Was the "Credit Crunch" a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam?

Monday 29 December 2008

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by: Joshua Holland, AlterNet

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan, also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, has been accused of having little oversight and little effect on the financial meltdown. (Photo: Getty Images)

Even as the media continue to repeat the claim that credit has frozen up, evidence has emerged suggesting the entire story is wrong.

There is something approaching a consensus that the Paulson Plan -- also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP -- was a boondoggle of an intervention that's flailed from one approach to the next, with little oversight and less effect on the financial meltdown.

But perhaps even more troubling than the ad hoc nature of its implementation is the suspicion that has recently emerged that TARP -- hundreds of billions of dollars worth so far -- was sold to Congress and the public based on a Big Lie.

President George W. Bush, fabulist-in-chief, articulated the rationale for the program in that trademark way of his -- as if addressing a nation of slow-witted 12-year-olds -- on Sept. 24: "Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse ... [and] began holding onto their money, and lending dried up, and the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt." Bush said that if Congress didn't give Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson the trillion dollars (give or take) for which he was asking, the results would be disastrous: "Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession."

For the most part, the press has continued to echo Bush's central assertion that there's a "credit crunch" preventing even qualified borrowers -- that's the key point -- from getting loans, and it's now part of the conventional wisdom.

But a number of economists are questionioning the factual basis of the credit crunch narrative. Columnist David Sirota recently looked at those claims and concluded that Americans "had been punk'd" -- that "the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false," and the threat of a systemic banking crash was used by the Bush administration to overcome popular resistance to the "bailout."

It's a reasonable conclusion; this is an administration that used the threat of thousands of al-Qaida sleeper cells in the United States to sell Congress on the Patriot Act, the specter of mushroom clouds rising over American cities to push through the Iraq war resolution and the supposedly imminent crash of the Social Security system to push for privatizing Americans' retirement savings.

But the question comes down to what they knew and when they knew it. The analyses that suggest the whole credit crunch narrative is false are based on data that lagged behind the numbers that policymakers had available, in real time, back in September. So the question -- probably unanswerable at this point -- comes down to whether or not they looked at the situation and in good faith believed that pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system would contain the damage and save an economy teetering on the brink of collapse.

What Else Could Be Happening?

Of course, no one disputes the fact that as the economy has tanked, the number of new loans being issued to American families and businesses has plummeted. But is because credit has dried up for qualified borrowers?

Economist Dean Baker doesn't think so. He explains the situation in simple terms: The media, he argues, "are blaming the economic collapse on a 'credit crunch' instead of the more obvious problem that consumers just lost $6 trillion of housing wealth and another $8 trillion of stock wealth." It's a commonsense argument: much of the economic growth of the Bush era existed on paper only, built on the rise of a massive bubble in real estate values rather than growth in productive industries. When all that ephemeral wealth vaporized -- and with the economy shedding jobs like a dog with dermatitis -- consumers stopped buying, and businesses, anticipating a long slowdown, stopped seeking the loans that they might have otherwise tapped to expand their operations.

Whether good borrowers can't get credit from banks because the latter are hoarding cash or lending has stopped because of a drop-off in demand for new loans is not some wonky academic debate; it's of crucial significance. Because if lending to qualified parties has truly frozen, then even if the specific implementation of the Paulson Plan was deeply flawed, its broad approach -- "recapitalizing" banks in various ways, buying up some of their crappy paper and guaranteeing some of their transactions -- is fundamentally sound.

If, on the other hand, the primary problem is that people are broke and maxed out on debt, and firms aren't looking for money to expand, then the kind of massive stimulus package being considered by the Obama transition team and congressional Dems -- largely designed to stimulate demand from the bottom up, with public works projects, tax cuts for working families, aid to tapped-out state and municipal governments and new money for unemployment and food stamps -- is obviously the best approach to take.

Broadly speaking, these are the parameters of the debate in Washington, and that means that properly diagnosing the underlying problem is crucially important.

Is the Credit Crunch a Big Lie?

There's plenty of evidence that Baker's right. He points out that even though mortgage rates have plummeted, the number of applications for new loans has dropped to very low levels and argues it's "the most glaring refutation of the claim that people are unable to get credit." If creditworthy applicants were being denied loans by banks unable or unwilling to lend, Baker explains, "then the ratio of mortgage applications to home sales should be soaring" as qualified homebuyers apply to multiple banks for a loan. "Since there is no notable increase in this ratio, access to credit is obviously not an issue."

Again, this is common sense. Consumer spending drives about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, and in recent years, much of that spending was financed by people taking chunks of home equity out of their properties -- people might have been eating in fancy restaurants, but they were essentially eating their living rooms to do so.

That the American people don't have the appetite to go deeper into debt than they already are in order to make new purchases is hard to dispute. In November, consumer prices across the board fell at a record rate for the second month in a row. And even with mortgage rates plummeting, so many homeowners are "underwater" -- owing more on their homes than they're worth -- that they're unable to refinance because the equity isn't there. Paul Schuster, a vice president at Marketplace Home Mortgage, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "What I'm really concerned about is the job picture ... If (people) don't feel good about their jobs, rates aren't going to matter."

The National Federal of Independent Business' November survey of small-business owners found no evidence of a credit crunch to date, concluding that if "credit is going untapped, it's largely because company operators are not choosing to pursue the credit. It's not that companies can't get the extra money, it's that they don't want or need it because of the broader slowdown in economic activity."

The credit crunch narrative -- and the justification for creating Paulson's $700 billion TARP honeypot -- is built on three related assertions: 1) banks, fearing that they'll be unable to meet their own financial obligations, aren't lending money to one another; 2) they're also not lending to the public at large -- neither to firms nor individuals; and 3) businesses are further unable to raise money through ordinary channels because investors aren't eager to buy up corporate debt, including commercial paper issued by companies with decent balance sheets.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota's research department -- V.V. Chari and Patrick Kehoe of the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern University's Lawrence Christiano -- crunched the Fed's numbers in an examination of these bits of conventional wisdom (PDF), and concluded that all three claims are myths.

The researchers found that "interbank lending is healthy" and "bank credit has not declined during the financial crisis"; that they've seen "no evidence that the financial crisis has affected lending to non-financial businesses" and that "while commercial paper issued by financial institutions has declined, commercial paper issued by non-financial institutions is essentially unchanged during the financial crisis." The researchers called on lawmakers to "articulate the precise nature of the market failure they see, [and] to present hard evidence that differentiates their view of the data from other views."

That finding was backed up by a study issued by Celent Financial Services, a consulting firm, again using the Treasury Department's own data. According to a story on the report by Reuters, Celent's researchers concluded that the "data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well." Rather than a widespread banking problem, Celent found that the rot was limited to "a few big, vocal banks and industries such as car manufacturing, which would be in difficulty anyway."

