When the foxes live in the henhouse...

Video (several minutes)

Matt Taibbi Breaks Down Goldman Sachs’ Big Scam

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

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Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

 Avatar on the ground in Afghanistan...

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t;
Adapted: The U.S. Army, Hayley Austin)



When Scholars Join the Slaughter

As previously reported on this web site, the US military has sent shock troops - anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists - with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, who also donned helmets and flak jackets. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. The program is currently comprised of approximately 400 employees, and is actively seeking new recruits.

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to throughout history as the “handmaiden of colonialism,” thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and a leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become “just another weapon … not a tool for building bridges between peoples.” Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

The two highest ethical principles of anthropology are protection of the interests of studied populations and their safety. All anthropological studies consequently are premised on the consent of the subject society. Clearly, the HTS anthropologists have thrown these ethical guidelines out the window. They are to anthropology what state stenographers like Judith Miller and John Burns are to journalism.

Because of their field's tainted history as the "handmaiden of colonialism," modern anthropologists have always been on guard to avoid anything that smacks of exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Core professional ethics standards require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists (like doctors) do no harm. But the AAA is not actually a certifying body, which means that despite fervent petitioning, it has no real power to ban members from working with the national security agencies — leaving it to individuals to decide where to draw ethical lines.

Even anthropologists who are already working with the military acknowledge that this is a major challenge. "You are trying to be loyal to two communities — your subjects, and to the brigade you are attached to. It puts you an impossible situation," says one of the dozens of civilian anthropologists working within the military, who requested anonymity because of his opposition.

Given such ethical dilemmas, it's no wonder that Washington is also trying to develop its own in-house expertise in the social sciences. As it now does to help recruit experts in foreign languages, the government has begun programs to attract anthropologists and other academics before they develop any of their profession's qualms. Typically, students are connected with an intelligence agency early on in their academic career, attending special summer camps and soaking up the agency's own unique culture. David Price, who teaches the history of anthropology at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, notes that such cultivation can end up defeating the purpose. "The intelligence agencies are [seeking social scientists] because they want to get smarter, to think outside the box, but it is very clear to me this will just reinforce what the box is," he says. "They are trying to capture their minds before they enter the class, so that they will already be thinking in agency-like way — so these programs will have the opposite effect."

 Continuity: Bush's assassins...Obama's assassins...

A.P.
A Yemeni anti-terrorist soldier.


Speech Therapy: Reality Bleeds Through the SOTU Circus

On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit.

The existence of this universal death squad – and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents – has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it's no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001. I first wrote of it in my Moscow Times column in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported.

The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. ... But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to…enter countries surreptitiously."

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

As the Iraqi resistance expands and perfects its attacks, the American military, like so many occupying armies before it, is turning to methods of warfare long outlawed by civilized nations -- assassinations and reprisals against civilians. When it comes to the first, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has long been on record as wanting Saddam Hussein and the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban brought in "dead or alive," with emphasis on the former. Now, according to a November 7th front-page piece in the New York Times, the Pentagon, in conjunction with the CIA, has announced the creation of a new "task force" -- polite language for an assassination squad -- to accomplish these ends. "The new Special Operations organization," according to reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, "is designed to act with greater speed on intelligence tips about 'high-value targets' and not be contained within the borders where American conventional forces are operating in Iraq and Afghanistan." In other words, this death squad, composed of U.S. Army Special Forces troops, can run down its quarry in countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan but presumably also (if the occasion required it) in France, Germany, or even the United States itself.

The contradictions inherent in this plan are striking and tell us a great deal about what it means to be the lone planetary superpower. Although the Bush administration has refused to join the new International Criminal Court because it allegedly threatened our sovereignty, we now openly say that nobody else's sovereignty means anything to us at all. Without debate or oversight by elected officials, we are seemingly adopting a militarized version of globalization -- sending "terminator" squads wherever we want to whenever we care to -- whose operations will inevitably change the nature of our world, no matter how any individual attack may sort itself out. The concept of sovereignty -- that national governments exercise supreme authority within their own borders -- is the bedrock of global order. Without it, we open the door to anarchy.

 Honduras: Lobo now in charge but is he?...and good news from Venezuela...

The Honduran Resistance Will Continue

Inside Costa Rica reports that the National Resistance Front has called for marches on January 27 to protest the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, whose projected administration is characterized as "the continuation of the dictatorship of the oligarchy." Anyone who was hoping that the inauguration of Lobo Sosa would end Honduran dissent will obviously find themselves disappointed.

The Frente stated that the goal of demonstrations is to "insist on the demand of a national constituent assembly, popular and democratic, to restore Honduras." This demand will not go away.

Much is at stake, not just in Honduras, but across the Region. One immediate impact of the coup was to give courage and sustenance to reactionary forces in Panama and Costa Rica to finally come out into the open in their opposition to the process of Central American unity. Its most advanced recent expression was the SICA (Central American Integration System) and the C-4 Accord (through which citizens of Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala can travel between the four countries without a passport or visa — an important step towards establishing a common labor market, something prized by local capitalists). Costa Rican president Oscar Arias has made it clear that his country, if he has his way, will turn away from the SICA and join Panama and Colombia in a different sort of alliance, whether formal or informal. That tripartite arrangement is a direct threat not only to Venezuela and Ecuador, which border on the Colombian narcostate (Washington´s South American “Israel”) but also against Nicaragua which has significant border disputes with both Colombia (maritime) and with Costa Rica (territorial disputes over the Rio San Juan and environmental issues stemming from the contamination of Costa Rican feeder rivers with heavy metals and other poisons).

Looking at the geopolitics of the Honduran coup from an even higher vantage point, it is clear that the coup was part of a Washington strategy to re- militarize its relations with South and Central America, and with the Caribbean countries. The coup was followed by the agreement to install military bases in Colombia, and later in Panama; and by the decision to take the Fourth Fleet out of mothballs and redeploy it to the southwest Caribbean theatre — offshore from Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Even more forcefully pushing the idea that everything is now just fine in Honduras, the Washington Post headlines its story "New Honduran leader to take office, ending turmoil".

How easy is that! all that unrest just melting away...

Too bad that coverage of the actual Congressional action exposes that as wishful thinking, even if we only take into account continued controversy within the elected national government (and ignore for the moment the existence of a well-organized Resistance sworn to continue advocating for constitutional reform).

Our Correo del Orinoco International – English Edition for the week of January 29, 2010 is now available! Attached is a digital version of Venezuela’s first and only English-language weekly newspaper. This edition will be distributed in print for free in Venezuela on Friday, January 29, as an insert in the Correo del Orinoco en español, our sister publication.

Correo del orinoco

 national Iraq War Inquiries ...

Oil, the Dutch Iraq inquiry on the Iraq war, and the missing letter

The Davids Commission, which investigated the role of the Netherlands in the 2003 Iraq war, has declared that the war was illegal. The panel of commissioners included experienced European jurists.

The report has also thrown up new evidence about the role of the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair in preparing the war. In the course of the commission’s investigation, it was alleged that in 2003 the British ambassador presented a letter from Blair to Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister. He insisted that this letter was for Balkenende’s eyes only, and that the Dutch prime minister had to read it in his presence and immediately hand it back to him.

“It was a surprise for our committee when we discovered information about this letter,” Rob Sebes told the press conference at the launch of the Davids Commission report. “It was not sent with a normal procedure between countries. Instead, it was a personal message from Tony Blair to our Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkanende, and had to be returned and not stored in our archives. We asked the British government to hand over the letter, but they refused.”

The committee had every reason to express surprise. This was a remarkable breach of diplomatic procedure. Such communications would normally be archived by senders and recipients. That is the basis on which history is written and, perhaps more significantly in this case, such diplomatic archives, along with other key government papers, are the basis on which prosecutions under international law are built.

– Blair was told prior to the war by his intelligence services that Iraq did not have access to weapons of mass destruction. Sir William Ehrman, the director-general of defense and intelligence at the Foreign Office at the time, told the inquiry that British intelligence services had concluded ten days prior to the beginning of the war that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction and that he also likely lacked warheads capable of delivering such weapons. The Blair government ignored the advice of their intelligence services and supported the war anyway. [11/25/09]

– The Blair government had decided to support the US-led war up to a year before the invasion. Sir Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, told the inquiry that the Blair government had decided that it was “a complete waste of time” to resist Bush’s efforts to go to war and had instead opted to offer advice about how to invade. Meyer also told the inquiry that former US national security adviser Condoleeza Rice had called the Meyer on the day of the 9/11 attacks and told him, “We are just looking to see whether there could possibly be a connection with Saddam Hussein.” Meyer also reiterated that both the American and British government were constantly looking for a “smoking gun” to justify the upcoming war. [11/26/09, 11/26/09]

– Blair was told the Iraq War would be illegal under international law by his attorney general. In a July 2002 letter, former British attorney general Lord Goldsmith warned Blair that the UN charter only permits military intervention “on the basis of self-defence” or for “humanitarian intervention” and that neither case applied to Iraq. Blair responded by banning Goldsmith from future cabinet meetings and ignoring his verdict on the legality of the war. [11/29/09]

In September 2006 the US Senate Intelligence Committee published one of the definitive public accounts of the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.

