun, very serious military-nearly military-style hardware, it's obvious that's why 90 to 95 percent of the guns are coming from the US. We are the world's gun bazaar, and the gangs in Mexico have figured it out. If anything, Mexico ought to be putting up their army at our border to check the cars coming from the US in to see who's bringing the guns in, because we make it so easy for dangerous people to get those guns.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, your article mentions that about one percent of all the licensed gun dealers represent 60 percent of the illegal gun sales.
PAUL HELMKE: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Why doesn't the government crack down on those particular licensed dealers that are involved in this trafficking?
PAUL HELMKE: Seems pretty obvious to me. Actually, that information is a little old. Congress no longer allows that kind of information to be made public. That's from 2000, when it was said that 60 percent of the guns traced to crime come from one percent of the dealers.
But we only have enough ATF agents-it would take them twenty-one years to investigate every gun dealer to do-to stop by every gun dealer in the US. And in fact, we have laws on the books that say once you've investigated a gun dealer, a licensed gun dealer in the US, you cannot come back again for another twelve months unless you have a warrant. We make it harder to sell cigarettes to minors or liquor to minors than we do to sell guns in this country. And since you can go in again with a credit card and buy a thousand AK-47s, .50-caliber sniper rifles that can shoot down helicopters, it's obvious why they come to the US to get their guns.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Helmke-
PAUL HELMKE: We do nothing to stop-almost nothing to stop dangerous people from getting them.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember when President Bush first took office and the statement of the NRA, "We're now going to be operating out of the Oval Office."
PAUL HELMKE: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you still see their power at that level today? And what do you feel needs to be done?
PAUL HELMKE: Clearly, we have a lot stronger supporters with President Obama, Vice President Biden, Attorney General Holder, Rahm Emanuel, others in the administration. Elected officials in Congress, however, are still scared to death of the NRA for some reason. They think that the NRA is powerful, even though the NRA basically hasn't won a single contested election in either the '06 cycle or the '08 cycle. We don't know of any person who's lost because of standing for commonsense gun control over the last two elections. But a lot of politicians are afraid of them, even though when we poll people at exit polls, 75 to 85 percent of gun owners, McCain voters, Republicans, as well as the general American public, support things like doing background checks in all sales, strengthening ATFs so we can stop this illegal trade in gun, restricting some of the weapons that are easily available to the general public.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And even we covered-I think it was last week that the passage of-giving D.C. the right to have a voting member of Congress, it was stuck into that bill the elimination or the reduction of D.C.'s strong gun control laws.
PAUL HELMKE: Clearly sad. D.C.'s law was challenged. The Supreme Court spoke up last summer, said D.C. went too far. But the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia speaking, said you can still have restrictions on who gets guns, what types of guns, where you take guns, how they're sold, how they're marketed, how they're carried. But Congress thinks they know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court. And the Senate, sadly, the other week, said that D.C. City Council didn't get it right, and so they want to play super city council in the sky and basically say, "You can't have a vote in Congress unless we can gut your gun laws totally." That's ridiculous, and it does show the power of the gun lobby.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Helmke, the case that just went on trial this week in Phoenix, Arizona, of a gun store owner who went on trial on charges he sold more than 700 weapons to straw buyers, knowing the firearms were bought on behalf of Mexican drug syndicates?
PAUL HELMKE: Right, happens all the time. A straw buyer is someone who knows they can't pass a background check, so they get someone else. And basically, the straw buyer says, "Let me look at that gun. How much does it cost? How does it feel?" And then they have someone else with them fill out the paperwork, obvious straw buyers.
We don't do enough in this country to crack down on that, and it's because, basically, we are not serious. We want everybody to have a gun for any purpose.
That gun dealer actually was originally in California, which has the best gun laws in this country, and he moved to Arizona, because it was too hard for him to sell those guns in California and he knew that in Arizona it would be a lot easier for him to market these to the gangs and the drug cartels in Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin is also with this, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, NYU, here in New York, just down the road. Can you put the policy of the US with Mexico in context, overall, in Latin America right now?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, the logic context is two things. One is the rise of the left throughout most of South America, in which the US has lost influence in what used to be called its backyard. But it also-and the reason for the rise of the left is the second part of the context, and that's the absolute failure of economic policies, starting with NAFTA and even before, what's generally known as neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus.
All the drug war is is a crystallization, in a lot of ways, of all of the pressures brought to bear on the Mexican state by privatization, by deregulation, through the opening of the economy. In some ways, you see a direct relationship between the recession of the state, particularly in northern Mexico, and the vacuum created, which is filled by the cartels. Society, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum. And in many ways, the cartels have functioned as the state, and they tax businesses, they create infrastructure, they provide jobs. The money raised-the money, the profits by narcotics industry in Mexico, billions of dollars-some estimates are $30 billion a year-are injected into Mexican banks. They keep Mexican banks afloat.
So, in many ways, what you're seeing here with the drug wars in Mexico is a death match between different sectors of elites trying to assume state powers. And when Felipe Calderon took power and came to office in 2006, he declared a war on drugs, and he sent troops into Juarez and other cities in the north, and that's what kicked off this cycle of violence.
It's nowhere close to being a failed state. That is hysteria. I think that's right. But there is a serious crisis in Mexico. And the larger conflict-context, of course, is that a hundred years ago-we're coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, and so I guess what's called a failed state now, back then, was called a revolution. So I think Mexicans are acutely aware that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Greg, you mentioned when Felipe Calderon came to office. Obviously, we tend to forget that he was elected in perhaps the most controversial election in Mexican history, a very, very close margin against a leftist candidate, Lopez Obrador. Is there some concern that this increase in militarization, both within Mexico and now possibly from the United States side of the border, will have some impact on the continuing political dynamic within Mexico?
GREG GRANDIN: Oh, I think there's a clear concern that the Mexican state, the promise of democratization that happened with the election of PAN and Vicente Fox two cycles back has not been delivered, that there's-that both main political-that all three main political parties, the PAN, the PRI and the PRD, are losing its ability to channel dissent and protest and popular aspirations through the political process.
And you see the growth of social movements and protest, not just in Chiapas, of course, with the Zapatistas, but we saw Oaxaca, saw the crisis in Oaxaca. And we saw a lot of the rhetoric of the war on drugs and the war on terror being used to repress dissent in Oaxaca. And in Chihuahua, people protesting the privatization of water and other natural resources have been locked up and have been physically repressed under the aegis of the war on terror and the war on drugs. So you're seeing a kind of synergy of all of these different crises coming together in Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama is weighing the possibility of sending more troops to the border. Do you think some of that-you were mentioning having to do with the economy, of many more Mexicans having to come up, of-not about drugs, but about people who are being squeezed all over the world?
GREG GRANDIN: They're being squeezed. But what's interesting about this particular crisis, I read some statistics that actually in every other economic crisis that Mexico has had throughout the last thirty or forty years, there's been a-it's been correlated with an increase of migration to the United States. This is the first time where there's actually a reverse in migration, because of the economy tanking in the US. And along with that, remittances have fallen. So, in some ways, migration has served as a safety valve from Mexican politics since 1968. And what you're seeing is a shutting down of that safety valve, which increases the pressures that Juan was talking about within Mexican society.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask Laura Carlsen, if we could get you back in the conversation here, for those of us who have had the opportunity from time to time to cross the border between Mexico and the US, there's an amazing difference between how you are treated when you're coming from the US into Mexico versus from Mexico into the US, in terms of the type of inspection and processes that you have to go through. As Paul Helmke was suggesting, maybe if the Mexican army would start searching cars coming from or trucks coming from the United States into Mexico, they might be able to interdict many of these weapons that are coming in illegally.