There are also some important caveats. Economists at the Boston Federal Reserve responded to the Minnesota Fed's research (PDF), arguing that the use of aggregate data doesn't fully reflect the dysfunction in specific subsectors of the economy, nor does it adequately reflect the decline in new loans.

It's also the case that single-cause explanations for complex crises usually fail to hit the mark. Banks, having fueled the housing bubble (and similar bubbles before that) with the creation of ever-shadier "exotic" securities, are probably erring on the side of caution in writing new loans. They're looking at their balance sheets as quarterly reports approach, and the number of foreign investment dollars coming into the U.S. has declined, meaning that some qualified firms may, indeed, have trouble raising cash in the near future.

Dean Baker, while arguing that "the main story is that people don't have money and therefore want to spend," acknowledged that "some banks are undoubtedly anticipating more write-offs from other loans going bad, so they will hang on to their capital now rather than make new loans." And, as Sirota notes, some of the institutions that are relatively healthy are reportedly holding cash in anticipation of picking up weaker banks on the cheap.

But one thing is clear: the economic crisis may have woken up Washington's political class when it hit the banks, but it remains a product of long-term imbalances in the economy, and the idea that it's primarily a pathology of the banking system in isolation is a misdiagnosis that, if uncorrected, can only result in a longer, deeper and more painful recession than might otherwise be the case.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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Obama to Face Critical Immigration Test Early

Wednesday 31 December 2008

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by: Silla Brush, The Hill

Francisco Javier Hernandez, from Zacatecas, Mexico, gains US citizenship during naturalization ceremonies at the Los Angeles Convention Center. (Photo: Getty Images)

President-elect Obama will likely make several tough decisions on immigration policy during his first few months in office, even if he postpones wide-ranging reform until later in his first term.

Obama will be under pressure from interest groups to review or drop several administrative policies aimed at curbing illegal immigration, which President Bush enacted after he failed in 2007 to persuade lawmakers to pass broad legislation that would have put millions of immigrants on a path to citizenship.

"I think immigration is shaping up to be an issue that he is going to face a consensus of pressure," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. "There is no reason a number of administrative actions can't be put into place in the first 100 days."

Immigration was not one of the top policy objectives laid out by Obama during the campaign. But labor, business and immigrant-rights groups sense an opportunity to push their agenda after Hispanic voters broke in large numbers for Obama and helped him win four battleground states: Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and Nevada. Noorani wants to see legislative movement on an overhaul of the country's immigration laws by Thanksgiving of 2009.

The Obama transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

The executive decisions Obama will inherit are relatively tame compared to the political firestorm Bush set off when he called for the most sweeping changes to immigration law in two decades - which included legalizing the undocumented population. Opponents criticized those efforts as providing "amnesty" to millions of illegal immigrants.

When the legislative effort fizzled, Bush settled for pursuing a more measured approach through stepped-up Border Patrol efforts and workplace enforcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as well as supporting ways to check whether employers have workers who are in the country illegally.

"The administration acted when Congress failed," said Laura Keehner, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. "We had a number of different initiatives that we thought were important to gain back the people's trust to ensure our borders and crack down on illegal immigration. We have been working with the transition team to ensure they're aware of the important issues that will face them on day one. We have made no secret of how we think they should be dealt with going forward."

Several of those efforts are now subject to either congressional reauthorization or action by federal courts. Immigrant-rights advocates and their allies in the business community are ramping up their calls for significant changes or wholesale reversals. Advocates for immigrants are also looking to make hay out of the recession, arguing that the Bush administration's executive policies have further hurt employers and workers.

Workplace raids around the country in recent months have been only the most public of the Bush administration's efforts. Immigrant-rights advocates have criticized the raids heavily and intend to pressure Obama to shift course early in his administration.

Meanwhile, the advocates are pushing their cause in two legal cases that will likely be decided early in Obama's administration.

In the first case, pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Bush administration is defending an administrative rule that cracks down on employers with illegal immigrant workers. The rule would require employers to fire workers who cannot resolve discrepancies stemming from when their names do not match information in the Social Security Administration database. The legal battle over the "no match" letter rule has been waged since late 2007, but immigrant-rights lawyers expect a ruling in March or April.

The immigrant-rights community says the rule would go into effect at a bad economic time. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a key plaintiff in the case and supporter of expanding immigrant rights, commissioned an economic study earlier this year that found the rule could cost employers at least $1 billion per year. The study also showed that the rule could affect between 37,000 and 165,000 authorized workers who are unable to resolve the paperwork discrepancies.

The plaintiffs plan to make the economic argument central to their legal case early next year.

"This would be a disaster for U.S workers and U.S. small businesses even without the current economic crisis," said Laura Reiff, counsel to the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition. "To implement a rule like this that destabilizes the workforce so significantly would put the economy in more of a tailspin."

Opponents of ending Bush's executive orders believe the troubled economy makes the case for tighter illegal immigration policies.

"It seems to me this is exactly the time to purge illegal workers, because Americans can't get jobs," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes the expansion of immigration rights.

The immigrant-rights lobby says that the incoming administration could drop the government's legal case and let the rule fall by the wayside, or Obama could specifically lift the rule.

"The Obama administration could come in and settle it," said Randy Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Reiff said she expected the immigrant-rights community to prevail in court. "But it would gives us a little more comfort if the Obama administration lifted the rule," Reiff said.

Immigrant-rights advocates are also tackling a related homeland security system called E-Verify. The program, which Obama has supported, allows companies to voluntarily check whether their workers can be employed.

Keehner, the DHS spokeswoman, said there is "very little" reason for a company to avoid using the system, "unless you are for some reason in favor of hiring illegal immigrants."

The program is up for congressional reauthorization in March, but the more pressing matter is a planned expansion of the system next month.

The Bush administration issued an executive order requiring that federal contractors or subcontractors use the system. That has raised the ire of immigrant-rights advocates.

The Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit in federal court just last week against the proposed expansion. Unless there is a court injunction, the expansion will take effect on Jan. 15, less than a week before Obama is inaugurated.

"The DHS intends to expand E-Verify on an unprecedented scale in a very short timeframe, and to impose liability on government contractors who are unable to comply," Johnson said. "Given the current economy, now is not the time to add more bureaucracy and billions of dollars in compliance costs to America's businesses."