Its 400-page report, three years in the making, laid bare the justifications for the invasion - and found little or no evidence to back a raft of claims made by the US intelligence community concerning Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction [WMD].

The report came just weeks before George Bush's Republicans were trounced in mid-term elections dominated by the issue of the war.

Days after the defeat, then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the war's chief architects, quit the government.

 Goldman Sachs: no harm in kicking 'em while they're going downhill because...

you'd expect GS to short their own stock while touting it to their clients...don't you think?




How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything "illegal" about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).

The following is how Goldman Sachs made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America in four easy steps....

Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.

Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs (click here to read the whole story). The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows.

 post election transparency...

Accountability Questions After Revelations Immigrant Deaths Were Covered Up

The Obama administration has declined to produce system-wide enforceable standards for the prisons it uses to house immigrants. Shapiro declined to speculate on the administration's rationale, but others have said that it is based on wide differences between the various types of facilities used by the government.

It has also failed to produce a medical care program that is binding on ICE personnel and its contractors. A number of the reported deaths in detention have been caused by ICE's failure to provide timely medical interventions in emergency situations. Some observers believe that the rationale for deciding against providing "long term" medical care - for example, biopsies - is that ICE detention is largely short-term.

Yet, ICE and its DHS parent department have acknowledged that many immigrants are held in custody for years. ICE has also admitted many of the deficiencies in its detention system and have vowed to initiate reforms. But Shapiro contends that the most recent documents obtained by the ACLU show that ICE's culture of secrecy has not changed.

Bernstein's New York Times article says that the documents show how officials - some still in key positions - used their role as overseers to "cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse."

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Add this all together and you have the grim face of “intelligence” at war in 2010 -- a new micro-brew when it comes to Washington’s conflicts. Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold War era). This is no longer “intelligence” as anyone imagines it, nor is it “military” as military was once defined, not when U.S. operations have gone mercenary and native in such a big way. This is pure “lord of the flies” stuff -- beyond oversight, beyond any law, including the laws of war. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims that the drone war is knocking off mid-level enemies, it seems remarkably ineffective. All it may be doing is spreading the war farther and digging it in deeper.

Talk about “counterinsurgency” as much as you want, but this is another kind of battlefield, and “protecting the people” plays no part in it. And of course, this is only what can be gleaned from afar about a semi-secret war that is being poorly reported. Who knows what it costs when you include the U.S. hired guns, the Afghan contractors, the bases, the drones, and the rest of the personnel and infrastructure? Nor do we know what else, or who else, is involved, and what else is being done. Clearly, however, all those billions of "intelligence" dollars are going into the blackest of black holes.

The real inflection point will come “when the government loses” a habeas case, said Margulies. “Are they going to let [a detainee] go?” If the administration concedes the loss, then there’s no crisis. But if it decides it can’t let someone go, and runs out of appeals, then the administration’s most likely option is to get a get a preventive detention bill from Congress, a civil liberties Rubicon. The Obama administration briefly considered that option this summer and balked. But if the administration loses a habeas case; seeks to detain someone indefinitely even so; and doesn’t have explicit preventive detention powers from Congress, then it most likely is just simply breaking the law.

“I heard about this listening to an NPR story this morning,” said Sabin Willett, a lawyer for the Uighurs at Guantanamo Bay, describing his big-picture reaction to the Guantanamo task force’s conclusions. “The intro to that story described them as ‘the terror suspects at Guantanamo.’” Willett pointed out that his clients have been cleared by Defense Department tribunals and exonerated by the courts. They are not terrorists, and no one believes they’re terrorists. “This proves the power of the press — those two words ‘terror suspects.’ How do I fight that?”

From there, Willett continued, it’s natural to start wondering if those “terror suspects” really are too dangerous to release. “I keep saying, give me a name. Who’s too dangerous? Give me a reason. Then start asking what other regimes had people they considered ‘too dangerous to release.’ You’re going to find yourself on a list of countries you’re not too proud to be on.”

 Numerous observations on Obama's first year...

Obama at One

Howard Zinn

I' ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.

As far as disappointments, I wasn't terribly disappointed because I didn't expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that's hardly any different from a Republican--as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there's no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people--and that's been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama's no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.

I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That's the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he's not making any significant step away from Bush policies. Sure, he keeps talking about closing Guantánamo, but he still treats the prisoners there as "suspected terrorists." They have not been tried and have not been found guilty. So when Obama proposes taking people out of Guantánamo and putting them into other prisons, he's not advancing the cause of constitutional rights very far. And then he's gone into court arguing for preventive detention, and he's continued the policy of sending suspects to countries where they very well may be tortured.

I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president--which means, in our time, a dangerous president--unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

 how fares the rule of law?

Crimes Against Humanity

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, U.S.A. has filed a Complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) in The Hague against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales (the “Accused”) for their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings. This term is really their euphemism for the enforced disappearance of persons and their consequent torture. This criminal policy and practice by the Accused constitute Crimes against Humanity in violation of the Rome Statute establishing the I.C.C.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Nevertheless the Accused have ordered and been responsible for the commission of I.C.C. statutory crimes within the respective territories of many I.C.C. member states, including several in Europe. Consequently, the I.C.C. has jurisdiction to prosecute the Accused for their I.C.C. statutory crimes under Rome Statute article 12(2)(a) that affords the I.C.C. jurisdiction to prosecute for I.C.C. statutory crimes committed in I.C.C. member states.

The Complaint requests (1) that the I.C.C. Prosecutor open an investigation of the Accused on his own accord under Rome Statute article 15(1); and (2) that the I.C.C. Prosecutor also formally “submit to the Pre-Trial Chamber a request for authorization of an investigation” of the Accused under Rome Statute article 15(3).

For similar reasons, the Highest Level Officials of the Obama administration risk the filing of a follow-up Complaint with the I.C.C. if they do not immediately terminate the Accused’s criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition,” which the Obama administration has continued to implement.

We are shocked at suggestions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Ivan Lewis and foreign secretary David Miliband that Britain may consider changing its laws to avoid any future attempts to prosecute suspected war criminals, Israeli or otherwise. The UK must not renege on its international treaty obligations, particularly those under the fourth Geneva convention to seek out and prosecute persons suspected of war crimes wherever and whoever they are, whatever their status, rank or influence, against whom good prima facie evidence has been laid. We reject any attempt to undermine the judiciary's independence and integrity. A judge who finds sufficient evidence of a war crime must have power to order the arrest of a suspect, subject to the usual rights to bail and appeal.

The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with (Report, 6 January). Nor should the government succumb to pressure from any foreign power to alter this crucial aspect of the judicial process. We urge the government to state clearly that it will not alter the law on universal jurisdiction and will continue to allow victims of war crimes to seek justice in British courts.

In the United States, she's been dubbed “the most dangerous woman in the world.” In Pakistan, she is seen as a victim of American injustice in the fight against al-Qaeda. And at the opening of her trial in New York, the judge found her too disruptive and had her removed from the courtroom.

“I was never planning a bombing! You're lying!” Aafia Siddiqui shouted as she was taken out of court less than two hours into the proceedings yesterday.

The outburst came as U.S. Army Captain Robert Snyder testified that documents found in Dr. Siddiqui's possession included targets for a mass casualty attack, including the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge.

There was shouting in Pakistan, too, at demonstrations in cities across the country in support of Dr. Siddiqui, who is a national cause célèbre as a symbol of Muslims mistreated during U.S. antiterrorism efforts, just like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or Bagram, the Afghan prison where her supporters say she was secretly held for years.

The special rapporteur on human rights, Martin Scheinin, said the UN should create a "a global declaration on data protection and data privacy" in response.

His report, delivered to the UN's Human Rights Council, describes the expansion of watchlists, border checks, financial data sharing, interception of communications, biometrics and ID registers in recent years.

"States no longer limit exceptional surveillance schemes to combating terrorism and instead make these surveillance powers available for all purposes," he added.

"Most worrying, however, is that these technologies and policies are being exported to other countries and often lose even the most basic protections in the process."

 Haiti: why the emphasis on security?

Fractured Narrative: Haitian Calm, American Cynicism

One can almost feel the disappointment amongst Western media mavens that earthquake-stricken Haitians have not, in fact, degenerated into packs of feral animals tearing each other to pieces. Day after day, every single possible isolated incident of panic, anger, "looting" (as the removal of provisions from ruined stores by starving people is called) and vigilantism has been highlighted -- and often headlined -- by the most "respectable" news sources. [As you can imagine, Britain's truly vile -- but eminently "respectable" and politically pampered -- Daily Mail is a leader in this odious field, with stories about "slum warlords" leading gangs of violent "pillagers."]

And yet the prophesied riots never seem to materialize. Outlets such as the New York Times are moved to remark, with seeming wonder, "Amid Desperation, Mood Stays Calm," as the paper noted in one sub-headline on its website on Monday. Astonishingly, the Haitians are acting almost like real human beings in any vast disaster: trying to stay alive, trying to care for loved ones, trying to help strangers, trying to get through the worst and reach a place where they can begin to rebuild their lives and communities. The media have sought strenuously to revive the bogus narrative that they foisted on the destruction of New Orleans: "Black Folk Gone Wild!" But thus far, they have been palpably disappointed.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, with much of the infrastructure and government services destroyed, Haitians have relied on each other for the relief efforts, working together to pull their neighbors, friends and loved ones from the rubble. One report from IPS News in Haiti explained, "In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren't seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists."