AMY GOODMAN: Laura, are you there?
LAURA CARLSEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you respond to that?
LAURA CARLSEN: Well, I think there's a complete double standard in terms of what is really a transnational problem--everyone recognizes it's a transnational problem-and the way that it's viewed in Mexico and the United States. By talking about spillover and many of the measures, the Mérida Initiative included, that focus only on the Mexican responsibility for this problem, what the United States is doing is washing its hands of these kinds of problems, including the drug-the gunrunning, as well as being the largest market and the reason for existence for these drug cartels.
When there's drug activity in the United States, it doesn't mean it's spilling over from Mexico. This is a normal part of the transnational drug trade. The United States is responsible for its share of corruption, by letting these kinds of illegal substances into the country, by the illegal trade in guns and money laundering that supports the drug industry on the ground in Mexico and other places. And so, by pushing the entire onus of this onto Mexico, it's releasing itself from responsibilities in many ways that's completely unacceptable and creating an image that there's a contagion coming from the south, which is Mexico, into a fundamentally healthy organism, which is US society, and we all know that isn't true.
AMY GOODMAN: Laura Carlsen, President Calderon said, to say Mexico doesn't have authority over all its national territories is absolutely false and absurd. He said the media is mounting a campaign of lies against Mexico. What do you think has to happen?
LAURA CARLSEN: Yeah, I think that's basically true. Any definition of a failed state, when you look at it technically and including the rankings that they do of failed states, Mexico does not qualify. There are places where the drug cartels have significant power. It's not that there's a total absence of the state. The drug cartels don't want to be the state. They don't want to take over the state. What they want to do is they want to carry out their business, a very lucrative business.
What I think has to happen is that we have to get rid of this failed drug war model and we have to start looking at other options. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy that was run by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, came out with a recommendation saying it's time to completely change course on this. What we have to do is start looking at illegal drug use as a public health problem; cease to criminalize it; stop having these confrontations, bloody confrontations, in the street with the drug cartels; and focus repressive measures just on organized crime. And at the same time, they came out and suggested that we take a serious look at legalization, in some cases, of drugs, because the only way this is really going to stop is when that market doesn't exist anymore. And the prohibitionist policies that have been put in place until now have completely failed.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin, on a different note, Salvador elections on Sunday?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, the polls show that the election is close. The FMLN candidate, which would have-which, if he does win, it will end nearly twenty years of ARENA right-wing rule, the ARENA party being linked to the death squad in the civil war of El Salvador in the 1980s. Mauricio Funes was well ahead in the polls, but there's been a major scare campaign.
JUAN GONZALEZ: That's the candidate of the FMLN.
GREG GRANDIN: That's the candidate of the FMLN. There's been a major scare campaign over the last two or three months, along the lines of what happened in Mexico, bringing it back to Mexico, with Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2006, which linked him to Chavez. And Lopez Obrador was well ahead in the polls, scheduled to win, and at the last minute it came in very close. Peru, we saw the same thing. So there's been an orchestrated attempt to link Funes with Chavez and also with the FARC in Colombia and scare Salvadoran voters into voting once again for ARENA. We saw the same thing in 2004.
Key to this, as you mentioned in the opening, is a threatening the Temporary Protection Status. There's about 2.5 million Salvadorans in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of them are here under what's known as a TPS, Temporary Protection Status, that was implemented in, I think, 1989, 1990, and it was a recognition of the migration, out-migration, exile, resulting from the violence of the civil war in the 1990s. And it's almost been a ritual of US politics every time there's a presidential election in El Salvador to threaten to revoke that TPS status. What you saw in El Salvador was headlines blared along all the right-wing newspapers, which is completely controlled by ARENA or affiliated with ARENA, announcing that Congress threatens to cut off TPS and remittances will fall and all of this, and all of this alarmism.
The Obama administration, the State Department, issued a neutrality statement yesterday. It was about a paragraph long, but it's not getting any attention within the Salvadoran press, and certainly not the headlines that the statements by Dan Burton and other Republican congressmen have received.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we'll certainly follow that story on Monday, what happens with the Salvador elections on Sunday. I want to thank you all for being with us. Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at NYU, his forthcoming book called Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Laura Carlsen, with us from Las Cruces, New Mexico, she is with the Center for International Policy. And finally, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.
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4) CIA report: Israel will fall in 20 years
Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:44:41 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=88491§ionid=351020202
A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel's survival beyond the next 20 years.
The CIA report predicts "an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region."
The study, which has been made available only to a certain number of individuals, further forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli - who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.
"There is over 500,000 Israelis with American passports and more than 300,000 living in the area of just California," International lawyer Franklin Lamb said in an interview with Press TV on Friday, adding that those who do not have American or western passport, have already applied for them.
"So I think the handwriting at least among the public in Israel is on the wall...[which] suggests history will reject the colonial enterprise sooner or later," Lamb stressed.
He said CIA, in its report, alludes to the unexpectedly quick fall of the apartheid government in South Africa and recalls the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, suggesting the end to the dream of an 'Israeli land' would happen 'way sooner' than later.
The study further predicts the return of over one and a half million Israelis to Russia and other parts of Europe, and denotes a decline in Israeli births whereas a rise in the Palestinian population.
Lamb said given the Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians and the Gaza strip in particular, the American public -- which has been voicing its protest against Tel Aviv's measures in the last 25 years -- may 'not take it anymore'.
Some members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee have been informed of the report.
MRS/MMN
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5) With Two Wars, U.S. Begins to Rethink an Old Doctrine
"...the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."
By THOM SHANKER
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/washington/15military.html
WASHINGTON - The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.
For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere.
To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II.
A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama.
In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear that the Pentagon was beginning to reconsider whether the old two-wars assumption "makes any sense in the 21st century" as a guide to planning, budgeting and weapons-buying.
The discussion is being prompted by a top-to-bottom strategy review that the Pentagon conducts every four years, as required by Congress and officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review. One question on the table for Pentagon planners is whether there is a way to reshape the armed forces to provide for more flexibility in tackling a wide range of conflicts.
Among other questions are the extent to which planning for conflicts should focus primarily on counterinsurgency wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what focus remains on well-equipped conventional adversaries like China and Iran, with which Navy vessels have clashed at sea.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that the Obama administration would be seeking to come up with "a multiwar, multioperation, multifront, walk-and-chew-gum construct."
"We have to do many things simultaneously if our goal is to remain the ultimate guarantor of international security," Mr. Donnelly said. "The hedge against a rising China requires a very different kind of force than fighting an irregular war in Afghanistan or invading Iraq or building partnership capacity in Africa."
But Mr. Donnelly cautioned that the review now under way faced a familiar challenge. "If there has been one consistent thread through all previous defense reviews," he said, "it is that once the review is done, there is an almost immediate gap between reality and force planning. Reality always exceeds force planning."
It is already is obvious, a senior Pentagon official said, that the Defense Department will "need to rebalance our strategy and our forces" in a way that reflects lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq. Exactly how that happens will be debated for months to come and will then play out in decisions involving hundreds of billions of dollars, involving the size of the Army, as well as such things as the number of aircraft carriers and new long-range bombers.
Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist policy organization, said that senior Pentagon officials knew that the new review needed to more fully analyze what the rest of the government could bring to national security.
"We have Gates and others saying that other parts of the government are underresourced and that the DoD should not be called on to do everything" Mr. O'Hanlon said. "That's a good starting point for this - to ask and at least begin answering where it might be better to have other parts of the government get stronger and do a bigger share, rather than the Department of Defense."
Among the refinements to the two-wars strategy the Pentagon has incorporated in recent years is one known as "win-hold-win" - an assumption that if two wars broke out simultaneously, the more threatening conflict would get the bulk of American forces while the military would have to defend along a second front until reinforcements could arrive to finish the job.
Another formulation envisioned the United States defending its territory, deterring hostility in four critical areas of the world and then defeating two adversaries in major combat operations, but not at exactly the same time.
The Bush administration's most recent strategy, completed four years ago, added requirements that the military be equipped to deal with a broad range of missions in addition to war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists and adversaries from obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
But Pentagon officials are now asking whether the current reality, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already outlasting World War II, really fits any of those models. "One of the things that stresses our force greatly is long-duration operations," the senior Pentagon official said. "It's the requirement to continue to rotate forces in over many, many rotations that really strains a lot of the force."
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6) $100 Billion the Country Could Use
Editorial
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/opinion/14sat1.html
Senate investigators estimate that Americans who hide assets in offshore bank accounts are failing to pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. In good times, that's grossly unfair and bad for the country. In times like these, it should be intolerable. The government not only needs the money, but closing down such tax scams is essential for President Obama's rescue effort to retain public support and credibility.
Some of the banks at the center of the global financial meltdown are prominent purveyors of evasion services. UBS of Switzerland has acknowledged that as of Sept. 30, it held about 47,000 secret accounts for Americans. It has refused to disclose the names of all but a tiny number of the account holders, arguing that it would be a breach of Swiss law. But last month - after UBS got caught soliciting business in the United States - it admitted to breaking federal law by helping Americans hide assets, and the bank agreed to pay $780 million in fines and restitution.
The United States Treasury isn't the only one being shorted. The Tax Justice Network, a research and advocacy organization, estimates $11.5 trillion in assets from around the world are hidden in offshore havens.
The United States also isn't the only country running out of patience. In February, European leaders forged an unusually tough and united call to put the problem of "uncooperative jurisdictions" near the top of the agenda for the April summit of leading economies in London. (Finance ministers will discuss the issue at a preparatory meeting in London this weekend.)
Bankers and their host countries are feeling the heat. In recent days, a rash of governments, including Andorra, Liechtenstein, Singapore and Hong Kong have said they would increase the transparency of their offshore banking business and share more information with tax authorities in depositors' home countries.
Even the Swiss government has caved - somewhat. On Friday, it announced that it would exchange information with tax authorities in other countries on the basis of "specific and justified" requests, though it resolutely rejected "any form of automatic exchange of information." Meanwhile, UBS promised to close its secret American accounts and not open any more. The United States is taking UBS to court to try to get the bank to reveal the identities of thousands of accounts.
The government needs more tools to crack down on such international tax evasion. The Internal Revenue Service relies on taxpayers to disclose any foreign bank accounts, and it has no means to routinely get that information from banks in jurisdictions that protect secrecy.
Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is considering legislation that would require banks to inform the I.R.S. when their clients wire money abroad. Senator Carl Levin has introduced a bill that, among other provisions, would allow the United States to bar banks in this country from doing business with foreign banks that refused to cooperate with American tax authorities.
This problem can't be fixed solely by American law. At the London summit, American officials should work with other governments to come up with a common set of rules to pry information from tax havens.
There are a variety of ideas worth serious consideration. Governments could revoke tax treaties with countries that refuse to cooperate with tax queries - making it much more cumbersome for their companies to do international business. They could restrict their own banks from doing business with banks in uncooperative countries or subject any business with these countries to higher standards of disclosure.
They could start now by publishing blacklists of countries and banks that refuse to cooperate with requests for information from fiscal authorities. A few years ago, most banks and tax havens would have shrugged off such an effort. But in the current environment, they seem to be more sensitive to public shaming.
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7) Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves
By EVO MORALES AYMA
Op-Ed Contributor
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/opinion/14morales.html
La Paz, Bolivia
THIS week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international antidrug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia's commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago.
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine - thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic - and ordered that "coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention." Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001.
So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.
Many plants have small quantities of various chemical compounds called alkaloids. One common alkaloid is caffeine, which is found in more than 50 varieties of plants, from coffee to cacao, and even in the flowers of orange and lemon trees. Excessive use of caffeine can cause nervousness, elevated pulse, insomnia and other unwanted effects.
Another common alkaloid is nicotine, found in the tobacco plant. Its consumption can lead to addiction, high blood pressure and cancer; smoking causes one in five deaths in the United States. Some alkaloids have important medicinal qualities. Quinine, for example, the first known treatment for malaria, was discovered by the Quechua Indians of Peru in the bark of the cinchona tree.
The coca leaf also has alkaloids; the one that concerns antidrug officials is the cocaine alkaloid, which amounts to less than one-tenth of a percent of the leaf. But as the above examples show, that a plant, leaf or flower contains a minimal amount of alkaloids does not make it a narcotic. To be made into a narcotic, alkaloids must typically be extracted, concentrated and in many cases processed chemically. What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic. The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not.
Why is Bolivia so concerned with the coca leaf? Because it is an important symbol of the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes.
The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.
Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.
Mistakes are an unavoidable part of human history, but sometimes we have the opportunity to correct them. It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.
Evo Morales Ayma is the president of Bolivia.
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8) U.S. Strike Kills 21 in Pakistan, Officials Say
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/asia/14drone.html?ref=world
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Three missiles thought to have been fired from remotely piloted American aircraft struck a Taliban training camp in northwestern Pakistan and killed 21 militants, according to a local government official and news reports on Friday.
Fifteen other people were wounded in the strike, from about 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday, on a training camp some 20 miles from Parachinar, the capital of the Kurram tribal area, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The camp was under the command of Fazal Saeed, a local militant commander aligned with the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. On Friday evening, the official said the dead were all militants.
The attack was the sixth on Mr. Mehsud's camps in the tribal areas since President Obama took office, expanding the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency and carried out largely by remotely piloted aircraft.
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
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9) Obama Says He Will Review Request for Guard on Border
By GINGER THOMPSON
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/politics/14border.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - President Obama is considering a request by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to deploy National Guard troops along the southern border to stop a devastating wave of violence from spilling into this country from Mexico.
Mr. Obama spoke about the request Wednesday with a group of reporters from regional newspapers. He said that he did not favor "militarizing the border," and that his staff was preparing a "comprehensive strategy" for working with Mexico to stem both the flow of drugs into the United States and the flow of guns into Mexico.
But Mr. Obama added that he would "examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense, and in what circumstances they would make sense as part of this overall review of our border situation."
Those comments followed a series of hearings at which members of Congress characterized the deteriorating situation in Mexico as a major threat to national security, and criticized the Obama administration, saying it had not offered a specific strategy for dealing with the problem.