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Beyond Bailouts: On the Politics of Education After Neoliberalism

Wednesday 31 December 2008

by: Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Financial news streams at Nasdaq's studio in Times Square in New York. (Photo: Q. Sakamaki / Redux)

As the financial meltdown reaches historic proportions, free-market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism as it is called in some quarters, is losing both its claim to legitimacy and its claims on democracy. Once upon a time a perceived bastion of liberal democracy, the social state is being recalled from exile, as the decades-long conservative campaign against the alleged abuses of "big government" - its euphemism for a form of governance that assumed a measure of responsibility for the education, health and general welfare of its citizens - has been widely discredited. Not only have the starving and drowning efforts of the Right been revealed in all their malicious cruelty, but government is about to have a Cinderella moment; it is about to become "cool," as Prince Charming-elect Barack Obama famously put it. The idea has enchanted many. The economist and recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, has argued that the correct response to the current credit and financial crisis is to "greatly expand the role of government to rescue an ailing economy," with the proviso that all new government programs must be devoid of even a hint of corruption.(1) Bob Herbert has called for more government regulation to offset the dark cloud of impoverishment that resulted from the last thirty years of deregulation, privatization and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.(2) And there are others, sophisticated thinkers all, such as Dean Baker, David Korten, Naomi Klein and Joseph E. Stiglitz, who have traced the roots of the current financial crisis to the adaptation of neoliberal economic policy, which fostered a grim alignment among the state, corporate capital and transnational corporations. Even New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman has found a way to live comfortably with the idea. He wants to retool the country's educational mainframe, teaching young people to be more creative in their efforts to build "the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure," - even as the stated goal unhappily recapitulates the neoliberal fantasy that unchecked growth cures all social ills.(3) And a contrite Alan Greenspan, erstwhile disciple of Ayn Rand, recently admitted before a Congressional committee that he may have made a mistake in assuming "that enlightened self-interest alone would prevent bankers, mortgage brokers, investment bankers and others from gaming the system for their own personal financial benefit."(4)

With the exception of Greenspan and Friedman, all of these economists and intellectuals have rejected a market fundamentalism that: dismantled the historically guaranteed social provisions provided - however partially and imperfectly - by the welfare state; defined consumerism and profit-making as the essence of democratic citizenship, and equated freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to govern economic relations free of government regulation. In doing so, they have repudiated the neoliberal dystopian vision that there are no alternatives to a market-driven society, which adhered to the inviolability and inevitability of economic law. And they have condemned a market rationality that advanced private interests as it sold off public goods and services, that sought to invest only in corporate and private sectors as it starved the social. The neoliberal mantra that There Is No Alternative has been replaced by a new, equally insistent and increasingly pervasive call for reform and regulation. With the evils of a neoliberal "voodoo" economics exposed at long last, we can look forward to the dawn of a new democratic age.

Unfortunately, what so many writers and scholars have taken for granted in their thoughtful criticisms of neoliberalism and their calls for immediate economic reform is the presupposition that we have on hand and in stock generations of young people and adults who have somehow been schooled for the last several decades in an entirely different set of values and cultural attitudes, who do not equate the virtue of reason with an ethically truncated instrumental rationality, who know alternative sets of social relations that are irreducible to the rolls of buyer and seller, and who are not only intellectually prepared but morally committed to the staggering challenges that comprehensive reform requires. This is where the fairy tale ending to an era of obscene injustice careens headlong into reality. Missing from the roadmaps that lead us back out of Alice's rabbit hole, back out of a distorted world where reason and judgment don't apply, is precisely the necessity to understand the success of neoliberalism as a pervasive political and educational force, a pedagogy and form of governance that couples "forms of knowledge, strategies of power and technologies of self."(5) Neoliberalism not only transformed economic agendas throughout the overdeveloped world, it transformed politics, restructured social relations, produced an array of reality narratives (not unlike reality TV) and disciplinary measures that normalized its perverted view of citizenship, the state and the supremacy of market relations. In the concerted effort to reverse course, dare one not take account of the profound emotional appeal, let alone ideological hold, of neoliberalism on the American public? The success of a market ideology that has produced shocking levels of inequality and impoverishment and a market morality that has spawned rapacious greed and corruption should raise fundamental questions. How did market rule prove capable of enlisting in such a compelling way the consent of the vast majority of Americans, who cast themselves, no less, in the role of the "moral majority?" The refusal of such an analysis, framed nonetheless as a response, by many theorists (including many leftists) typically explains that working people "do not, under normal circumstances, care deeply about anything beyond the size of their paychecks."(6) But this is too quick, and far too inadequate. We argue that matters of popular consciousness, public sentiment and individual and social agency are far too important as part of a larger political and educational struggle not be taken seriously by those who advocate the long and difficult project of democratic reform.

Tragically, few intellectuals providing critical commentary on the financial and credit crisis offer any insights regarding how the educational force of the culture actually works pedagogically to reproduce neoliberal ideology, values, identifications and consent. How exactly is it possible to imagine a more just, more equitable transformation in government and economics without a simultaneous transformation in culture, consciousness, social identities and values? We are not implying a vulgar economism is at work in such commentaries in our new and sophisticated information age, but there is a tendency to undertheorize the important relationship between the production of neoliberal economics, popular consent, cultural politics and pedagogy. In doing so, the primacy of the force and influence of formal and informal educational sites, or the apparatuses of what we call public pedagogy, which have mediated the ever-shifting and dynamic modes of common sense for the past several decades remains invisible and so unchecked. Yet the formation of this common sense, which nonetheless served to legitimate the institutional arrangements of a rapacious capitalism, shifting class formations and colorblinding racial logics, has emerged alongside a number of significant and unsettling cultural transformations, to name a few of the most phenomenal: the now much-discussed culture of fear; the hyperindividualization and isolation of expanding consumer society; the ideology of privatization and the dissolution of social totality (and with visions of the good society); and the creation of the punishing state organized around the criminalization of social problems.(7) Indeed, the current focus on the rationality of exchange and exploitation does not capture the fate of those populations - refugees, jobless youth, the poor, immigrants, black and Latino communities - who came to exemplify all that was allegedly wrong with social safety nets that produced pathological forms of dependency, who were often the unwitting targets of the war on crime and the war on terror, as it played out on the domestic front. These, moreover, are populations increasingly rendered disposable not only because they exist outside any productive notion of what it means to be a citizen-consumer, but because of a decades-long racist campaign that invented cultural deficits and deficiencies raising the specter of contagion and threat. The questions we need to be asking ourselves extend beyond how we proceed with competent and effective economic reform. There is a neoliberal logic that extends beyond the economic. We must also consider how we dismantle the culture of fear, how we learn to think beyond the narrow dictates of instrumental rationalities, how we decriminialize certain identities, how we depathologize the concept of dependency and recognize it as our common fate, how we reclaim the public good, how we reconstitute, in short, a viable and sustainable democratic society.