Bob Moliere, an organizer within the popular political party Fanmi Lavalas was killed in the earthquake. His wife, Marianne Moliere, told IPS News after burying her husband, "There is no life for me because Bob was everything to me. I lost everything. Everything is destroyed," she said. "I'm sleeping in the street now because I'm homeless. But when I get some water, I share with others. Or if someone gives some spaghetti, I share with my family and others."

It is not this type of solidarity that has emerged in the wake of the crisis – and the delayed and muddled response from the international community – that most corporate media in the US have focused on. Instead, echoing the coverage and calls for militarization of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, major media outlets talk about the looting, and need for security to protect private property.

The US military has taken control of Port-au-Prince airport as a key hub of its military buildup, blocking access by humanitarian flights. Humanitarian flights from France, Brazil, and Italy were refused permission to land, and the Red Cross reported one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of the neighboring Dominican Republic.

France’s ambassador to Haiti, Didier le Bret, said France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner had lodged a protest with the US State Department after the US blocked a French flight carrying an emergency field hospital. He added that Port-au-Prince airport was “not an airport for the international community. It’s an annex of Washington. ... We were told it was an extreme emergency, there was need for a field hospital. We might be able to make a difference and save lives.”...

However, WFP officials confirmed that US control of Port-au-Prince airport was creating serious logistical problems for aid and rescue efforts. The WFP’s Jarry Emmanuel told the New York Times: “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti. But most of those flights are for the United States military. ... Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed [people]. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”

A vast, permanent, completely mobile, well-trained, civilian rescue and restoration corps could easily be maintained by the United States, at the merest fraction of what it now pays out for its regular "war supplements" -- never mind the obscenely bloated 'regular' Pentagon budget. (And yes, such a corps would have a security component, made up of officers who have been trained to deal with suffering people in extremity -- not those trained to inflict suffering and extremity on people.)

This seems like a somewhat better use of public money than, say, waging endless wars to "project dominance" to the four corners of the earth, or bailing out a kleptoplutocracy that has wrecked the global economy and ruined the lives of millions around the world -- or even enriching pharmaceutical and med-biz conglomerates beyond the dreams of avarice just to claim you have passed health care "reform" without actually reforming an insanely expensive and unjust system. But like Dennis Kuchinich's idea of a "Department of Peace," any notion of a full-scale rescue corps would be hooted off the national stage by the super-savvy serious "realists" who rule our discourse, and our lives.

So we will go on as we are now. When natural disasters strike -- and they will be striking more often, and with deadlier effect, on our crowded, corroded planet in the years to come -- we will simply follow the same old pattern: launching ad hoc, inept attempts to retool a few bits and pieces of the lumbering War Machine for temporary humanitarian service. And once again, hundreds, if not thousands, of stricken people will die needless deaths.

 I would swear a pact with the Devil except he keeps changing parties. True Story.

Why I Voted for the Republican in Massachusetts

I must admit that my first instinct was to vote for a third Party candidate, a Libertarian. (There was no Green or other independent in this race.) After all, the Libertarian, a guy named Kennedy, agreed with me on opposition to wars and empire and in support of civil liberties. In contrast I knew damned well that when push came to shove the Republicrat candidates would be on the other side on all these issues – no matter what they said now in the heat of the campaign and desperate for votes. And of course all three candidates were against single-payer health care, a passion of this writer for twenty some years. So my first instinct was to vote for the Libertarian and get someone who agreed with me 70 per cent of the time versus 0 per cent
.
Would I not risk the failure of the Obama health care bill if the Democrat did not win? But I do not want the Obama health care bill to succeed. It is little other than a formula for permanently handing our entire health care system over to the sector of finance capital known as the insurance industry, for taxing decent health care plans and for putting off to the indefinite future comprehensive, egalitarian, universal health care. Dr. Marcia Angel, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and long-time crusader for single-payer, has taken the position that it would be far better to have no new law than the Obamanation known as the Democrat Party “health care reform.” I agree with her on that, and so do many of my colleagues in Physicians for a National Health Program, although that is not our official position. So on the issue of health care, it made little difference which candidate I would vote for.

But why then not stick with the Libertarian? Why vote Republican? This is where my Democrat Party friends came in. Whenever I went to vote for Nader or a Green, they would explain that I was wasting my vote on a third Party candidate. Was I not doing the same here by voting Libertarian? Suddenly I realized that the Democrats were right. If I wanted to protest the lies of the Obmacrats and “send a message” to the Democrat Party elite, I should not waste my vote on the Libertarian. And so they convinced me to vote Republican. And so Scott Brown, the Republican, won in Massachusetts with my vote and that of many others pissed off at the betrayal of the Democrats.

Is there a possibility that some of the angry voters who voted for Republican Scott Brown would consider a progressive third party? Perhaps. More likely, however, is that these angry voters will merely vote for the party not in power, expressing their anger while ensuring more of the same. This is not so much the fault of the angry voters as it is the failure of the Left to organize a left opposition that does not include the Democrats. The only choice most voters see is Tweedledee and Tweedledum. So, the revolving door of rule by the wealthy continues.

Democrats and progressives are crying doom over the party's defeat in Massachusetts. The loss, we're told, is a blow to Barack Obama's political agenda, and so it is. They say it's a shame that yet another rightwing zealot who advocates torture is now in the Senate, and so it is. But it is precisely that agenda that led to the loss, and the shame. It is that agenda which has resurrected a rightwing party that was dead in the water, and empowered its most extreme elements.

And what is Barack Obama's agenda? What is his political program? It breaks down into three main elements: unwinnable wars, unconscionable bailouts, and unworkable, unwanted health care "reform" that forces people to further enrich some of the most despised conglomerates in the land. It is, in every way, a recipe for moral, economic and political disaster. It is a gigantic anchor tied around the neck of the Democratic Party, and it will drag the whole lumbering wreck back to the bottom in short order.

It also provides a fertile breeding ground for the willful, belligerent ignorance of the Right to thrive. With such an egregiously stupid and destructive agenda at work in the White House, opponents need only say that they are against it, and they are guaranteed a wide following. Who would not be against unwinnable war, unconscionable bailouts and unworkable boondoggles serving rapacious elites? The actual positions held by these opponents – the actual policies they will pursue once in power – are given little scrutiny in such circumstances. The opponent represents change from a hated status quo – and that's enough. Later, when their odious positions come to light, it is too late.

 After Brown's win in MA, do Democrats move "right" or "left"?

Labor: Results send 'sobering reminder' to lawmakers to perform

"This election should be a sobering reminder to candidates running in 2010," the labor official said. "Voters are fed up with inaction in Washington and are expecting RESULTS. If candidates want the votes of working families they need to PASS a jobs bill, health care, financial regulation and labor law reform."

The statement is a warning to Democrats from organized labor, a normally supportive constituency that has been spurned in part over the past year on financial regulation reform, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), and elements of health reform legislation.

Today’s tight Senate contest in Massachusetts, Lieberman added, is indication that Capitol Hill has grown too partisan — and voters are fed up. “The independents are speaking loudly around the country today and they’re telling us, one, to get together here in Washington,” he said. “The second thing really is to do something about the economy and move to the center and worry about things that [independents] are worried about.”

In the Massachusetts campaign, Obama and the Democrats are reaping what they have sowed over the past two years. The 2008 presidential campaign was a fraud, organized by powerful sections of the ruling elite who wanted a new face to pursue essentially the same policies as those pursued by Bush, albeit with some important tactical modifications. Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, of new politics, of a progressive but deliberately vague “reform” agenda. Once in office—and even before, in the case of the bank bailout—his administration has been one of Wall Street, the military and the intelligence-security apparatus.

Under the undemocratic US two-party system, there is no reflection of the leftward-moving views and aspirations of the broad masses. If the people of Massachusetts were actually voting in a referendum on an even minimally progressive healthcare program—say, the expansion of Medicare to cover every American—there is little doubt they would approve it by a massive majority. Obama gives them no such choice.

The cynicism of Obama’s latest effort at false populism—featured in his Wall Street-bashing radio speech Saturday as well as his remarks in Massachusetts—was admitted by a liberal supporter, columnist Robert Kuttner, in remarks on Huffington Post. He noted that he had received numerous robo-calls at his home in Massachusetts, including one from Obama.

He wrote: “In Obama’s call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, ‘because I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care.’ Let’s see, would that be the same insurance industry that [White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel] was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama’s bill as sensible reform? If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.”

At least in the short term, the mass disappointment and growing anger toward Obama and the Democrats redounds to the advantage of the Republicans. The perverse peculiarity of the US two-party system is that no matter how often voters express their desire for progressive change, the candidates once in office discard their campaign promises and ignore the views of the voters, in order to serve the interests of the financial-corporate elite. However bitter the internecine rivalry between the two parties, there is little in the way of substantive differences dividing them.

The fact that the Democrats have so much difficulty beating, and could even lose to a run-of-the-mill right-wing politician in the most liberal US state is a testimony to their bankruptcy and political duplicity.