At one of those hearings, Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, told legislators that Mexico was not in control of parts of its territory. The statements put new strain on the United States' long-conflicted relationship with Mexico. Speaking about Mr. Blair's statements, President Felipe Calderón said he believed there was a new "campaign" against his country.
"I challenge anyone to tell me to what point in national territory they want to go, and I will take them," Mr. Calderón said in a speech Thursday.
He acknowledged the magnitude of Mexico's fight and added that its problems were a consequence of Mexico's location next to "the biggest consumer of drugs in the world and the largest supplier of weapons in the world."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Mexico on March 25 and 26. Aides said the trip was meant to demonstrate the Obama administration's support for Mr. Calderón's efforts and to talk about ways to expand cooperation in areas like trade.
Topping the agenda, officials said, would be discussions about ways to increase cooperation through a $1.4 billion plan approved by the Bush administration that includes weapons and training for Mexican security forces.
Officials said trips to Mexico were also being planned by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
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10) American Injured in Clash at Israeli Barrier
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/middleeast/14westbank.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM - A 37-year-old American was badly hurt on Friday in a clash between Israeli troops and demonstrators protesting the extension of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank.
The American, Tristan Anderson, from Oakland, Calif., was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister near the West Bank town of Ramallah, according to witnesses, and he was taken to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. An army spokeswoman said his condition was severe but stable.
Ulrike Anderson, a Swedish high school teacher with the International Solidarity Movement who is not related to the wounded man, said she was standing about 10 feet from him when he was hit.
"The Israeli soldiers were standing on the hill looking over us firing tear-gas canisters," Ms. Anderson said by telephone. "Tristan was hit and fell to the ground. He had a large hole in the front of his head. I tried to stop the bleeding. He was bleeding heavily from the nose."
The army spokeswoman said there were about 400 violent demonstrators at the village of Niilin, west of Ramallah, many of them throwing rocks at the troops. The forces shot back, she said, but not with live fire.
Ms. Anderson estimated the crowd at 200 and said that by the time Mr. Anderson was hit, the crowd had largely dissipated. She said she and several other activists had been living in Niilin since last summer, when construction on the barrier there started, and had been taking part in weekly demonstrations against it.
Israel has been building a barrier made up of fencing and walls for about five years. It says it is aimed at stopping terrorists from entering Israel; Palestinians and other opponents say that it takes land away and makes daily life very difficult for the Palestinian villagers there.
The International Solidarity Movement is a Palestinian-led group that opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It leads demonstrations against the barrier every Friday at several West Bank locations.
Mr. Anderson, 37, came to Israel two weeks ago to join his girlfriend, who is also active in opposing the barrier and the occupation of the West Bank, said Sasha Solanas, a volunteer at the International Solidarity Movement's office in Ramallah.
He had been active with the organization in the United States, Ms. Solanas said, and he had participated in protests at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007 and 2008 against plans to cut down or transplant 42 trees in a campus grove in order to make way for a new athletic center.
Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
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11) Bad Economy Leads Patients to Put Off Surgery, or Rush It
By KEVIN SACK
March 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/us/14surgery.html?ref=us
As the recession deepens, doctors and hospitals are reporting that hard-pressed patients are deferring elective surgery, like knee replacements and nose jobs, even as others are speeding up non-urgent procedures out of fear that they may soon lose their jobs and health insurance.
With unemployment still rising, there are wide variations by region and type of surgery. That means that highly regarded orthopedic surgeons in Chicago may be as busy as ever, while gastroenterologists in Atlanta are scrambling to fill cancellations.
But even those whose operating rooms are booked months in advance say they anticipate a slowdown later this year.
Delaying elective procedures can have serious medical consequences, as when a detectable polyp develops into a tumor because a patient skips a colonoscopy. Some hospitals said their emergency rooms were already seeing patients with dire conditions that could have been avoided had they not deferred surgery for economic reasons.
"We're probably seeing five or six of those a day at each of our hospitals," said Zeff Ross, a senior vice president at Memorial Healthcare System, which operates six hospitals in South Florida. "Someone gets an attack of diverticulitis, but they wait. They get it a second time and the doctor tells them to get the surgery done now, but they still wait. The third time, it perforates and that's a much tougher surgery, much more dangerous for the patient and with a longer length of stay."
The slowdown is likely to have significant financial repercussions. Elective operations are typically covered by private insurance plans that tend to reimburse hospitals and doctors at higher rates than government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. As those payments dwindle, so do hospital profit margins and the resources to provide charity care to a growing number of uninsured.
"Elective admissions could represent only 9 or 10 percent of a hospital's admissions and yet represent 25 percent of its bottom line," said Michael A. Sachs, chief executive of Sg2, a health care consulting firm. "They're the patients that subsidize the underfunding associated with Medicaid and Medicare patients and uncompensated care."
The loss of revenue and growth in uncompensated care is conspiring with other byproducts of the recession - declining philanthropy, battered investments and tight credit - to force many hospitals to lay off workers, postpone expansions and cancel equipment purchases.
A study released in November by the American Hospital Association found that about one-third of hospitals had seen either a moderate or significant decrease in elective procedures in the previous three months. More recent studies in states like New Jersey and Georgia have put the figure closer to 50 percent. Ambulatory surgical centers, which had experienced exponential growth over the last decade, are also reporting a slowdown in some markets.
Dr. David S. George, an Ohio ophthalmologist who with two other physicians owns an outpatient eye center, said they performed 5 percent fewer cataract operations in 2008 than in 2007, following nearly a decade of consistent 10 percent annual growth.
"That was the first down year we've had," Dr. George said. "When we tell patients about the benefits of cataract surgery, we're getting more answers like, 'Well, it's not that bad yet. Let's check it out in six months or a year.' Even those with good insurance are very concerned about the co-pay and the out-of-pocket costs."
That is the case for Jane Bagwell, a 60-year-old legal secretary in Atlanta, who has chosen to delay surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff in her left shoulder, even though she rates her pain as an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.
In a less terrifying economy, Ms. Bagwell said, she would not hesitate to schedule the operation. These days, however, she finds herself pinching every penny, including the ones that would help her pay the 20 percent share of surgical costs not covered by insurance. And given that her law firm is laying off staff members, she worries that if she took three weeks off to recuperate, her job might be eliminated before she could return.
Instead, she pops ibuprofen. "I feel like I live off them," she said.
The trends are far from universal, with some physicians and hospitals saying they have seen little change. Several doctors interviewed reported that some of their patients were deferring procedures while others were accelerating them.
"They're trying to get things done next week because they know they're going to be losing their insurance or going to Cobra," said Dr. Jeffrie L. Kamean, an Atlanta gastroenterologist.
Dr. Kamean was referring to the federal law that allows laid-off workers to continue their employer-sponsored insurance, though at costs that are often prohibitive (the federal stimulus package provides money to subsidize Cobra expenses).
Val Arnold, 37, a skin cancer survivor who lives in Holly, Mich., said she chose to have reconstructive surgery on her nose on Feb. 13 because she had been laid off from her job with General Motors and would lose her employer-sponsored insurance on March 1. She would have preferred to wait, so that she would be immediately available if the automaker reactivated her job.
"It was like all of a sudden I have to get it done now," Ms. Arnold said during her two-week recuperation. "What if they call me this week?"
Health experts predict that as the economy worsens, more insured people will begin deferring care because they cannot afford the high deductibles common in the insurance market.