Does it not seem odd, for example, that we bemoan the lack of a culture of service among young college graduates and at the same time seek to improve an educational system by implementing school policy that financially rewards students for scholastic achievement? Is it not a bit naive to assume that such policy can end in any other way than a "pay to play" mentality? We must surely reform our financial institutions and our economic philosophies more generally, but so too must we reform those institutions, professional competencies, and social identities altered by decades of neoliberal rule. And that will prove a most challenging endeavor. It will require that universities, news media, hospitals and clinics, schools and other institutions return critical and reflexive decision-making capacities to professors, journalists, doctors, nurses, teachers and others and away from accountants and middle managers. It means that the bottom line will not determine curricula or shape research agendas; it will not drive the news media, determine a course of medical treatment or fix the outcome of clinical trials. Once-trusted relations between doctors and patients, teachers and students, parents and children will no longer suffer the flatting out of their respective rolls to that of buyer and seller.

In spite of the crucial connection between various modes of domination and pedagogy, there is little input from progressive social theorists of what it might mean to theorize how education as a form of cultural politics actually constructs particular modes of address, identification, affective investments and social relations that produce consent and complicity with the ethos and practice of neoliberalism. Hence, while the current economic crisis has called into question the economic viability of neoliberal values and policies, it often does so by implying that neoliberal rationality can be explained through an economic optic alone, and consequently gives the relationship of politics, culture and inequality scant analysis. Neoliberal rationality is lived and legitimated in relation to the intertwining of culture, politics and meaning. Any viable challenge to the culture of neoliberalism as well as the current economic crisis it has generated must address not merely the diffuse operations of power throughout civil society and the globe, but also what it means to engage those diverse educational sites producing and legitimating neoliberal common sense, whether they be newspapers, advertising, the Internet, television or more recent spheres developed as part of the new information revolution. In addition, it is crucial to examine what role public intellectuals, think tanks, the media and universities actually play pedagogically in constructing and legitimating neoliberal world views, and how the latter works pedagogically in producing neoliberal subjects and securing consent.

Politics is not simply about the production and protection of economic formations; it is also about the production of individuals, desires, identifications, values and modes of understanding for inhabiting the ideological and institutional forms that make up a social order. At the very least, any attempt to both understand the current crisis and what it would mean to produce a new kind of subject willing to invest in and struggle for a democratic society needs to raise another set of questions in addition to those currently posed. For example: What educational challenges would have to be addressed in overcoming the deeply felt view in American culture that criticism is destructive, or for that matter a deeply rooted anti-intellectualism reinforced daily through various forms of public pedagogical address made available by talk radio and the televisual infotainment sectors?[7] How might we engage pedagogical practices that open up a culture of questioning that enables people to resist and reject neoliberal assumptions that decouples private woes from public considerations, reduces citizenship to consumerism and makes free-market ideology coterminous with democracy? What are the implications of theorizing education, pedagogy and the practice of learning as essential to social change and where might such interventions take place? How might it be possible to theorize the pedagogical importance of the new media and the new modes of political literacy and cultural production they employ, or to analyze the circuits of power, translation and distribution that make up neoliberalism's vast pedagogical apparatus - extending from talk radio and screen culture to the Internet and newspapers? At stake here is both recognizing the importance of the media as a site of public pedagogy and breaking the monopoly of information, which is a central pillar of neoliberal common sense. These are only some of the questions that would be central to any viable recognition of what it would mean to theorize education as a condition that enables both critique, understood as more than the struggle against incomprehension, and social responsibility as the foundation for forms of intervention that are oppositional and empowering. To imagine a simpler solution is to be sold on a fairy tale.

(1). Paul Krugman, "Barack Be Good," New York Times (December 26, 2008), p. A25.

(2). Bob Herbert, "Stop Being Stupid," New York Times (December 27, 2008), p. A19.

(3). Thomas L. Friedman, "Time to Reboot America," New York Times (December 24, 2008), p. A21.

(4). Deborah Jones Barrow, "Greenspan Shrugged? Did Any Rand Cause Our Financial Crisis?" WowOwow (October 24, 2008). Online: http://www.wowowow.com/post/greenspan-shrugged-did-ayn-rand-cause-our-financial-crisis-128286

(5).Thomas Lemke, "Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique," Paper presented at the Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Amherst (MA), September 21-24, 2000, Online: http://www.thomaslemkeweb.de/publikationen/Foucault,%20Governmentality,%20and%20Critique%20IV-2.pdf

(6). Ellen Willis, "Escape from Freedom: What's the Matter with Tom Frank (and the Lefties who Love Him)?" Situations 1:2 (2006), p. 9.

(7). This issue is taken up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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[NewsViewsnolose] US Justice Department covered up drug trafficking thru parts 8‏

newsviewsnolose@yahoogroups.com on behalf of dick.mcmanus

US Justice Department covered up and failure to prosecute drug trafficking

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/145 Part I

There is a summary of the number of cases/investigations at then end of this part two.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/146 Part II

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/152 Part III

The follow sections are a summary of Rodney Stich's book Drugging America - the Trojan Horse http://www.pbsblog.com/pdf/EDrugging_America_part.pdf

US Justice Department covered up drug trafficking part four
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/156


part five
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/158

part six
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/159

part seven
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/160


part 8
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/message/161


Some Unknown History of the U.S.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SomeUnknownUSHistory/


Project Censored news stories up to the end of 2008

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009/

Fission Stories: Nuclear Power's Secrets
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id2165/pg1/index

__._,_.___

BREVITAS

CRASH TALK

BBC - House prices in 20 US cities fell by a record annual rate of 18.04% in October, according to the The S&P/Case-Shiller home price survey. . . David Blitzer, of Standard & Poor's said that "home prices are back to their March 2004 levels". . . The city which showed the biggest price-fall was Phoenix, where home prices plunged 32.6% in the year to October - followed by Las Vegas, which was down 31.7% and San Francisco, down 31%.

Naftali Bendavid, Wall Street Journal - Democratic leaders are increasingly concerned that they won't be able to offer an economic stimulus package for congressional debate until late January because they haven't received a plan from President-elect Barack Obama's transition team. . .

Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added, "I had been hoping that the timetable would be this week" for having a proposal in hand. But Mr. Obey said Mr. Obama's team, which recently met with congressional committee leaders, is still determining the details of the package it wants. "The Obama people are still trying to chew through all of that, to decide what they think works and what doesn't at this stage," Mr. Obey said. . .

"First we've got to have some signals called by Obama," Mr. Obey said. "It's hard to negotiate with somebody if the other party hasn't decided what they want out of the negotiations."