From my perspective, a vote for Coakley is utterly indefensible and contemptible. Brown is also awful, although he doesn't appear to be notably more awful than most other politicians trying to get to Washington or already ensconced there. I view voting for "None of the above" as an honorable choice. And I will further say that, if I lived in Massachusetts, I would be somewhat tempted to vote for Brown, if the thought of doing so didn't afflict me with hysterical paralysis. I say that for only one reason: in the specific context of this election -- and given that one of the primary reasons Coakley's supporters urge a vote for her is to "save" the health insurance bill (a bill which is the corrupt product of a corrupt system, incapable of being "improved" no matter how much they tinker with it given the vile corruption at its core) -- a Brown victory would deliver one overriding message: Stop Fucking With Us. That's a message worth delivering, I think. It might slow the bastards down just a little bit; gridlock and confusion among the monstrous governing class are very positive assets now. And at this point, time is critical.

 MLK...

King for a Day

To mark the day set aside to honor that cuddly, kindly American hero of yesteryear, we offer this paraphrase from Woody Allen:

"If Martin Luther King Jr. came back and saw the things being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

Dr. Martin Luther King's ideas on the nature of peace and social justice bear no resemblance to those of the current occupant of the White House, yet another in a long line of presidential killers on an industrial scale. MLK, the social democrat, would have recoiled in horror at the trillions lavished on Wall Street Obama's first year in office, believing as he did that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”

Today, Barack Obama is held up as the logical outcome of the movement King led. Such a claim avoids a basic fact of American history. Elections do not deliver much in the way of social change. More often they provide sleeping pills – skillfully crafted illusions meant to de-mobilize, to dull the senses and to prevent serious demands for justice from emerging. King understood this process well. One can assume that if King were faced with two active wars, 48 million people without health care and more than 20 million unemployed, he would be able to see through the illusions being offered at the top of the state. The good news is that a new movement for justice need not start from scratch – it can learn the lessons of history. The Civil Rights movement offers nearly all the instincts necessary for movement building – a skepticism about elections, an unquenchable desire for grassroots mobilization and a firm conviction that the movement is operating on the side of justice.

Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce.

Tavis Smiley announced on January 6 that the annual State of the Black Union event, held in early February for the last ten years, will not be held this year. His public reasons are vague and unconvincing. The real deal is that corporate media, the Democratic party and the Obama administration cannot tolerate the emergence of public leftward pressure from Black America. So the black conversation that SOBU showcased over the last decade must be silenced.

 like justice for chocolate...

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."

The American Civil Liberties Union will be in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, January 19, seeking an injunction to compel the Library of Congress to reinstate Col. Morris Davis to his job at the Library's Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, was terminated from his job as the Assistant Director of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division at CRS because of opinion pieces he wrote in his personal capacity about the military commissions system. Davis was then transferred to a temporary 30-day position at CRS, which will expire on January 20. The ACLU has asked the court to issue a ruling by that date.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit earlier this month charging that CRS violated Davis's right to free speech and due process when it fired him for speaking as a private citizen about matters of public concern having nothing to do with his responsibilities at CRS.

 "our lifestyle is not negotiable..."

Holy smoking...., America is losing its middle class!

Indeed, we are witnessing the death of the American lifestyle, bass boats and all. Unless of course, the Chinese banksters will keep on loaning us enough dough for one more fix, one more snort of crank to keep the American lifestyle from going into withdrawal. Yeah, sure.

That does not keep both political parties from assuring us that, "The great American middle class lifestyle is not negotiable," then proceeding to negotiate the hell out of it.

God save the middle class! Whatever the middle class is, they have the assurances of every administration of its eternal preservation.

When asked exactly what constitutes being middle class, most typical Americans, which is to say working class Americans, talk in terms of income. Better educated and more erudite Americans mumble some vague litany about college and home ownership, etc., then attach an annual income number about twice as high as the average working mook's. Neither of them ever comes close to a real definition. Nevertheless some 300 million Americans fancy themselves as middle class, chiefly because they: (A) own microwaves and a car with plastic bumpers; and (B) live in perpetual hock to MasterCard and Visa. Debt, stress and insecurity being the only observable characteristics of middle class America, they rally round those things in a show of class solidarity. "Hell no! Our pointless stressful lifestyle is NOT NEGOTIABLE! No goddamned socialist is gonna take away my constitutional right to medical bankruptcy. God bless the middle class!"

How many more people do we need? Well, for rough calculation purpose Aaron and I have argued that since most low-industrialization societies (not pre-industrial, but with access to dramatically fewer energy resources) both in the present and the past have about 1/3 of their population involved in agriculture either as full time farmers or as part time farmers. This was a rough calculation and not intended to be precise, but for the purposes of rhetoric, Aaron and I have called for 100 million new farmers. Most of those, we suspect, will not be full time farmers, but small gardeners and market farmers. We will also, however, need millions of full time farmers as well.

Even if the 100 million number is wildly overstated (and what figure is necessary will depend on the shape of climate change and energy depletion, rather than on preference, realistically speaking), we will need many, many more farmers than the ones we have, and many younger farmers.

Necessity, then, is leading us to a vast cultural shift, and one we're ill prepared for. On Science Blogs there's a lot of discussion (good and valuable) about the importance of science education and preparing young people for careers in science. In the culture at large, there's a lot talk (good and valuable) about the coming demographic shift in which we will need a lot more nurses, doctors and specialists in elder care. There is almost no discussion whatsoever of the even more pressing crisis in agriculture - the profound need to train young people to grow food. The assumption has been that technology and resources are infinite and the path to ever-fewer farmers and offshoring of agriculture will continue indefinitely.

It's all great fun, of course, but do cuddly little porkers have a place in the cold, hard, curriculum-led world of modern education? Most definitely, insists head of the farm unit, Howard Wood.

"Working on the farm doesn't just increase our students' self-confidence, it gives them terrific teamworking and leadership skills," he says. "We start work here at 7am, when we do the morning milking, and we don't finish till 5.30pm, when we've done the evening milking.

"This isn't just pets' corner, it's a working farm. The older students, the 16-year-olds, have their own keys. We have a duty rota and they come in on their own to do shifts at weekends and during the school holidays. Never once in 30 years have they let me down."

For their part, the pupils appreciate the opportunity they've been given. After all, there aren't many schools in Britain which have their own farm.

 Capsule hotel in Japan. What's in our future?

(NY Times)


WAY: plastic bunk might be a lot better than the overpass but $1000 a month...?


For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk

For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.

Atsushi Nakanishi has condensed his possessions to two suitcases, which he stores in lockers at the capsule hotel where he lives.

“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

At Miura's capsule hotel this night, there are no successful businessmen renting capsules. Only men like him, people looking for work.

Miura snapped his mobile phone shut, saying he'd just gotten some good news. His temp agency has set him up with a book binding job the next day, which will pay him about $70. That's enough, Miura says, to buy him another night indoors and a fast food dinner. It's a cycle Miura has been on for some time. He's been working steadily since he was 18, primarily in construction jobs.

Despite that, he can't afford the deposit on an apartment, which is usually thousands of dollars upfront. Japan's recession last year made finding work even tougher. Japan's corporations laid off thousands of temporary, part-time workers. These workers, who make up a third of Japan's workforce, have fewer legal protections than full-time employees. When those temporary workers got fired, says Makoto Kawazoe of the Young Worker's Union, they lost their homes.

"When people lose their jobs in Japan, they fall into poverty immediately," says Kawazoe. "Rents are extremely expensive. Due to the lack of affordable housing, underpaid laborers can't rent a room. They end up homeless, even if they're working."

Wendy’s closes its doors in Japan today after almost 30 years as queues spill onto the sidewalk at some of the hamburger chain’s 71 restaurants.

Wendy’s/Arby’s Group Inc., the third-largest U.S. fast-food restaurant company, was unable to renew a franchise agreement with Tokyo-based Zensho Co. this month. The Atlanta-based company hasn’t ruled out re-entering the world’s second-largest economy if it finds a suitable new partner.

Sales at fast-food restaurants grew 3.1 percent in Japan last year, bucking the 0.8 percent drop in the overall dining industry, according to market researcher Fuji Keizai Co. Consumers, facing bleaker job prospects and falling wages, are seeking budget options, spurring sales for the local chains of McDonald’s and KFC.

“Fast-food sales do well in tough times,” said Koichi Ogawa, chief portfolio manager at Daiwa SB Investments Ltd. in Tokyo. “People want to spend less on meals.”

Zensho said it decided not to renew the Wendy’s contract to concentrate on its other chains, which include the Sukiya beef- bowl brand.

Unlike some big screen animated features from the United States that rely almost completely on computer animation, in Japan, almost all features are drawn by hand — a labor-intensive craft practiced by thousands of young artists each year.

For the last six years, Nobuki Mitani, has been working as an “in-between” animator — filling in the cells between “key” animations. It is one of the lowest paid positions in the animation hierarchy.

Many of these entry-level jobs have been outsourced to the Philippines and South Korea in recent years.

Mitani, 27, said the hours are long, and the pay is low — about $800 a month.

“Every day I work about 10 to 12 hours,” he said. “Often, we work on Saturday, and if it’s busy, we work Sunday, too.”