"During good economic times, the trade-offs aren't as severe," said David Dranove, a professor of health-industry management at Northwestern University. "It's that $2,000 for elective surgery versus that vacation in Cancún. Now it's $2,000 for the surgery versus making the mortgage payments, and suddenly the surgery can wait."
At Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., outpatient surgical volumes are down 10 percent so far this year compared with 2008. At Elkhart General Hospital in Elkhart, Ind., site of a Caterpillar plant that has seen huge layoffs, the 498 operations in January were 28 fewer than in January 2008 and 63 fewer than projected in this year's budget, said Gregory W. Lintjer, the president.
"We're seeing a slowdown in hip and knee replacements, the kind of things that people can live with a little longer if they so choose," Mr. Lintjer said.
Not surprisingly, the steepest drop has been in plastic surgery, which is typically not covered by insurance. Dr. John W. Canady, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said business seemed to be off by an average of 30 percent among his members, particularly for surgical procedures.
On the other hand, Dr. Canady said, plastic surgeons are starting to field requests for Botox and other minor aesthetic improvements from middle-aged patients who find themselves competing for jobs against younger applicants.
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12) Tales From Torture's Dark World
By MARK DANNER
Op-Ed Contributor
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15danner.html
ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.
"In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo," the president said, "a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency."
At these places, Mr. Bush said, "the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures." He added: "These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful." This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush's most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government's "alternative set of procedures" and his equally fervent insistence that they were "lawful," he set out before the country America's dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.
At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 "high-value detainees" from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas "black sites" to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be "advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them."
A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials - whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war - traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.
Their stated goal was to produce a report that would "provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program," periods ranging "from 16 months to almost four and a half years."
As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, "to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities," to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them - in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.
The result is a document - labeled "confidential" and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials - that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.
A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.
Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, "The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below."
Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page - "suffocation by water," "prolonged stress standing," "beatings by use of a collar," "confinement in a box" - the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: "The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
•
Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president's "alternative set of procedures" were applied:
"I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.
"I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.
"The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.
"The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks."
So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.
After being treated for his wounds - he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture - Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.
It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room - guards, interrogators, doctor - was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. "It wasn't up to individual interrogators to decide, 'Well, I'm going to slap him. Or I'm going to shake him,'" said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.
Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah "had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, 'He's uncooperative. Request permission to do X.'"
He went on: "The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific.... No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard."
Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council's principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.
At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as "the torture memo," which claimed that for an "alternative procedure" to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort "that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result." The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal "green light" for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:
"I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room."
The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, "for what I think was about one and a half to two hours." He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury."
After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. "They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don't know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.
"I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.
"The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless."
After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah "was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.
"I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.
This went on for approximately one week."
•
Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:
"On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks.... I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural."
This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:
"After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists."
Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah's neck:
"On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.
"Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets.... I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation."
•
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.
After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep - "the first proper sleep in over five days" - and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:
"I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in '.pl.'"
He was stripped and put in a small cell. "I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor," he told the Red Cross.
"Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing."
For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.
"If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe."
As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the "alternative set of procedures" used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:
"The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor."
Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the "alternative set of procedures" as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.
Here again is Mr. Mohammed:
"After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well.... The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request" - he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling - "but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month.... I wasn't given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight."
•
Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other "high-value detainees" whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.
From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished - to be "brought to justice," as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured - and have already done so at Guantánamo - means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.
For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which "torture doesn't work." The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.
As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits - in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda - the president's approval of use of an "alternative set of procedures" might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.
What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.
Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College, is the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror." This essay is drawn from a longer article in the new issue of The New York Review of Books, available at www.nybooks.com.
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13) A.I.G. Paying $165 Million in Bonuses After Federal Bailout
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and PETER BAKER
March 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/16aig.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.
Austan Goolsbee, staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, on Sunday detailed Mr. Geithner's reaction.
"He stepped in and berated them, got them to reduce the bonuses following every legal means he has to do this," Mr. Goolsbee said on "Fox News Sunday." "I don't know why they would follow a policy that's really not sensible, is obviously going to ignite the ire of millions of people, and we've done exactly what we can do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
The payments to A.I.G.'s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company's senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.
The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government's efforts to prop up Wall Street. "There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what's happened at A.I.G. is the most outrageous," said Lawrence H. Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, during an appearance Sunday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "What that company did, the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching, what's proved necessary - is outrageous."
Mr. Summers suggested, however, that the government's ability to require the bonuses be scaled back was restricted by preexisting contracts, even though he did not specify what those restrictions may be.
"We are a country of law," said Mr. Summers, one of several economic officials to hit the Sunday-morning talk show circuit. "There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system."
Mr. Summers also appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation," remained consistent in his core message about the bonuses: "It is outrageous. The whole situation at AIG is outrageous. What taxpayers are being forced to do is outrageous."
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, worried about the message the bonuses send to other companies receiving bailout money. "If you're going to take the government as a partner, the message here, I'm afraid, to any business out there that's thinking about taking government money, is "Let's enter into a bunch of contracts real quick, and we'll have the taxpayers pay bonuses to our employees,' " he said on "This Week." Mr. McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, also criticized the Obama administration.
"For them to simply sit there and blame it on the previous administration or claim contract - we all know that contracts are valid in this country, but they need to be looked at," he said. "Did they enter into these contracts knowing full well that, as a practical matter, the taxpayers of the United States were going to be reimbursing their employees? Particularly employees who got them into this mess in the first place. I think it's an outrage."
A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, has defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.
"We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses - which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers - if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury," he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.
Still, Mr. Liddy seemed stung by his talk with Mr. Geithner, calling their conversation last Wednesday "a difficult one for me" and noting that he receives no bonus himself. "Needless to say, in the current circumstances," Mr. Liddy wrote, "I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them."
An A.I.G. spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had no comment beyond the letter. The bonuses were first reported by The Washington Post.
The senior government official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the administration was outraged. "It is unacceptable for Wall Street firms receiving government assistance to hand out million-dollar bonuses, while hard-working Americans bear the burden of this economic crisis," the official said.
Of all the financial institutions that have been propped up by taxpayer dollars, none has received more money than A.I.G. and none has infuriated lawmakers more with practices that policy makers have called reckless.
The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.'s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars' worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.
The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.
Mr. Liddy, whom Federal Reserve and Treasury officials recruited after A.I.G. faltered last September and received its first round of bailout money, said the bonuses and "retention pay" had been agreed to in early 2008 and were for the most part legally required.
The company told the Treasury that there were two categories of bonus payments, with the first to be given to senior executives. The administration official said Mr. Geithner had told A.I.G. to revise them to protect taxpayer dollars and tie future payments to performance.
The second group of bonuses covers some 2008 retention payments from contracts entered into before government involvement in A.I.G. Indeed, in his letter to Mr. Geithner, Mr. Liddy wrote that he had shown the details of the $450 million bonus pool to outside lawyers and been told that A.I.G. had no choice but to follow through with the payment schedule.
The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.
But the official said the administration will force A.I.G. to eventually repay the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers as part of the agreement with the firm, which is being restructured.
A.I.G. did cut other bonuses, Mr. Liddy explained, but those were part of the compensation for people who dealt in other parts of the company and had no direct involvement with the derivatives.
Mr. Liddy wrote that A.I.G. hoped to reduce its retention bonuses for 2009 by 30 percent. He said the top 25 executives at the financial products division had also agreed to reduce their salary for the rest of 2009 to $1.