OBAMA LAND

BBC - Barack Obama says he agrees with Senate Democrats that they should not accept the man chosen by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to replace him as senator. . . The president-elect said he agreed the Senate "cannot accept" a new senator chosen by Mr Blagojevich, adding that Mr Blagojevich himself should resign.

Obama Meter: down one. Current score: 19%

OUTLYING PRECINCTS

Radar - The New York press has started to stick a fork in Caroline Kennedy's bid to be appointed to the senate seat which will be vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. . . "The wheels of the bandwagon are coming off,'' wrote the New York Daily News while New York Post State Editor Fred Dicker has already declared her one of the losers of 2008. Even the liberal New York Times called her frustratingly "vague (and) undefined and seemingly determined to remain that way.'' Blogs have taunted her for the number of "you know" and "ums" she used in recent media interviews.

Daniel De Groot, Open Left - Obama's cabinet includes two each of sitting Governors and Senators (Clinton, Salazar, Richardson, Napolitano). You might include Biden too, making the score 3 and 2. The significance is that all of these have given up powerful, independent roles in the Presidential feeder leagues for subservient roles within the Presidency. If you look at the Republican side, McCain had no shortage of eager Senators and Governors willing to be his VP either. For Bush's first cabinet, he didn't pick any sitting Senators, but he did pick 2 sitting governors, and at least 2 others were under serious consideration. Similarly for Obama, it is pretty clear he could have had even more Senators (Kerry, Murray, Dodd) and Governors (Granholm, Blagojevich) if he had wanted them. . . Clearly things have changed, and the Presidency is now the best game in town, or out of it.

POLICE BLOTTER

Houston Chronicle - The number of crashes at Houston intersections with red-light cameras doubled in the first year after their installation, according to a city-financed study. . . Critics of the initiative, which mails $75 civil fines to drivers photographed running red lights at 50 intersections, said the study shows that cameras actually cause more crashes and bolsters their argument that the program is more about generating revenue than protecting the public.

Portland Press Herald, ME - Freeze! A Portland man faces charges of burglary and drunken driving after his arrest atop a Zamboni machine at the Cumberland County Civic Center early Tuesday morning. Adam Patterson, 23, had inadvertently summoned the Portland Fire Department to the civic center by driving a forklift, with the forks raised, into part of the sprinkler system, setting off an alarm, police said. Firefighters responded at 2 a.m. to find Patterson trying to drive the large ice resurfacer, which was against an interior wall and not on any ice, police said. . .

INAUGURAL INFO

DC GOVERNMENT UPDATES

WASHINGTON CITY PAPER

TEN MYTHS ABOUT DC

RECOVERED HISTORY

David Rose, Vanity Fair, April 2008 - Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.) But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme "Iran-contra 2.0," recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.'s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

FURTHERMORE. . . .

Tom Sherwood, NBC Washington - According to HCD Research of Flemington, N.J., (mediacurves.com) 62 percent of Americans in a national poll said they would break the law and illegally pay off a state governor in order to get a job that pays $100,000 a year if they were guaranteed not to get caught. And 58 percent of the 808 Americans surveyed said they would make a payoff -- if it were possible to do so without consequences -- to fix a reckless driving offense, obtain quality medical coverage or receive improper help to save a business.

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YOU DON'T NEED GIZMOS TO BUILD GREEN

Tree Hugger - Tree Hugger is full of photovoltaic glass and ground source heat pumps, but ultimately all of those "green gizmos", as Donovan Rypkema called them, cost a lot of money to buy and to maintain. But he is just one of a growing movement of architects who are making the case that people have known for hundreds, maybe thousands of years how to build in ways that save energy and adapt to climate instead of trying to bludgeon it into submission. Steve Mouzon is another. He writes: "Originally, before the Thermostat Age, the places we built had no choice but to be green, otherwise people would freeze to death in the winter, die of heat strokes by summer, or other really bad things would happen to them."

Mouzon is crazed about the focus on the gadgetry of green, or Gizmo Green. This notion that we can simply invent more efficient mechanisms, and throw in some bamboo to boot, is only a small part of real sustainability. First, we must build sustainable places, because it does not matter what the carbon footprint of a building is if you have to drive everywhere in order to live there.

He understands also that while a sustainable building must be durable, flexible and frugal, it must first be lovable, "because it does not matter how efficiently the building performs if it is demolished and carted off to the landfill in a generation or two because it cannot be loved."

Lisa Selin Davis in Grist gives some examples of buildings that work:

"Take, for instance, the kind of architecture Mouzon prefers to reference, French Acadian -- or Cajun, as it came to be known in Louisiana. These houses were made of locally found cypress wood, which just happened to be naturally mold-resistant and didn't rot in the relentlessly hot, wet weather. They had steeply hipped roofs to keep out the hot sun; the roofs hung over long galleries and porches, which promoted air circulation -- no AC needed. Another style found in New Orleans, the shotgun, has tall windows that help cool the houses naturally. Cape Cods have centrally located fireplaces and low ceilings to heat efficiently during frigid winters.

"Mouzon's idea is to make houses work like that again, to respect regional differences and make houses that work with the environments in which they sit. "It's time to put architecture back to work again," he says. "There really ought to be an architecture that is appropriate to regional climates."

HEAT WAVES ARE NATURE'S BIG KILLER

Dan Shapley, Daily Green - A new "death map" compiled by researchers at the University of South Carolina shows that heat waves kill more Americans than any other type of natural disaster, despite the common perception that hurricanes and tornadoes are the most dangerous weather event. . .

An August study found that heat waves will become more intense throughout the century due to global warming, and the U.S. Midwest is among the most vulnerable to dangerous heat. While the news reported about high temperatures and global warming typically focuses on the rising average temperatures, it's the temperature extremes that matter most. While the average temperature by 2100 might rise 5.4 degrees, the hottest of the hot days will be 14.4 degrees warmer.

According to the new research, the South is the most susceptible to all hazards, including floods and tornadoes, but the Great Plains is most threatened by heat and drought. In the mountain West, winter weather and flooding are the biggest killers.

Overall, heat and drought kills nearly 20% of all Americans who die because of a natural hazard, and another 19% die from severe summer weather. The next biggest killer is severe winter weather (18%). Earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes combined caused less than 5% of deaths.

STAYING IN CAN COST ENERGY, TOO

Lucy Siegle, Guardian - Hard times mean communal socializing has been jettisoned in favor of home comforts . . . You might think that from an eco point of view this could be a big win, but confining ourselves to our own four walls spells trouble.

This is because, with the exception of the hospitality industry's fondness for patio heaters - one commercial patio heater can emit more CO2 than a 4x4 car - heading out means sharing resources, especially energy. Leaving the homestead also means that you are not plugged into those energy guzzling, 'luxury' appliances.