 What happens to children who live with food insecurity ?

Millions More US Children in Poverty

Between August 2008 and August 2009, food stamp use increased by a staggering 24 percent, and monthly caseloads increased by 7 million—from 29.5 million to 36.5 million people—a 24 percent increase. “This extraordinary increase means that roughly 3.4 million more children were receiving SNAP benefits in August 2009 than a year earlier,” according to Isaacs.

The report states that eight states were likely to have experienced a “particularly high risk” of poverty in 2009, “reflecting a combination of high child poverty in 2008 and very high increases in use of nutrition assistance between 2008 and 2009.” These states, all in the US South or Southwest, already had child poverty rates greater than 20 percent in 2008, even prior to the surge in food stamp use. They are: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. The report warns that both “public agencies and private charities” will “face significant strain” in providing aid to these children in the near future.

The “very high” increase in poverty in these states spells Depression-level misery for their populations. In Mississippi, for example, the child poverty rate was 30.4 percent in 2008, or nearly one in three children. The Brookings report also relies on low federally-determined official poverty levels. In 2008 this meant an annual income of $22,000 for a family of four. A more reasonable measure would doubtless show that the majority of children in states like Mississippi live in poverty....

Isaacs told the World Socialist Web Site that if the current recession follows the pattern of other recent recessions, the child poverty rate will increase for several years. Another Brookings study released earlier in the year estimated that the national child poverty rate could climb as high as 25 percent, or one in four, by 2012.

There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.

The counties are as big as the Bronx and Philadelphia and as small as Owsley County in Kentucky, a patch of Appalachian distress where half of the 4,600 residents receive food stamps.

In more than 750 counties, the program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps feed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps. Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.

Nearly one-quarter of all American children will be in households that use food stamps for five or more years during childhood.

91 percent of children with single parents will be in a household receiving food stamps, compared to 37 percent of children in married households.

Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.

What this report really highlights are the drastic race, gender and socio-economic disparities in this country. And unfortunately, these disparities seem to be affecting our youth at a staggering level.

 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti Tuesday evening...

(chris-floyd.com)

Haiti after the earthquake

While official details about the scope of the damage were scarce, eyewitness accounts and media reports painted a nightmarish picture of widespread destruction that was feared to have claimed tens of thousands, if not more.

A hospital collapsed and people were heard screaming for help. The U.N. said Haiti's principal prison had crumbled and inmates had escaped. A Florida-based shipper said the cranes at the Port-au-Prince cargo pier had toppled into the water and that much of the pier was destroyed.

Some 200 guests were reported missing at Haiti's Hotel Montana, a four-star property reportedly destroyed in Tuesday's massive earthquake.

AMY GOODMAN: All through the night, the cable channels were focusing on what was happening in Haiti, trying to get information, and they were listing relief organizations. Now, we see this in situations all over the world. And the question is, where people give their money, what are the organizations that end up having power on the ground? The United States says that they will also give money. Other countries, I presume, will be also pledging. What about the politics of aid and what you see as the pitfalls and what you see are the tremendous needs that Haiti has right now? Let me put that question to Kim Ives.

KIM IVES: Well, yes, aid has historically in Haiti been extremely pernicious. It has destroyed Haitian agriculture. It’s been a real counter to development in the country, development aid. And even humanitarian aid has been often wasted. For instance, during—after the storms of 2008, $197 million was freed from the Petrocaribe accounts, which Venezuela provided Haiti. A lot of questions remain about how that money, that $197 million, was spent. A lot of it seems to have been frittered away into corruption and various other types of embezzlement.

So, yes, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of corruption and charlatans flocking to Haiti like flies. And it’s important to find good relief agencies. One is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, HERF, that people can go to the site of haitiaction.net and find out more about that. And that is a place people can donate. But, yes, we can expect terrible things to be happening in the aid front in the coming weeks.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And also, Kim Ives, the issue of food. We saw last year a food crisis around the world in early 2009. Haiti was one of the worst hit by that food crisis. There were reports of people eating mud for—because of starvation. Explain the issue of food and also how the United States affected the food supply in Haiti.

KIM IVES: Well, yeah. Essentially, Haiti was self-sufficient thirty years ago in its production of food, particularly rice. And since the fall of the Duvalier regime, it has really been opened up. The neoliberal regime, one of its principal demands is the lowering of tariff barriers, so that rice grown in Arkansas and Texas and Louisiana can be dumped on the country, which has effectively destroyed the rice farmers of the Artibonite Valley, leaving Haiti now required to import almost 80 percent of its food. So foreign aid has essentially destroyed Haitian food self-sufficiency.

AMY GOODMAN: And then the poverty that that leads to, the deforestation of the mountains. Having spent—gone to Haiti a number of times, people going up into the mountains to make charcoal, to burn whatever wood they can get, and that leads to the precarious natural situation, where you have an earthquake or a hurricane and the mudslides that—from Pétionville down, right?

KIM IVES: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: That make the crisis much worse.

Scant hours after the earthquake hit, televangelist Pat Robertson was on the air, declaiming to his millions of viewers that the reason Haiti was stricken by this disaster -- and has been suffering grievously for 200 years -- is because the Haitians "swore a pact with the devil" in order to win their freedom from their French colonial overlords the early 1800s.

And while such vomitious expulsions are to be expected from this well-wadded, politically-wired, virulently extremist mullah (once aptly described in these pages as a "dictator-coddler, blood diamond merchant, Jew-hater and milkshake shiller") this time there is a very tiny grain of truth to be found in the splattered mass of Robertson's upchucking. The Haitians have indeed been cursed for 200 years, and the curse does indeed go back to their liberation. But pace Robertson, the source of this curse is not metaphysical. As I noted in a piece written in 2004:

Exactly two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves overthrew their French masters -- the first successful national slave revolt in history. What Spartacus dreamed of doing, the Haitian slaves actually accomplished. It was a tremendous achievement -- and the white West has never forgiven them for it.

In order to win international recognition for their new country, Haiti was forced to pay "reparations" to the slaveowners -- a crushing burden of debt they were still paying off at the end of the 19th century. The United States, which refused to recognize the country for more than 60 years, invaded Haiti in 1915, primarily to open it up to "foreign ownership of local concerns." After 19 years of occupation, the Americans backed a series of bloodthirsty dictatorships to protect these "foreign owners." And still it goes on.

Indeed it does. The 2004 piece detailed Washington's latest long, bipartisan squeeze play on Haiti, which culminated in a coup engineered by the Bush Administration -- the second time in which a U.S. president named George Bush had ousted the democratically-elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office.

In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis and co-author of a June 1989 article for Scientific American "Hidden Earthquakes," said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there.

 Is terrorism truly an existential threat?

The Lie of Law: Courts Bow to State's Raw Power

Of course, as the Nazi regime plowed forward with its racist, militarist, imperialist agenda, this "rule of law" became increasingly elastic, countenancing a range of actions and policies that would have been considered heinous atrocities only a few years before. This trend was greatly accelerated after the Regime -- claiming "self-defense" following an alleged "invasion" by a small band of raiders -- launched a war which soon engulfed the world.

Naturally, in such unusual and perilous circumstances, jurists were inclined to give the widest possible lee-way to the war powers of the state. After all, as one prominent judge declared, the war had pushed the nation “past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written. War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust."

-- No, wait. I must apologize for my mistake. That last quote was not, in fact, from a German jurist during the Nazi regime, but from a ruling issued this week by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- one of the highest courts in the land. The quoted opinion -- written by the legally appointed Judge Janice Rogers Brown -- was part of a sweeping ruling that greatly magnified the powers of the government to seize foreigners and hold them indefinitely without charges or legal appeal.

An Associated Press discussion of the possible motives of accused Christmas Day airline attacker Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab contained this quite similar passage (h/t Casual Observer):

Students and administrators at the institute said Abdulmutallab was gregarious, had many Yemeni friends and was not overtly extremist. They noted, however, he was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel's actions in Gaza.

When the Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al Qaeda announced earlier this year that they were unifying into "Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula," they prominently featured rhetoric railing against the Israeli attack on Gaza, and "presented their campaign as part of the struggle to liberate Palestine, since Israel and the Crusaders are one." So extreme is anger towards Israel over Gaza among Yemenis that even that country's President -- our supposed ally in the War on Terror -- called for the opening of camps to train fighters against Israel in Gaza. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta signed his "martyr's will" from Al Qaeda on the day in 1996 when Israel attacked Lebanon, and he did so due to "outrage" over that attack. There's just no question that the U.S.'s loyal enabling of (and support for) Israel's various wars with its Muslims neighbors contributes to terrorist attacks directed at Americans.

There is an important implication of getting the wrong answer that is rarely acknowledged – false positives. That is, how many times will we falsely identify an innocent person as a threat? And then take steps to neutralize that threat. We don’t want to think about it or talk about it because we’re more concerned with making sure we’re not attacked. But it’s a very real cost with very real consequences – one of which is alienating Muslims who did not pose a threat and making it easier to be recruited by terrorists.