Ever since it was bailed out by the government last fall, A.I.G. has been defending itself against accusations that it was richly compensating people who caused one of the biggest financial crises in American history.
A.I.G.'s main business is insurance, but the financial products unit sold hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall.
A.I.G. had set up a special bonus pool for the financial products unit early in 2008, before the company's near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear and there were concerns that some of the best-informed derivatives specialists might leave. It locked in a total amount, $450 million, for the financial products unit and prepared to pay it in a series of installments, to encourage people to stay.
Only part of the payments had been made by last fall, when A.I.G. nearly collapsed. In documents provided to the Treasury, A.I.G. said it was required to pay about $165 million in bonuses on or before Sunday. That is in addition to $55 million in December.
Under a deal reached last week, A.I.G. agreed that the top 50 executives would get half of the $9.6 million they were supposed to get by March 15. The second half of their bonuses would be paid out in two installments in July and in September. To get those payments, Treasury officials said, A.I.G. would have to show that it had made progress toward its goal of selling off business units and repaying the government. The financial products unit is now being painstakingly wound down.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, was one of the few officials on Sunday to temper his public reaction to the A.I.G. bonuses, saying he wanted more information.
"I do think it's important to know whether these are commission payments for products that brokers have sold, or whether this is, in fact, a bonus," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "And I think those are two very different things."
Mr. Corker added that the reaction to the bonuses might serve some good: "These entities that are receiving government money, unfortunately receiving government money, our money - I do think they have to play by a different set of rules, and hopefully that will cause institutions across this country not to want to take government money and quickly move away from us because of us getting under the hood like this."
Mary Williams Walsh contributed reporting from Washington and A.G. Sulzberger contributed reporting from New York.
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14) At A.I.G., Good Luck Following the Money
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15gret.html?hp
WE return this week to the subject of the American International Group, the giant insurer that has received $170 billion in taxpayer guarantees, because the clamor over its rescue continues to grow. Of concern to those on both Capitol Hill and Main Street is the secrecy surrounding the $50 billion funneled to A.I.G.'s counterparties since it nearly collapsed last fall.
Now that we live in bailout nation, why does the A.I.G. rescue rub so many the wrong way? Here is a hypothesis: Even as investors, employees, communities and taxpayers have been battered by the crippled financial system, A.I.G.'s counterparties were saved from losses on deals they struck with the insurer.
Add the fact that the government has resisted revealing these companies' identities or how much federal money they received, and it's easy to see why resentment boils. As a result of the A.I.G. rescue, taxpayers own almost 80 percent of the company. (Friday evening, as this column was going to press, rumors were swirling that A.I.G. might be releasing a list of all of its counterparties.)
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, said she had twice asked for a full accounting from Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which arranged the A.I.G. rescue. She has not received it.
"They have told others it is proprietary information," Ms. Maloney said in an interview. "But we are the proprietors now. Taxpayers own the store, and we should be able to see the books."
A.I.G., at one time the world's largest insurer, sold contracts to these sophisticated counterparties that theoretically protected them from losing money if the debt they had purchased defaulted. Known as credit default swaps, the contracts offer the same kind of protection a homeowner receives from an insurance policy against fires and other unforeseen calamities.
The arrangements behind the deals produced fees for A.I.G. while the firms buying the contracts got peace of mind. No one thought A.I.G. might have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in claims. Until, that is, A.I.G. came under financial pressure last year.
When the government stepped in to rescue A.I.G., its main and very reasonable concern was that a collapse of the insurer would drag down with it other big financial companies that were its customers. So the government shoveled taxpayers' money into A.I.G., beginning with an $85 billion loan last September.
Then the rescuer went mum.
Officials at the Fed, who continue to oversee the A.I.G. rescue, have taken the position that the terms of the insurers' contracts are confidential and that it would be wrong for the government to break those promises by naming recipients of taxpayer money. Another concern may have been that disclosures of A.I.G.'s counterparties might make investors and depositors uneasy about the well-being of the firms getting the money.
According to people briefed on the situation who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it, the counterparties that taxpayers have bailed out include Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and two French banks, Calyon and Société Générale. Along with other unidentified entities, the counterparties have received 30 percent of the $170 billion allocated to A.I.G. (Goldman has said that it had insulated itself from any financial damage that might have resulted from an A.I.G. collapse.)
Even A.I.G.'s own independent directors haven't been told which of the counterparties were paid, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
SUCH secrecy raised hackles because the insurance claims were paid off in full, even though widespread defaults on the underlying debt have not occurred. Why, many people wonder, did the Fed make A.I.G.'s counterparties whole on losses that have not happened yet? Why didn't it force these financial companies to close out the contracts at a discount, making them take what is known on Wall Street as a "haircut"?
Robert Arvanitis, chief executive of Risk Finance Advisors in Westport, Conn., and an expert in insurance, speculated that the United States was afraid that A.I.G.'s foreign bank counterparties would suffer large hits to their capital cushions, the amount they must set aside in case of losses.
"If somebody takes away the A.I.G. guarantee, all of a sudden the banks' capital ratios look bad," he said. "It might have stretched some of these banks."
Still, Mr. Arvanitis said, it is not clear that the government had to pay out 100 percent of the contracts' value to all the counterparties. Healthier institutions could have been persuaded to take a haircut, he said. "That is what tough negotiators do," he added.
The government installed Edward M. Liddy as chief executive of A.I.G. when the company was bailed out. A former chief executive of Allstate, Mr. Liddy was also a director at Goldman Sachs before he joined A.I.G.
And in January, the Fed appointed three trustees to oversee the insurer. Their job is to maximize the company's ability to repay amounts owed to the government and to ensure that A.I.G. is managed "in a manner that will not disrupt financial market conditions," according to the Fed.
The trustees are Jill M. Considine, former chairman of the Depository Trust Company and a former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Chester B. Feldberg, a former New York Fed official who was chairman of Barclays Americas from 2000 to 2008; and Douglas L. Foshee, chief executive of the El Paso Corporation and chairman of the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The trustees have already rankled a big A.I.G. shareholder. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees pension plan, which owns 18,000 shares of A.I.G. common stock, had put forward a shareholder proposal on executive pay that it hoped would be put to a vote at the company's annual meeting in May.
The proposal asked the company to adopt a policy requiring senior executives at A.I.G. to retain a significant percentage of the shares they received as compensation until two years after they left the company. Such a policy would help reward performance based on long-term value creation for shareholders, the pension plan said.
But Richard Ferlauto, the director of corporate governance and pension investment at Afscme, said A.I.G. trustees have indicated they oppose the proposal. But Kevin F. Barnard, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who represents the trustees, said they were still considering the proposal. "To my knowledge, they are batting ideas back and forth but have not made fixed decisions," he said.
Mr. Ferlauto said the compensation debate at A.I.G. would be yet another indication of how A.I.G. sees its relationship with those who continue to bail it out of trouble: taxpayers.
"If they do vote against a reasonable compensation reform," he said, "then it would be an appalling breach of faith with the American taxpayer."
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15) Has the Economy Hit Bottom Yet?
By VIKAS BAJAJ
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15vikas.html?hp
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
Still, we have to ask: was that the bottom we just hit?