While gas consumption has reputedly fallen recently by 12 per cent, courtesy of heart-stopping energy bills, electricity usage is still spiraling out of control. When it comes to 'luxury electronics', the normal rules that anybody sane would use to purchase functional white goods, such as a reasonably sized fridge - which include reliability and efficiency - go out of the window. As TV-watching hours increase, so too do screen sizes. It is almost impossible to purchase a good old cathode-ray television now, even though they consumed as little as one-third the energy of their flat-screen replacements. Meanwhile a 42in plasma television switched on for five hours a day will consume 766kWh of electricity over a year, compared to just 222kWh for a 28in standard TV.

To add insult to injury, nitrogen trifluoride, a chemical used in the manufacture of a liquid-crystal flat screen emits a gas 17,000 times more potent than CO2.

But challenging TVs for the crown of biggest wastrel appliance are game consoles. According to a recent US report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, if left on constantly, consume more than 1,000kWh of electricity each year, equal to the annual energy use of two new refrigerators. A Nintendo Wii is relatively efficient, using seven times less power.

Around eight per cent of your energy bill goes on nothing, courtesy of the standby function. The 42in plasma TV eats 125kWh of electricity in standby. And standby power for games consoles is predicted to grow from the 43 watts average in 2005 to 105 watts in 2020.

BOOK PUBLISHING IN BIG TROUBLE

Jason Boog, Salon - The end of days is here for the publishing industry -- or it sure seems like it. On Dec. 3, now known as "Black Wednesday," several major American publishers were dramatically downsized, leaving many celebrated editors and their colleagues jobless. The bad news stretches from the unemployment line to bookstores to literature itself. . .

One of the most visible victims was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher of Philip Roth, Margaret Drabble, Richard Dawkins and J.R.R. Tolkien, among many others. Just before Thanksgiving, the publisher (actually two venerable houses, Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, which were bought and merged by an Irish company over the past two years) had announced an unprecedented buying freeze on new manuscripts. On Dec. 3, they laid off what former executive editor Ann Patty described as "a lot" of employees (the industry trade publication Publishers Weekly confirmed at least eight), among them the distinguished editor Drenka Willen, whose list of authors included Gunter Grass, Octavio Paz and Jose Saramago.

On the same day, Simon & Schuster laid off 35 employees, and a companywide memo from Random House's CEO announced the dissolution of Doubleday (publisher of "The Da Vinci Code" and Jonathan Lethem) and Bantam Dell (Danielle Steel, John Grisham), distributing the pieces among the conglomerate's three remaining publishing groups, which ultimately resulted in lost jobs. The large Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson also announced 54 layoffs.

The bad news kept rolling in. Within weeks, Macmillan had laid off 64 employees, spreading the damage across the entire company, which includes such literary stalwarts as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Henry Holt; Picador and St. Martin's Press. Not only were some of the industry's most respected figures out of a job, but a tremendous number of writers had lost their editors and publicists.

Priya Jain. Salon - McSweeney's is holding a garage sale of sorts. An e-mail sent out last week announced that, "for the next week or so," the publishing house founded by Dave Eggers would be selling its new books at 30 percent off and its backlist at 50 percent off. It is also, by way of eBay, auctioning off donations from its more well-known contributors: One could bid on an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of "The Daily Show" guided by John Hodgman, or a "one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July."

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. "For us the timing was particularly bad," says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney's Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. "We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] 'What Is the What', which was our best seller of all time.". . .

WHY ECO HOUSES COST MORE

Nic Darling, 100K House - In an interview a few weeks ago I was asked what our premium was for building LEED Platinum. The reporter had done some research and found that the highest level of LEED for homes usually carried a 15-20% markup and wanted to know what the added cost was for our project. It was a difficult question since we don't have a non-LEED version of the house with which to compare, but eventually I said, "Um . . . I guess . . . negative 5%" (an estimation of my interview articulacy). I went on to explain that, with the average new home built in Philadelphia coming in at a minimum of $125 per square foot in hard construction costs and our, admittedly more sparse, home hitting $100 psf, I figured that number was defensible.

The next question of course is why? Why do production home builders and established developers, people who have been building homes for many years, have to spend 15% more to get to LEED Platinum while us rookies are getting there at a discount? It was a question I had no concise answer to until a few days ago when an acquaintance, who wishes to remain anonymous, gave me a piece of her grandmother's wisdom in explanation . . . "It is because they're polishing a turd.". . .

Most of the builders and developers reporting high premiums for pursuing LEED are still trying to build the exact same home they have always built. They are simply adding features to make that same house energy efficient, healthy and sustainable. This addition gets expensive.

Builders, successful ones anyway, often have a basic home that they build over and over. They know how it goes together. They can build it quickly and inexpensively, and most importantly, they know it will sell. When they are suddenly faced with the need to "go green," they are understandably reluctant to make significant changes to the design of their proven house. Location, interior fixtures, numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage and window placement are all tested and successful specs. The familiar methods of construction they use are easy for them to estimate and well known to every sub-contractor and laborer on the site. There is, in their minds, less management and less risk.

So, they polish the turd. Rather than redesign the house that has been successful for them in the past, they add solar panels, geothermal systems, high end interior fixtures, extra insulation and other green features. The house gets greener. It gets certified, but it also increases significantly in cost. Since the features are add-ons and extras, the price rises as each one is tacked on.

To avoid these extra costs, one must start the home design process with affordability and sustainability factored into every decision. One simply can't, in most instances, build the same home in the same place using the same techniques and expect to accomplish those goals. For example, one can't:

- build on arable land 20 miles from the nearest amenities.

- build a 5000 square foot single family home.

- have more windows than walls, particularly on the north and west side.

- add a garage.

- have giant spa tubs in each bathroom.

And so on . .

PRIUS DOUBLES AS EMERGENCY GENERATOR

PRIUS DOUBLES AS EMERGENCY GENERATOR

NY Times - The Prius has a new use, and it does not involve driving. The Harvard Press - which serves the Massachusetts town of Harvard as opposed to the university ' reported that the car's battery helped keep the lights on for some locals during the recent ice storms.
The newspaper reports that John Sweeney, a resident who lost power, "ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas."
According to the newspaper, "the device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power."

In fact, this development, which comes at a tough time for Toyota, which makes the Prius, may not be as strange as it sounds. Mr. Sweeney's tinkering is along the lines of the "smart grid" technology that many utility executives and other experts say lies in our future. The idea is that the battery of an electric car - a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios - can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.