And the reason we’re more concerned with making sure we’re not attacked no matter the cost is because we continue to believe that a terrorist attack is an end-of-the-world event. Why else would Americans give up their Fourth Amendment right "to be secure in their persons … against unreasonable searches and seizures" to subject themselves to even more intrusive security to board an airplane? Not to be callous, but while 9/11 was a great tragedy for the victims and their families, it was not a world- or civilization-ending event for the country. We’re still here. The reality is that terrorism is not an existential threat.

Not only do we make the threat of terrorism bigger than it really is, but we continue to ignore one of the primary reasons we have a terrorist threat at all: an interventionist U.S. foreign policy practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike (the difference being one of style not substance) that gives Muslims good reasons to hate America. That – not security or intelligence shortcomings – is the biggest failure of our government and those in charge of it.

 Activists being murdered in Honduras...

WAY: our astute readers will realize that these murders result, at least in part, because of US policies. More specifically, Obama could have squashed or isolated this ongoing scenario. This is what US policy looks like...

Killing Organizers in Honduras

The bodies of slain activists are piling up in Honduras. While it's being kept quiet in most Honduran and international media, the rage is building among a dedicated network of friends spreading the word quickly with the tragic announcement of each compañero/a.

Now that the world heard from mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times of a “clean and fair” election on Nov. 29 (orchestrated by the US-supported junta currently in power), the violence has increased even faster than feared.

The specific targets of these killings have been those perceived as the biggest threats to the coup establishment. The bravest, and thus the most vulnerable: Members of the Popular Resistance against the coup. Their friends and family. People who provide the Resistance with food and shelter. Teachers, students, and ordinary citizens who simply recognize the fallacy of an un-elected regime taking over their country. All associated with the Resistance have faced constant and growing repercussions for their courage in protesting the coup. With the international community given the green light by the US that democratic order has returned via elections, it’s open season for violent forces in Honduras working to tear apart the political unity of the Resistance Front against the coup.

The killings are happening almost faster than they can be recorded.

We expose to international societies the oppressive occasion that Honduras society experienced and sharpened by the increases in the murders, prosecutions and exiles against our comrades since the end of last year till today. We call for international human rights organizations to increase their press on the actual government.

We decline the amnesty plan of the dictatorship prepared to excuse the crimes committed against the mankind since the coup government. We remind that these kinds of crimes do not lapse and the responsibles will give the account for in justice sooner or later.

Towards the sovereign right of the public to determine the society that he lives in, we request our right to change the present institutional system and found the democratic National Constitutional Assembly leaning against the rulership of the society.

We are resisting and we will win.”

Today we enter the first hours of 2010 in an atmosphere of terror with which the coup regime – civilian and military, national and international – intend to silence the voices of millions of legitimate Honduran citizens who reject the use of violence as a means of coercing consent and governing the state.

COFADEH calls on the international community to keep its eyes on this Central American country and to declare maximun alert in terms of the human rights situation. The economic, political and diplomatic isolation of the coup regime, and its successor as of the 29th of November, reduces its ability to maneuver in the civilized world although it adds to the vulnerability of the population.

It is extremely urgent that multilateral organizations send delegations to Honduras before and after the sham “transfer of power” on January 27th, in order to help save the lives of social and political leaders opposed to those who have seized power.

Honduras is advancing at an accelerated pace, far from the international eye, towards a state of absolute defenselessness.

 continuing in our name...three each day...

Are US forces executing Afghan kids?

Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgements about what is being done in their name.

Let’s be clear here. If the charges are correct, that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and executing them, then they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. This indeed, would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women and children. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room, and spraying them with bullets, execution style.

Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who ran a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of operation in Afghanistan, it should not be surprising that the US would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, though, the US media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,” he said.

The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews. In Jalalabad, protesters set alight a US flag and an effigy of President Obama after chanting “Death to Obama” and “Death to foreign forces”. In Kabul, protesters held up banners showing photographs of dead children alongside placards demanding “Foreign troops leave Afghanistan” and “Stop killing us”.

Hekmatullah, 10, a protester, said: “We’re sick of Americans bombing us.” Samiullah Miakhel, 60, a protester. said: “The Americans are just all the time killing civilians.”

Initially NATO officials insisted there were no operations going on in Kunar at all, though later they privately admitted US special forces were in the area. This story morphed into claims that it was a US military operation that killed an “IED cell” and that they had no proof of any civilian deaths.

Now, NATO says the operation was not military in nature, but rather was a “sanctioned” operation conducted by “non-military Americans” and that the children were all killed in self defense.

Whether “non-military Americans” entails contractors, like Blackwater, or CIA agents as were attacked yesterday in Khost remains to be seen. It is clear however that there is more than meets the eye to these killings, which locals insist involved the killers dragging the children out of bed and even handcuffing some of them before shooting them.

“At least three children were killed in war-related incidents every day in 2009, and many others suffered in diverse but mostly unreported ways,” said Ajmal Samadi, the director of the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) in the report.

According to the figures compiled by ARM, more than 1,050 children under the age of 18 were killed in war-related violence in 2009.

The report singled out the killing of eight students in eastern Kunar Province by US special operations forces on December 26 “an appalling act of crime against civilian people” by foreign forces and their Afghan supporters.

The massacre in Kunar also triggered mass protests against the US occupation.

 Jobless Recovery? Taking a pulse out there...

An Introspective Look at the Future of America

So as we head off into 2010, I see a lot of uncertainty in the short term. If interest rates rise and the US dollar gets stronger, by mid year I would expect a repeat of October 2008. What I expect to happen over the longer term however is that the FED will ultimately print enough money to attempt to slowly inflate the debt away to a manageable amount amid a generalized and severe decay in terms of the standard of living for Average Americans. At some point along the line, I expect the world reserve currency role to be moved into a global currency and for the US dollar to be allowed to float against it without the benefits associated with the world currency role, and for the US standard of living to continue to decline and eventually decay into a societal collapse followed by something different. I expect China to emerge as the dominant economic power in the world and to purchase a large amount of US assets. Somewhere along the line I also expect the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to bomb Iran because he will be ordered to do so by the people who control the money.

Personally, based on what I see coming over the long term I have elected to forego city life and have embarked on a long term project in the picturesque Appalachian foothills in an effort to increase my degree of self sufficiency and insulate myself from the continued decay and declining standard of living sweeping the country. My long view for the US is high inflation which will not show up in the government's fraudulent statistics, along with a declining standard of living, increasing decay and ultimately leading to chaos, societal and government collapse in the US within a decade or two, maybe sooner.

Now you want to talk about an oxymoron, this is an excellent example. So, as an exercise to show this economic idiocy, put ‘jobless recovery’ into your search browser and see what come up. You should show around 3 million possible sites to go to. I was just a bit astounded, oh hell, I was enraged. What in hell are these moronic economists talking about? Do you realize that according to these Bozos, every recession we have had ended up as a ‘jobless recovery’? I also remember back a bunch of years reading a transcript of a Greenspan’s talk somewhere that we must have at least 4 ½% unemployment to have a healthy economy. Translated that means that you must have at least 4 ½% unemployment to keep wages down to keep funneling money to the top of the pyramid, and, you must have, at least in this country, in the neighborhood of 15-16 million hungry people out there in the greater society to make enough money to justify the sharks existence.

Analysts had predicted that December layoffs would number around 8,000.

Instead, the figure was more than ten times higher: 85,000.

Unemployment held steady at 10 percent – not because the job market is stabilizing but because tens of thousands of Americans gave up looking for work and are no longer counted among the unemployed.

The sharp drop in the labor force is not merely an indicator of the real unemployment rate. It is a confirmation of the mounting hopelessness in vast stretches of the United States – particularly in California, southern New England and the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes States, where communities are being devastated by a federal auto-industry "bailout" that continues to encourage carmakers to shutter factories in U.S. cities and to relocate production to Mexico and China.

Yet the negative jobs report, in conjunction with bleak data from the housing market in recent days, has raised fears among economists that the US is heading for a “double dip” recession, in which an apparently recovering economy slips back into contraction.

The sectors of the economy experiencing the most job losses cast further doubt on the touted “recovery.” Job losses continued to mount in construction, which is closely tied to the housing and commercial real estate markets, and in manufacturing, which would appear to belie claims of a “bounce” in that sector. And the retail sector declined in December by 10,000 jobs, in spite of better-than-predicted consumer spending.

The government sector also lost jobs. This points once again to the inadequate character of the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), funds from which have been used to help plug holes in state budgets. Given the dire budgetary situation confronting state and local governments, it is likely that government jobs will be shed at a far higher rate in the coming months—more still after the impact of the stimulus begins to wane in the summer.

 intelligence v. covert action...

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: Military Operations in the 2000s in Afghanistan, Reportage 2009

Risen, James, and Mark Mazzetti. "C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones." New York Times, 21 Aug. 2009. [http://www.nytimes.com]

According to government officials and current and former employees, Xe Services (the former Blackwater) contractors, "at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan,... assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.... The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency's most important assignments." The contractors are "not involved in selecting targets or actual strikes. The targets are selected by the C.I.A., and employees at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., pull the trigger remotely."

After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many.

Better is a Solomon solution; divide the CIA in two. That way we can throw out the bath water and keep the baby.

Covert action and analysis do not belong together in the same agency—never have, never will. That these two very different tasks were thrown together is an accident of history, one that it is high time to acknowledge and to fix.