After months of punishing economic news, the gloom seemed to lift last week if only for a moment. The stock market shot up 12 percent in four days. Two of the nation's biggest banks said they had returned to profitability. General Motors said it wouldn't need another $2 billion in government help this month. And retail sales were better than expected.
Then again, perhaps that's what passes for good news these days.
The market is still down by more than 50 percent since its high 17 months ago. Yes, the banks made money, but for just two months, and never mind the billions of bad assets that remain on their books. G.M. will still, in all likelihood, need billions in taxpayer help down the road and there's no guarantee it will survive. And those retail sales numbers? They were still bad, just not as bad as analysts were expecting.
Still, there was a sense among some economists and Wall Street analysts that if the bottom was not touched, perhaps the freefall was at least slowing. No less than Lawrence Summers, President Obama's top economic adviser, said on Friday that while the economic crisis would not end anytime soon, there were early signs that it was easing.
Which leads to a question: When we do hit the bottom - this year or years from now - how will we know?
There's no easy answer.
Mr. Galbraith was not the first or last economist to acknowledge fallibility at predicting turning points. (Just think back to assurances by top government officials in early 2007 that the growing problems with subprime mortgages were "contained.")
Forecasting the end of the current recession is even more difficult because it will hinge on how quickly and efficiently governments resolve the crisis in the banking system. Many investors continue to worry that the world's biggest financial institutions are insolvent, despite assurances from Washington that those firms have plenty of capital.
How political leaders diagnose and fix the banks will be critical. Analysts say misguided and erratic government responses exacerbated Japan's "lost decade" in the 1990s and the Depression of the 1930s. "The things that can screw it up are bad policies," said Thomas F. Cooley, dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University.
In the end, there's probably no way to know for sure that we've hit bottom until we're on the rebound. Still, analysts say there are some key indicators that might help in spotting a bottom and recovery at a time when it can be hard to see past the despair.
STOCKS
History shows that the stock market usually hits bottom before the economy does.
In October, Warren E. Buffett, one of the world's most successful investors, said he was buying American stocks because they usually rise "well before either sentiment or the economy." But even he acknowledged not having "the faintest idea" what would happen in the next month or year.
Since then, stocks have dropped by another 20 percent, and with the market at levels last seen in 1997, stocks are cheap by historical standards. The price-to-earnings ratio - which investors use to gauge how much they are paying for each dollar of corporate profit - is around 13, about 20 percent lower than the average of the last 130 years.
But many investors remain on the sidelines. Money market funds have swollen to $3.8 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion two years ago. And the cash banks are holding in their vaults and at the Federal Reserve has more than doubled in the last nine months.
What has made the current recession so pernicious is the eroding pressure of deflation, the general decline in prices that has hurt both businesses and consumers. They earn less and the value of their businesses and homes has fallen, yet they still owe as much as they did before, said Russell Napier, a consultant with Credit Lyonnais and author of "Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms."
He said he believed stocks would not rise until deflation ended and businesses could charge higher prices to pay off debts. Early indications suggest that this may be happening and that the stock market may be near the bottom, Mr. Napier said. He pointed to three indicators that often signal that economic growth and inflation are on the way - the prices of copper, corporate bonds and inflation-protected Treasury securities. Prices for all three are higher today than they were in November.
"All the indicators suggest you should be buying and not selling," he said. Still, Mr. Napier acknowledged that stocks, while cheap, could fall further. Measured by their 10-year price-to-earnings ratio, stocks were a lot less expensive in the early 1980s, when the ratio fell to less than seven, and in the 1930s, when it was below six.
Nouriel Roubini, the economics professor from New York University who predicted much of the current crisis, has warned that corporate earnings and stock prices could continue to fall, perhaps precipitously.
HOME PRICES
To determine whether home prices are still inflated, economist use ratios that compare the cost of buying a home to renting or to median family income. If the ratios move sharply higher, as they did in recent years, it suggests home prices might be inflated. When they are falling, as they are across the country and particularly in places like San Diego, Phoenix and Tampa, owning a home becomes more affordable.
Barry Ritholtz, a professional investor who writes the popular economics blog The Big Picture, has a simpler, more subjective, approach: Assume a young couple earning two modest incomes is looking to buy a two- or three-bedroom starter home in a middle-income neighborhood in your city. Can they qualify for a mortgage and afford to buy it?
"If the answer is no, then you are not at a bottom in housing," said Mr. Ritholtz, who estimates that the decline in national home prices is only half-complete.
Just as prices in the bubble did not go up uniformly in all parts of the country, they will not reach bottom together, said Ronald J. Peltier, chief executive of Home Services of America, a real estate brokerage firm.
In places like Riverside, Calif., and Miami, where homes are selling for half or less than what they sold for three or four years ago, real estate may be close to the bottom. One telling sign is that first-time home buyers and investors are snapping up homes, though they are mostly buying from banks selling foreclosed properties at deep discounts. Sales of existing homes in California jumped by more than 50 percent in January from a year earlier. But the median price was down more than 40 percent, to $224,000.
At the same time, prices have come down a lot less in urban areas like Manhattan and, not surprisingly, the number of homes being sold is down by as much as 50 percent from a year ago. Prices in these urban areas will have to fall much more before many young couples can afford starter homes.
Of course, those who bought at the peak of the market will suffer the greatest pain if they are forced to sell. But Mr. Peltier and other specialists say the current dismal market will only be resolved by lower prices, easier lending and an improving economy.
CONSUMER SPENDING
Americans like to buy things, and for at least the last decade, many economists assumed they would continue to spend on cars, clothes and the latest digital toy, good times or not. Consumer spending has rarely declined in the post-World-War-II era and when it has, it bounced back quickly.
The current recession is severely testing that article of faith. Personal consumption fell by about 1 percent in the second half of last year - the first sustained decline since 1980. Economists say consumption will be slow to recover because debt-saddled Americans are saving more or paying down debt. The savings rate - the amount of money consumers did not spend - jumped to about 3 percent late last year, from practically zero, still far below its postwar average of 7 percent.
A sign that consumption has hit bottom may come when the savings rate begins to flatten. Spending should then rebound as pent-up demand gives way. Car sales, for instance, have fallen to levels last seen in 1981, when the population of the United States was about three-quarters of what it is today. Many families are deferring car purchases and making do with what they have. Eventually, however, they will have to replace their aging vehicles.
In a study of economic cycles, Edward E. Leamer, an economist at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that auto sales and home building tended to lead recoveries.
An increase in international trade would be another early indicator that consumer spending here and abroad has hit the floor and begun to rebound.
After growing at an average of 7 percent a year for most of this decade, global trade was little changed from March to September last year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Many large economies including the United States, Japan and China have reported a sharp drop in exports and imports in recent months. There was more bad news on Friday, when the Commerce Department reported that exports from and imports to the United States fell by about 12 percent in January.
"Seeing global trade pick up would be a very positive sign," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard.
Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist at Citigroup, has another indicator for spotting when we have hit bottom: When we stop behaving like children in the backseat of the car asking their parents, "Are we there yet?"
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16) Administration Is Open to Taxing Health Benefits
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15health.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.
The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as "the largest middle-class tax increase in history." Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.
In television advertisements last fall, Mr. Obama criticized his Republican rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. The benefits have long been tax-free, regardless of how generous they are or how much an employee earns. The advertisements did not point out that Mr. McCain, in exchange, wanted to give all families a tax credit to subsidize the purchase of coverage.