SUIT FILED OVER POLICE ABUSE OF ORGANIC FOOD CO-OP

SUIT FILED OVER POLICE ABUSE OF ORGANIC FOOD CO-OP

The Buckeye Institute's 1851 Center for Constitutional Law has taken legal action against the Ohio Department of Agriculture and the Lorain County Health Department for violating the constitutional rights of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio. The Stowers operate an organic food cooperative called Manna Storehouse. ODA and Lorain County Health Department agents forcefully raided their home and unlawfully seized the family's personal food supply, cell phones and personal computers. The legal center seeks to halt future similar raids.

"The use of these police state tactics on a peaceful family is simply unacceptable," Buckeye Institute President David Hansen said. "Officers rushed into the Stowers' home with guns drawn and held the family - including ten young children - captive for six hours. This outrageous case of bureaucratic overreach must be addressed."

The Buckeye Institute argues the right to buy food directly from local farmers; distribute locally-grown food to neighbors; and pool resources to purchase food in bulk are rights that do not require a license. In addition, the right of peaceful citizens to be free from paramilitary police raids, searches and seizures is guaranteed under the constitution.

"The Stowers' constitutional rights were violated over grass-fed cattle, pastured chickens and pesticide-free produce," Buckeye Institute 1851 Center of Constitutional Law Director Maurice Thompson said. "Ohioans do not need a government permission slip to run a family farm and co-op, and should not be subjected to raids when they do not have one. This legal action will ensure the ODA understands and respects Ohioans' rights."

On the morning of December 1, 2008, law enforcement officers forcefully entered the Stowers' residence, without first announcing they were police or stating the purpose of the visit. With guns drawn, officers swiftly and immediately moved to the upstairs of the home, finding ten children in the middle of a home-schooling lesson. Officers then moved Jacqueline Stowers and her children to their living room where they were held for more than six hours.

There has never been a complaint filed against Manna Storehouse or the Stowers related to the quality or healthfulness of the food distributed through the co-op. The Buckeye Institute's legal center will defend the Stowers from any criminal charges related to the raid.

LONELY POLITICAL VOICES FOR DECENY IN GAZA: KUCINICH & MCKINNEY

The Hill - Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is calling for a United Nations investigation into Israel's attacks on Gaza, criticizing Israel for a disproportionate response to Hamas rocket attacks.

The criticism stands in stark contrast to the statements of other Democrats, who have offered near-unanimous support for Israel amid the latest violence in the Middle East.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other Democrats have blamed Hamas for the violence, which has left more than 300 people in Gaza dead. One person in Israel has been killed by a Hamas . . .

"All this was, and is, disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law," Kucinich said in a statement. "Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable.". . .

In March, the House voted 404-1 for a resolution condemning Hamas and other Palestinian groups for rocket attacks on Israel. It also condemned the use of Palestinians as human shields. Hamas has been criticized repeatedly for shooting rockets into Israel from civilian areas in Gaza, which leads to the deaths of civilians when Israel counterattacks.

The only member of Congress to vote against the resolution was Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), a Republican candidate for president in 2008. Four Democrats, Reps. Jim Moran (Va.), Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii), Michael Capuano (Mass.) and Jim McDermott (Wash.), voted present. Kucinich was not present for the vote.

Kucinich said the perpetrators of attacks against Israel should be brought to justice, but that Israel "cannot create a war against an entire people in order to attempt to bring to justice the few who are responsible.". . .

President-elect Obama has yet to weigh in on the violence, although top adviser David Axelrod on Sunday noted statements Obama made over the summer that respected Israel's right to defend itself.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution - A boat carrying international peace activists, including former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and medical supplies to the embattled Gaza Strip sailed back into a Lebanese port on Tuesday after being turned back and damaged by the Israeli navy, organizers of the trip said. . .

The boat, which set off from Cyprus Monday wanted to make a statement and deliver medical supplies to embattled Gaza. The trip's organizers said the boat was clearly in international waters, 90 miles off the coast of Gaza, at the time of its close encounter with the Israeli navy.

"Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front and one on the side," McKinney told CNN. "Our mission was a peaceful mission. Our mission was thwarted by the aggressiveness of the Israeli military."

She called on President-elect Obama to address the Gaza crisis, saying the weapons being used by Israel were supplied by the United States.

She denied that the incident was an accident, caused when he captain of the Dignity tried to maneuver past the Israeli blockade. "What the Israelis are saying is outright disinformation," she said. "What happened to us last night was a direct threat to our mission, but not our cause."

In a press release, the Free Gaza movement stated, "Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus "” despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so.". . .

McKinney, who ran as the Green Party candidate for president, sees the voyage as a humanitarian mission, said her father, former Georgia state Rep. Billy McKinney.

"Her mother did not want her to go," he said, referring to concerns at home for her safety. "But I think that certain people have missions in life and you can't deter them."

GAZA BEAT

GAZA BEAT

Stephen Lendman, Global Research - Since Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 2006, Israel, Washington and the West withheld recognition and more. All outside aid was cut off, an economic embargo and sanctions were imposed, and the legitimate government was isolated and vilified.

The leading candidate to become Israel's next prime minister, Tzipi Livni, vows as a "strategic objective" to overthrow Hamas by military, economic and diplomatic means. Her main opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, pledges to "topple the Hamas regime" and end its effective resistance against an oppressive occupation.

All along, Hamas has been conciliatory to no avail. Earlier in the year, its leaders agreed to a ceasefire and observed months of it unilaterally, despite repeated Israeli violations and Gaza being under siege. On November 4, it ended after the Israeli Defense Forces entered the Strip (without cause) and killed six Hamas officers supposedly to close off tunnels close to the Kisufim roadblock. Thereafter, in spite of both sides calling for peace, IDF hostilities continued.

Israel is a serial aggressor. Hamas responds in self-defense as international law allows. Article 51 of the UN Charter permits the "right of individual or collective self-defense (against an armed attack) until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security."

On December 21, 1965, the UN General Assembly adopted Res. 2131 titled: "Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty." It called armed intervention, subversion, and all forms of indirect intervention synonymous with aggression and, for the first time, recognized "the legitimacy of struggle by the people under colonial rules (including occupation) to exercise their rights to self-determination and independence."

On November 22, 1974, the General Assembly passed Res. 3236 recognizing that Palestinians have the same right to self-determination as other sovereign states.

On June 8, 1977, Protocol 1 to the August 1949 Geneva Conventions was passed - "relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts." It declared the legitimacy of armed struggle (or resistance) to achieve self-determination as long as no proscribed methods are used. Further, "all states (are urged) to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial territories (including occupied people seeking freedom)."