The effects of this structural fault became clear to President Harry Truman as he watched the agency at work in its first decade and a half. He was aghast.

Like oil on water, covert action fouls the wellspring of objective analysis—the main task for which Truman and the Congress established the CIA in 1947. The operational tail started wagging the substantive tail almost right away. It has done so ever since—with very unfortunate consequences.

On December 27, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a "Dear Boss" letter applauding Truman's outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA "a different animal than I tried to set up for you." Souers specifically lambasted the attempt "to conduct a ‘war' invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover."

Souers also lamented the fact that the agency's "principal effort" had evolved into causing "revolutions in smaller countries around the globe," and added:

With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some."

Clearly, CIA's operational tail was wagging the substantive dog-a serious problem that persists to this day. For example, CIA analysts are super-busy supporting operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan; no one seems to have told them that they need to hazard a guess as to where this is all leading and whether it makes any sense.

That is traditionally done in a National Intelligence Estimate. Can you believe there at this late date there is still no such Estimate? Instead, the President has chosen to rely on he advice of Gen. David Petraeus, who many believe will be Obama's opponent in the 2012 presidential election.

  weather of mass destruction?

WAY: along with a good part of the US, we are currently experiencing some disruptive weather here in Far West TX. But this is a hiccup, really, compared to what's possible.

Carbon in exile: the melting of Siberia

Siberia is a landscape that’s underpinned by frozen ground, called ‘permafrost’, but this ground is beginning to thaw. Off the coast, whole islands made of permafrost are literally disappearing as the arctic sea washes away the rapidly melting land. Melting permafrost is causing roads, pipelines and foundations to collapse across the country. Every year, there’s an increase in the area of ground that melts in summer and the area that doesn’t refreeze in winter. This isn’t just a problem in the Arctic. This melt has global implications, because it’s going to speed up climate change.

Permafrost is like a giant frozen compost heap – full of dead plants, animals, trees and other carbon-rich organic matter, and in places it reaches 1.5km (one mile) deep. While it stays frozen, that carbon is locked up in the ground. But as the Arctic warms and the permafrost thaws, microbes start to break down that organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas – probably causing, tonne for tonne, around 25 times more global warming over a hundred years than carbon dioxide. By lighting escaping methane, scientists can capture dramatic images of plumes of flame bubbling up through holes cut into Siberian lakes.

These emissions are adding more and more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is accelerating climate change. Permafrost contains massive amounts of carbon – probably about twice what’s currently in the atmosphere, and about 5 times more than all the human-caused greenhouse gases we’ve released. While we don’t have a really clear understanding of how much carbon might be released as the permafrost melts, it’s fair to say that any extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from melting permafrost are bad news.

Earlier this month the Financial Times revealed that the World Bank was rejecting the recommendations of an independent panel that they had appointed. The panel's mission was to assess the environmental, institutional, poverty, and human rights impacts of the World Bank's investments in "extractive industries:" gas, coal, oil, and mining. Their recommendation was to phase out all investments in fossil fuels over the next eight years:

"The WBG [World Bank Group] should aggressively increase investments in renewable energies by about 20 percent annually. WBG lending should concentrate on promoting the transition to renewable energy..."

The World Bank's current energy lending dedicates 6 percent to renewables, 94 percent to oil. In rejecting the recommendation of the independent panel, the Bank is targeting $US 300-500 million annually in loans promoting development of oil -- and the slow cooking of our planet.

A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The political capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the US and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons. Sound like the ravings of doom-saying environmental extremists? It's actually from a report commissioned by the Pentagon on how to ready America for the coming climate Armageddon:

Each of the years from 2010-2020 sees average temperature drops throughout Northern Europe, leading to as much as a 6 degree Fahrenheit drop in ten years. Average annual rainfall in this region decreases by nearly 30%; and winds are up to 15% stronger on average. The climatic conditions are more severe in the continental
interior regions of northern Asia and North America.

The effects of the drought are more devastating than the unpleasantness of temperature decreases in the agricultural and populated areas. With the persistent reduction of precipitation in these areas, lakes dry-up, river flow decreases, and fresh water supply is squeezed, overwhelming available conservation options and depleting fresh water reserves. The Mega-droughts begin in key regions in Southern China and Northern Europe around 2010 and last throughout the full decade. At the same time, areas that were relatively dry over the past few decades receive persistent years of torrential rainfall, flooding rivers, and regions that traditionally relied on dryland agriculture.

In the North Atlantic region and across northern Asia, cooling is most pronounced in the heart of winter -- December, January, and February -- although its effects linger through the seasons, the cooling becomes increasingly intense and less predictable. As snow accumulates in mountain regions, the cooling spreads to summertime. In addition to cooling and summertime dryness, wind pattern velocity strengthens as the atmospheric circulation becomes more zonal.

While weather patterns are disrupted during the onset of the climatic change around the globe, the effects are far more pronounced in Northern Europe for the first five years after the thermohaline circulation collapse. By the second half of this decade, the chill and harsher conditions spread deeper into Southern Europe, North America, and beyond. Northern Europe cools as a pattern of colder weather lengthens the time that sea ice is present over the northern North Atlantic Ocean, creating a further cooling influence and extending the period of wintertime surface air temperatures. Winds pick up as the atmosphere tries to deal with the stronger pole-to-equator temperature gradient. Cold air blowing across the European continent causes especially harsh conditions for agriculture. The combination of wind and dryness causes widespread dust storms and soil loss.

Signs of incremental warming appear in the southern most areas along the Atlantic Ocean, but the dryness doesn’t let up. By the end of the decade, Europe’s climate is more like Siberia’s....[from Pentagon report on plausibility of abrupt climate change]

 if oil is involved...

WAY: once you look at the geography of Yemen, you'll understand why the US is interested, regardless of al-Qaeda and crotch-bombers.



http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/redsea.htm

Bab el-Mandab

The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. It is located between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea, and connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, an estimated 3.3 million bbl/d flowed through this waterway toward Europe, the United States, and Asia. The majority of traffic, around 2.1 million bbl/d, flows northbound through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex.

Bab el-Mandab is 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, making tanker traffic difficult and limited to two 2-mile-wide channels for inbound and outbound shipments. Closure of the Strait could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal or Sumed Pipeline, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. This would effectively engage spare tanker capacity, and add to transit time and cost.

The curious emergence of a tiny but well-publicized al Qaeda in southern Yemen amid what observers call a broad-based popular-based Southern Movement front that eschews the radical global agenda of al Qaeda, serves to give the Pentagon a kind of casus belli to escalate US military operations in the strategic region.

Indeed, after declaring that the Yemen internal strife was Yemen’s own affair, President Obama ordered air strikes in Yemen. The Pentagon claimed its attacks on December 17 and 24 killed three key al Qaeda leaders but no evidence has yet proven this. Now the Christmas Day Detroit bomber drama gives new life to Washington’s “War on Terror” campaign in Yemen. Obama has now offered military assistance to the Saleh Yemen government.

As if on cue, at the same time CNN headlines broadcast new terror threats from Yemen, the long-running Somalia pirate attacks on commercial shipping in the same Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea across from southern Yemen escalated dramatically after having been reduced by multinational ship patrols.

 secret detention centers again...

America's Secret ICE Castles

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g) program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening."

Jacqueline Stevens: You don't need to go to Iran or North Korea to find secret courts. Try attending a US immigration hearing.

Thirteen of the fifteen Guatemalans in the town of Chimaltenango who had organized a group on behalf of loved ones picked up by ICE in the US could not locate them. These Guatemalans, in meetings with Lykes and Kanstroom, also spontaneously brought up the decades-long civil war that ended in 1996, during which 200,000 were killed and thousands vanished. A woman who lost her son and husband in the war and who was desperate to find her grandson asked the two professors, "Are they being disappeared?"

The US government is not sending out death squads. But the Guatemalans are onto something. According to an unnamed ICE official responding to questions sent by e-mail, ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other tricks, some of which are illegal, in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. I found incidents in which ICE agents posed as OSHA inspectors, insurance agents and religious workers. The effect is to corrode trust in the government, neighbors--and even Mormons.

 Ready or not,

... someone has to take a closer look at the crotch-bomber.

Is the Detroit Nigerian "Terrorist" A Patsy?

What does the hapless Nigerian mope yanked off a plane in Detroit Christmas Day for setting his lap on fire have in common with color-coded terror alerts, with the shoeless, homeless Miami Haitians convicted of trying to bring down the Sears Tower, or with the 2004 pre-election videos allegedly dropped by Osama Bin Laden? Easy. All have been useful in whipping up public fear of Muslim-inspired “terrorism” and each and every one plugs neatly and sweetly into the meta-narratives that justify increasing the power of US police and intelligence establishments and the further militarization of foreign policy.

The guy is said to be an engineering student from Nigeria who received terrorist training in Yemen. Engineers are the practical souls whose profession is making things that actually work. Fortunately for the people on the plane, he seems to have been a very bad student who would have made a wretched engineer. He didn't know the difference between an explosive device, which might have done great harm to the plane and its passengers, and a small incendiary one which could do no more than set his own lap on fire, and maybe singe the hair of the passenger immediately next to him.