At the time, even some Obama supporters said privately that he might come to regret his position if he won the election; in effect, they said, he was potentially giving up an important option to help finance his ambitious health care agenda to reduce medical costs and to expand coverage to the 46 million uninsured Americans. Now that Mr. Obama has begun the health debate, several advisers say that while he will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits, neither will he oppose it if Congress does so.
At a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat whose own health plan would make benefits taxable, asked Peter R. Orszag, the president's budget director, about the issue. Mr. Orszag replied that it "most firmly should remain on the table."
Mr. Orszag, an economist who has served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, has written favorably of taxing some employer-provided health benefits and using the revenue savings for other health-related incentives. So has another Obama adviser, Jason Furman, the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council.
They, like other proponents, cite evidence that tax-free benefits encourage what Mr. McCain called "gold-plated" policies, resulting in inefficient and costly demands for health care and pressure on employers to hold down workers' pay as insurance expenses rise. And, they say, the policy discriminates against those - many of whom are low-income workers - who do not have employer-provided coverage.
When Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, advocated taxing benefits at a recent hearing of the Finance Committee, which he leads, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner assured him that the administration was open to all ideas from Congress. Mr. Geithner did, however, allude to the position that Mr. Obama had taken as a candidate.
The administration's receptivity to the idea is owed partly to the advocacy of Mr. Baucus, whose committee has jurisdiction over tax policy and health programs, and to support from Republicans. There is less enthusiasm among Democrats in the House, though the health debate is at an early stage and no comprehensive plans are on the table.
Also, Mr. Obama's own idea for raising revenues for health care - limiting the income tax deductions that the most affluent taxpayers claim - has run into opposition not only from Mr. Baucus but also from his counterpart in the House, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Mr. Obama's proposed limit on deductions would raise an estimated $318 billion over 10 years, or half of his proposed "health care reserve fund." That is a fraction of the revenues that could be raised from taxing employer-provided health benefits.
In the campaign, Mr. McCain estimated that taxing all health benefits would raise $3.6 trillion over a decade - "a multitrillion-dollar tax hike," one Obama advertisement said.
The Congressional Budget Office says that including health benefits in taxable income could mean $246 billion in additional revenue for a single year. Stopping short of full taxation, as Mr. Baucus and others suggest, would mean less new revenue.
The latest government figures, for 2007, show that 70 percent of the 253 million people with health insurance received at least some of their coverage through employers. Employment-based insurance covers three-fifths of the population under 65.
Those who want to tax benefits in whole or in part make two main arguments. They say the tax exclusion is a generous subsidy that insulates employees from the true costs of health care, leading them to demand more of it and driving up overall costs. Critics also say the policy is unfair because it favors higher-income people. "It's too regressive," Mr. Baucus said. "It just skews the system."
But in a blueprint for health legislation that he issued last November, Mr. Baucus said taking the exclusion on health benefits out of the tax code would go "too far" and "cause widespread disruption in employer-based health benefits." Mr. Obama has also said he wants to preserve employer-provided coverage. Mr. Baucus, in his paper, cited other options, like taxing benefits above some value, taxing only wealthy employees or both.
However the proposal is devised, advocates will not have an easy time selling it.
Republicans, like Mr. McCain and former President George W. Bush before him, tend to favor taxing the benefits to finance other incentives for people to buy their own insurance. But given Mr. Obama's use of the issue in his campaign, Republicans are unlikely to support a change unless the president himself proposes it, a senior adviser to Senate Republicans said.
Many Democrats, especially House liberals, are opposed. "It's a dumb idea," said Representative Pete Stark of California, chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health. "We have to maintain as much as we can of the employer payments."
Administration officials often say they will not repeat the mistakes of former President Bill Clinton, whose plan for universal health insurance collapsed in 1994. But Frank B. McArdle, a health policy expert at Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm, said, "If President Obama agrees to cut back the tax break for employee health benefits, he will risk repeating one of Mr. Clinton's errors by disrupting health insurance for people who have it and like it."
Some big businesses consider nontaxable employment benefits a tool for recruiting and retaining workers. The United States Chamber of Commerce opposes eliminating the exclusion on health benefits, but James P. Gelfand, senior manager of health policy, said the group had not taken a position on limiting it.
Organized labor, a pillar of the Democratic Party base, considers the benefits among the union movement's historic achievements for the middle class. But a split could be developing between the manufacturing unions, which have negotiated rich benefit packages, and the growing service employees unions, which include many low-wage workers without generous benefits.
Alan V. Reuther, legislative director of the United Automobile Workers, said: "These proposals would represent a tax increase on working families. They would undermine good health care coverage."
But at the Service Employees International Union, which was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, Dennis Rivera, the coordinator of the union's health care campaign, said that while his organization was "predisposed not to agree to the taxing of health benefits," he would wait to pass judgment. The union, Mr. Rivera said, wants to see how any tax changes fit into the overall effort to revamp the health care system. "We need to see the total picture," he said.
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17) Arrests of 3 Dissidents in Ulster Killings Stir Riots
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/world/europe/15ulster.html?hp
LURGAN, Northern Ireland (AP) - Irish nationalist gangs hurled gasoline bombs at police officers on Saturday after three suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents were arrested on suspicion of killing two British soldiers in an attack designed to stir up wider violence in Northern Ireland.
Police officers in armored cars and flame-retardant suits said no members of their force were injured during the rising mob violence in the Irish Catholic end of Lurgan, a religiously divided town southwest of Belfast. Rioters also blocked the main railroad that goes between Belfast and Dublin, which runs alongside the town's hard-line Kilwilkie district.
The police also said they arrested a 37-year-old man and 30-year-old woman, and seized a gun and ammunition in the neighboring town of Craigavon, where I.R.A. dissidents shot to death a police officer on Monday.
The police would not say whether those arrests and the arms were connected to the March 7 shooting of the soldiers or the killing of the police officer.
The unrest came in direct response to the arrest on Saturday of Colin Duffy, 41, who was a top I.R.A. figure. The police arrested two other suspected I.R.A. dissidents in the overwhelmingly Catholic village of Bellaghy - all on suspicion of shooting to death the two soldiers.
The police arrested two teenage rioters and advised drivers to stay away from the Catholic north side of Lurgan to avoid having their cars seized and burned as road barricades.
The police long considered Mr. Duffy the I.R.A. godfather of Lurgan and twice charged him with murders in the town in the run-up to the I.R.A.'s 1997 cease-fire, which breakaway factions are now trying to destroy.
Mr. Duffy was convicted of killing a former soldier in Lurgan in 1993, but he was freed on appeal three years later after the main witness against him was identified as a member of an outlawed Protestant gang.
He was back in jail within a year after the police identified him as the gunman who committed the I.R.A.'s last two killings before its cease-fire.
The prosecutors' case against Mr. Duffy collapsed after the main witness withdrew her testimony.
The arrests on Saturday came a week after the Real I.R.A. splinter group fired more than 60 bullets at several unarmed, off-duty soldiers outside an army base as they collected pizzas, the first of two deadly gun attacks against British security forces.
Two soldiers died and four other people were seriously wounded, including two deliverymen.
The I.R.A. dissidents next struck Monday when Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot fatally in Craigavon. A different splinter group, the Continuity I.R.A., claimed responsibility.
A 17-year-old boy and two men have been arrested since Tuesday on suspicion of involvement in the killing of the police officer.
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