Rarely do Palestinians get any, and, since 1967, have been some of the most isolated people in the world. For Gazans, no outside aid gets in, except for what Israel occasionally lets UN and humanitarian agencies supply and the little coming through tunnels on Egypt's border. It's never enough and falls woefully short of minimum amounts needed to survive. The result is a growing humanitarian crisis, an entire people on the verge of breakdown, compounded by mass slaughter, destruction, and it's "only beginning" according to the IDF spokesman.

The world community is silent and lets Israel do as it pleases - despite repeated international law violations, willful acts of aggression, grievous harm to four million people under occupation, including 1.5 million under a medieval Gaza siege, now under attack. . .

Hamas was democratically elected. It's the legitimate Palestinian government. It's falsely called a terrorist organization, and it has every right to resist an illegal occupation under international law. It observed a unilateral ceasefire for months and extended peace overtures numerous times in the past. Israel spurned them by dividing Gaza and the West Bank, co-opting Mamoud Abbas, inciting Fatah against Hamas, isolating Gaza, and pursuing a policy of aggression, killings, targeted assassinations, mass incarcerations, and torture with full support from Washington, the West, and (from his comments above) the incoming Obama administration. . .

For her part, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni ordered the Ministry to "take emergency measures (to) open an aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign," according to Haaretz. In other words, Israel will spin its wanton aggression into justifiable self-defense and get dominant media help to sell it. . .

The Times and dominant media . . . continue spreading spurious lies about Hamas being "officially committed to Israel's destruction, and when it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and then 'forcibly' took over Gaza in 2007, it said it would not recognize Israel, honor previous Palestinian Authority commitments to it, or end its violence against Israelis."

All of the above is untrue. The Times continues to report falsely. Hamas wants peace, has repeatedly been conciliatory, and its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said earlier that armed struggle would end "if the Zionists ended (their) occupation of Palestinian territories and stopped killing Palestinian women, children and innocent civilians."

Israel rejects all overtures. More recently, Hamas offered peace and Israeli recognition in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders - its Occupied Territories that it's entitled to under international law.

ISRAELIS KILL 20 TIMES AS MANY IN THREE DAYS AS HAMAS HAS IN SIX YEARS

With the death toll of Palestinians rising above 400 after three days of illegal Israeli warfare, it is worth noting that the blame for this action is being placed on Hamas' missile attacks which - according to the Guardian - have killed just 19 over the past six years.

FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL INAUGURAL COMMITTEE

GETTING TO THE SWEARING-IN

Getting to the swearing-in ceremonies that morning will be very difficult because of the large crowds. In addition to the 240,000 ticketed guests, a million or more people are expected to view the inauguration from the National Mall between 4th Street and the Lincoln Memorial, along with hundreds of thousands of others who plan on watching the Inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The District of Columbia's inaugural website will have the most up-to-date information on road closures and other travel alerts. We recommend that guests bookmark the site, http://www.inauguration.dc.gov/index.asp, and check it frequently for changing information.

A security perimeter will be established around the U.S. Capitol and the parade route on or before January 20, 2009. Subway stations, bus stops, and streets within that perimeter will be closed. Street closures throughout Washington, D.C., will make traveling by car or taxi very difficult. Bridges from Virginia crossing the Potomac River into Washington, D.C., as well as major roadways from Maryland into Washington, D.C., may be closed to all but bus traffic.

Within 2 Miles of the U.S. Capitol

For those people who will be staying within 2 Miles of the U.S. Capitol, walking to the swearing-in ceremony will be the most reliable method of reaching the ticketed seated and standing areas. Be sure to carefully plan your return trip as well "“ it won't be possible to cross the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route, except at designated points and Metro will be extremely crowded.

For some people bicycling may be an option to get close to the U.S. Capitol. While bicycles will be prohibited within the security perimeter on January 20, 2009, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association is working on a plan with city officials to have bike valet stations available outside the security perimeter near the swearing-in ceremonies and parade route. More information is available at: http://www.waba.org/index.php.

Beyond 2 Miles of the U.S. Capitol

Use public transportation to get you as close as possible to the U.S. Capitol and walk from there.

D.C.'s subway system will be running "rush-hour"� service all day, but is expecting "crush-level"� crowds. Be prepared to wait for space on a train for long periods of time, during which you will have to stand in close proximity to several thousand people. Many Metro escalators will be closed due to crowding and individuals will need to climb Metro stairs or wait to utilize the small number of elevators at Metro stations.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) plans to run Metrobuses on Inauguration Day. Check its website, www.wmata.com, for information regarding routes and schedules. As with any other travel planning for January 20, please allow extra time and prepare a back-up plan.

AMTRAK www.amtrak.com, and regional commuter trains, Virginia Railway Express (VRE) www.vre.org and MARC (Maryland) Commuter Train www.mtamaryland.com/services/marc/ will be operating reserved trains on special schedules and are expected to sell out well in advance of January 20. Please visit their websites for more information.

ACCESSIBILITY FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

There will be no vehicular access or parking in the areas around the Capitol on January 20, 2009. This includes vehicles with special disability license plates or tags. While there will be locations outside the perimeter of the Capitol that will be designated as drop-off points for persons with disabilities, traffic conditions and restrictions may make reaching these drop-off locations extremely difficult.

As noted above, public transportation is expected to be running at "crush capacity"� and WMATA has informed us that while Metro Access will operate for its regular customers, they do not expect to be able to provide pick-ups for people after events.

There will be designated areas for people with disabilities in each of the ticketed seating areas on the Capitol grounds, however these areas are limited in size and available on a first-come first-served basis. Persons in wheelchairs or utilizing walkers should be aware that they will need to move across bumpy surfaces, grassy areas, and possible icy areas (depending on the weather).

OTHER IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS

The weather in Washington in January is usually quite cold and often rainy or snowy. Please think carefully about whether you can stand outside in cold weather in a large crowd for up to six hours, and whether you are ready for long delays getting home afterwards.

Regardless of the weather conditions, umbrellas will not be permitted in the ticketed areas. Other prohibited items include, but are not limited to: Firearms and ammunition (either real or simulated), Explosives of any kind (including fireworks), Knives, blades, or sharp objects (of any length), Mace and/or pepper spray, Sticks or poles, Pockets or hand tools, such as "Leatherman"�, Packages, Backpacks, Large bags, Duffel bags, Suitcases, Thermoses, Coolers,

Strollers, Laser pointers, Signs, Posters, Animals (other than service animals), Alcoholic beverages, Other items that may pose a threat to the security of the event as determined by and at the discretion of the security screeners

Bring with you any medications that you need because there will be very long delays in getting to and from events.

Be aware that it may be difficult to talk or send pictures from your cell phone, according to wireless companies. Please use text messaging to send critical messages.