His Nigerian nationality is extremely useful, as it lets “terror experts” and talking heads on TV and radio to draw simplistic and misleading pictures for American audiences of Nigeria as a place besieged by Muslim fundamentalists linked with Al Qaeda and in need of more US military assistance. In the real world Nigeria is a major US oil supplier, and West Africa furnishes about a fifth of US oil imports, a portion expected to grow over the next decade.

One would have thought, given the “special treatment” afforded antiwar activists by TSA at airports, that a warning about Abdulmutallab’s possible involvement with terrorists, by his own father no less, a former top official in a government friendly to Washington, numerous NSA intercepts, a CIA dossier and MI5 reports would have raised at least one red flag!

In the suspect’s case, there were so many red flags flying you’d have thought the Red Army was parading through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport!

Then again, perhaps Abdulmutallab was on that plane because, as journalist Daniel Hopsicker was told by a former aviation executive during his investigation of the 9/11 attacks: “Sometimes when things don’t make business sense … its because they do make sense…just in some other way.”

According to the official story, propagated by the Obama administration and uncritically parroted by the US media, the various components of the US national security apparatus were incapable of bringing together the following known facts:

• In May, the British government withdrew its student visa for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian who had studied at University College, London, and placed him on a watch list, barring him from reentering the country.

• In August, US intelligence agencies learned of Al Qaeda discussions of an operation against a US target to be organized from Yemen, using a “Nigerian.”

• On November 19, the father of Abdulmutallab, a prominent Nigerian banker, visited the US embassy in Abuja and told State Department and CIA personnel that his son had fallen under the influence of radical Islamists, gone to join them in Yemen, and broken off contact with his family.

• Based on the father’s report, State Department and CIA officers at the embassy informed Washington on November 20 and a security file was opened on Abdulmutallab at the National Counterterrorism Center, the main Washington clearinghouse for terrorism information.

• On December 16, Abdulmutallab visited a ticket office in Ghana and paid $2,831 in cash for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day.

• On December 25, Abdulmutallab boarded the flight in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for a trans-Atlantic journey. Following standard procedure, the US Department of Homeland Security was notified at least an hour before departure that he was a passenger on the flight.

No intelligent person can believe the official US government account of its failure to stop the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. The claim that US intelligence agencies were unable to detect the bomb plot, despite so many warnings months in advance, is simply not credible.

 What boundaries between big business and big government?

Lining Up for the Wall Street Gravy Train

"Our analysis shows... that long-run development is not inherent in the capitalist economy. Thus, specific 'development factors' are required to sustain a long-run upward movement."

What Keynes was alluding to is the fact that mature capitalist economies tend towards stagnation. What happens, is that the rate of return on investment begins to dwindle as overcapacity builds. That causes declining profits which lead to belt-tightening, rising unemployment and falling demand. As investment drops off further, growth slows correspondingly and the economy dips into a protracted slump. This corrosive stagnation is the challenge that all advanced capitalist economies face. The solution--as Keynes notes--lies in "specific development factors", which in today's terms means "financial innovations".

Financial innovation, like derivatives contracts and securitization, have created vast new opportunities for investment and profitmaking. This complex netherworld of highly-leveraged debt-instruments and off-balance sheet operations, constitutes a shadow economy where the process of capital accumulation persists despite pervasive inertia in the underlying economy. This is why the Fed and the Treasury have been doing their best to stitch the system back together without changing its basic structure. The same is true of Congress, which has gone to great lengths to preserve the profit-generating instruments which brought the global financial system to the brink of disaster. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

"Lobbying by Wall Street has blunted efforts to step up regulation on derivatives trading by carving out exceptions or leaving the status quo in place. Derivatives took blame for some of the worst debacles of the financial crisis. But a year after regulators and critics began calling for an overhaul in the way they are traded, some efforts have been shelved and others have been watered down.

"The number one problem I see right now is the corporate control of the government. We cannot hope to see any realistic change until we separate private enterprise from the federal and state governments. The public cannot compete with the corporations in terms of money and power. The political system we have can work only if it is able to operate without politicians being allowed to profit from their political decisions. The only other way would be through a violent revolution and I think no one really wants to see the chaos that would ensue. However, I also realize that the power elite will not let go without a fight, so it may come to a traditional bottom up revolution in order to create a more just society."

 Different perspectives on "Avatar"...

James Cameron's Avatar delivers a powerful message of connectedness with Mother Nature

If you see just one film this holiday season (or even this year), make it James Cameron's Avatar. It's a powerful, inspiring film that demonstrates movie-making at its best, and it delivers a crucial message for our time: That all living beings are connected and that those who seek to exploit nature rather than respect it will only destroy themselves.

Much of the press about Avatar has focused on the special effects, the motion capture and the 3-D presentation. These are modern filmmaking marvels, for certain, but the film succeeds for a far more important reason: Its story -- and its message. Others have reviewed the film in a more critical light; notably Alex Jones who sees it as more of a propaganda piece (http://www.infowars.com/alex-jones-...). But I see the film differently, and I think it carries a strong, positive message. (Spoiler alert: This article discusses some of the plot elements of the film.)

With Avatar, Cameron has delivered a fast-paced fantasy adventure that weaves together a stream of powerful themes that are so important to our modern world that they extend far beyond the world of fictional film: Issues like corporations destroying nature for profit, the lack of respect for living creatures, and the failed policies of "military diplomacy" that the USA continues to pursue. The themes in Avatar reflect the greatest challenges of our modern world, and the message of Avatar is both deeply moving and highly relevant to the future of human civilization.

The comments we made on Titanic in 1998 seem appropriate to Avatar’s drama: “Nearly every element in the film, including the love story, is presented in a clichéd and predictable manner. Each character exhibits modes of behavior and personality traits, even facial expressions, which are immediately identifiable and remain unchanged throughout the film.”

The rotten Quaritch acts harshly and cruelly “from the first time we see him to the last, without respite”; the cynical, sneering company administrator is “untiringly” cynical and sneering; the spiritual Na’Vi are “unfailingly” at one with nature.

The spunky, newly mobile Jake encounters the slender alien Neytiri. Do we have any doubts that after initially sparring with one another, they will come to a deep understanding, fall in love, make love, endure hardships, be torn apart, triumph over the difficulties, etc., etc.? Everything on Pandora, other than the flora and fauna, can be anticipated, as fully known in advance as the ultimate fate of humanity according to the Christian gospels.

This is a work created from a familiar template. The story of the white man who lands among the natives and learns to admire them and their traditions, and ultimately fights alongside them against his own people, has been depicted (and perhaps even lived) before, with varying degrees of sympathy and authenticity. Here the drama, for the most part, feels like something created at third- or fourth-hand. It becomes tedious in the course of its nearly three hours.

Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Wolfowitz, Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the 1948 Human Right Declaration). It throws a very dark light on our murderous tendencies towards other people, their belief and rituals. But it doesn’t just stop there. In the same breath, very much like German Leben philosophers (1), it praises the power of nature and the attempt to bond in harmony with soil, the forest and the wildlife. It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than impose ourselves on it. Very much like German Idealists and early Romanticists, it raises questions to do with essence, existence and the absolute. It celebrates the true meaning of life and livelihood.

 how many new client states does a militarized economy require each year?

Obama, tell me how this ends: Is Afghanistan just a new war of attrition?

To sustain public support, a protracted war needs a persuasive narrative. Americans after Dec. 7, 1941, didn't know when their war would end. But they took comfort in knowing where and how it was going to end: with enemy armies destroyed and enemy capitals occupied.

Americans today haven't a clue when, where or how their war will end. The Long War, as the Pentagon aptly calls it, has no coherent narrative. When it comes to defining victory, U.S. political and military leaders are flying blind.

Historically, the default strategy for wars that lack a plausible victory narrative is attrition. When you don't know how to win, you try to outlast your opponent, hoping he'll run out of troops, money and will before you do. Think World War I, but also Vietnam.

The revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, celebrated as evidence of enlightened military practice, commits America to a postmodern version of attrition. Rather than wearing the enemy down, we'll build contested countries up, while expending hundreds of billions of dollars (borrowed from abroad) and hundreds of soldiers' lives (sent from home).

How does this end? The verdict is already written: The Long War ends not in victory but in exhaustion and insolvency, when the United States runs out of troops and out of money.

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries -- or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power"). Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are. Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war."

In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air -- that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more. "Yemen" is suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country -- including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths -- but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get Really Serious and Do More.

For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself up on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification -- as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable. Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course) are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion.

 Looking back so we can look ahead...

WAY: you can find interesting talks on many subjects at TED. I find the spreadsheet site very helpful. Here's one talk by Spencer Wells that we chose for 2010.

Spencer Wells builds a family tree for humanity

Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person, Mitochondrial Eve -- you might have heard about her -- in Africa. An African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today.

But what's even more amazing, is that if you look at the Y chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y chromosome, Adam, only lived around 60,000 years ago. That's only about 2,000 human generations. The blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. Such an amazing story. We're all effectively part of an extended African family.

Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? Why didn't homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? Well, that's a big question. These "why" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones. The ones that are tough to answer.

And so when all else fails talk about the weather. What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough. Getting very cold. The northern hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick.

Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet -- about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn. And there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. This is a paleoclimatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation.

So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning into desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails.

And then something happened.