Fascism

Remember in the last post I said that Michael Chertoff was going to get his own post in this series? Well, he's going to get at least two, and this is the first one. It's very serendipitous for him that he just happens to represent a company, ironically called Rapiscan (as in raping of civil rights) that is positioned to make a huge profit from the rhetoric generated by Chertoff in the wake the strange story of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Below are a few paragraphs from Antifascist Calling that summarize his involvement, followed by the full article. And my guess is that these expensive machines will go the way of the discontinued Puffers

On New Year's eve, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff penned a Washington Post op-ed that argued "whole-body imagers" should be deployed world-wide.

[...]
Currently TSA has fielded 40 machines at 19 airports with more on the way. Indeed, the agency handed out a $25 million contract last October to Rapiscan Security Systems for 30 more peep-show devices with funds generously provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

What Chertoff failed to disclose however, is that since leaving the secret state's employ his security consulting firm, The Chertoff Group, "includes a client that manufactures the machines" according to The Washington Post.

Scannergate: Terror Scares A Boon for Security Grifters

[I'm going to break my rule and give a ton of links. Sorry if it's too much info at once] This video clip is from the BBC documentary The Century of the Self, and it explains how the media allows itself to be manipulated and used to further the ends of those in power. They did it 50 years ago. They did it to sell the war in Iraq. And they're doing it today. The lobbyists are people they tell us are people we have to trust. For instance, former DHS Sec. Michael Chertoff who's going to get his very own post in this series or former DNI Mike McConnell, who happens to have made a bundle out of security contracts at Booz Allen

Ten years after leaving the government, McConnell was finally making real money -- two million dollars a year at Booz-Allen.

video link

Over the last few weeks there have been a series of posts at different websites that have documented the latest variations of the conjunction of the military and anti-terror industrial complex with our government. I'm going to call it the Fear Industrial Complex because to be boxed in into the Military Industrial Complex would be inaccurate and wouldn't even come close to defining the collusion of 1) the military wing, with 2) the security wing, with 3) the Congressional wing, with 4) the Presidential wing and lastly 5) the media wing of the complex . There are so many links that if I tried to put them all in one post it would take several hours to put together and would shortshrift them all and be a disservice to the thought-provoking information.

With that, here's the first post by Frida Berrigan, with an intro by Tom Engelhardt in the link. I'm posting the entire thing because things like this have a way of disappearing

America’s Global Weapons Monopoly

Under the radar, Obama pushes for Patriot Act renewal

Feingold expresses frustration over Senate version

Richard Moore
Investigative Reporter

With key sections of the U.S. Patriot Act set to expire Dec. 31, the Obama administration - essentially tiptoeing through the corridors of Congress and using the raucous health care debate as cover - has quietly maneuvered for renewal of the controversial provisions, which he opposed as a senator.

Perhaps the most contentious measure is the business records provision, also known as the library provision, which allows the government to seek a court order forcing private entities such as banks, hospitals, and libraries to hand over "any tangible thing" - from library circulation records to medical records - officials think is relevant in a terrorist investigation.

That is patently false a bald-faced lie by the government; the implied message is that this is only used in terrorism investigations and is used judiciously, and fairly, ... which it has not. And the contention that there are court orders involved in what they want to do, is an insult to our intelligence: National Security Letters, and their abuse

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Spyvate Sector
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

ACLU: What you should know

On December 31, 2009, three provisions of the Patriot Act will sunset. This is the perfect opportunity for Congress to examine all of our surveillance laws and amend those that have been found unconstitutional or have been abused to collect information on innocent people, including last year's changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Attorney General Guidelines (AGGs).

Click the 1st pic for a slideshow and the second for an interactive map
.

Peter Morici via Ian Welsh

You got to admit President Obama obfuscates embarrassing facts and pays off his supporters as well as any politician since Huey Long.

He slams health insurance companies, while endorsing heath care reforms that would compel thirty more million Americans to buy their policies or face a poll tax.

Now he slams the bankers for paying themselves $140 billion in bonuses.

Those bonuses were "earned" trading derivatives and other engineered products [watch these two videos] with the more than $2 trillion in cheap credit provided by the Federal Reserve, TARP and other Washington largess. Meanwhile, bankers denied worthy homeowners opportunities to refinance mortgages and solid small businesses credit.

How much is $140 billion?

Click the picture to see how they did it 55 years ago

Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

By John Perkins

August 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

"Don't know much about history"

~ Sam Cooke

Mr. Panetta Needs a History Lesson

CIA director Leon Panetta implied Sunday that the "reality of 9/11" excused the unconstitutional and criminal acts of the Bush administration:

The country was frightened, and political leaders were trying to respond as best they could. Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong.

Panetta makes it sound like all of the illegal decisions were made after 9/11, in response to that horrific event.

But as I've previously pointed out:

* The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here)

* The Patriot Act was written before 9/11 [*note below*]

* The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11

* The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11

* The decision to launch a war against Iran was made before 9/11

* Cheney advocated strengthening the powers of the White House to the point of monarchy before 9/11

In addition, while the decision to torture appears to have been made after 9/11, it appears to have been made for the purpose of creating a false linkage between Iraq and 9/11 in order to justify the Iraq war. In other words, the post-9/11 decision to torture appears to have been made to rationalize the pre-9/11 decision to invade Iraq.

Moreover, it was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn't work to produce accurate intelligence.

Click the header to read the links

---

[**] The link for the article on the Patriot Act being written prior to 9/11 is dead, but I found a reprint and will reprint it in it's entirety below

The USA PATRIOT Act Was Planned Before 9/11

NYTimes: Big Banks Paid Billions in Bonuses Amid Wall St. Crisis

MSN Money: CitiGroup's Possible $100 Million Bonus to ONE PERSON

RATM: Sleep Now In The Fire

It's Not Hard to Be a Job-Slashing, Pension-Grabbing CEO -- If You're a Sociopath

By Thom Hartmann, Smirking Chimp. Posted July 28, 2009

CEOs in America pull in the big bucks because there's a shortage of people willing to destroy the lives of many other human beings.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US... Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"

It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult -- so impossible for mere mortals -- that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Who's Behind Lanny Davis' Putsch Paycheck?

Following the money trail in the Honduran coup

By Bill Conroy

July 22, 2009 "Narco News" -- (Lea en Español Aquí) -- Going to bat for an illegal coup used to be the job of shadowy CIA operatives back in the good ol' days of the Cold War.

But that is bygone era. Today’s junta-enablers no longer have to work in secret. In fact, illegal usurpers can now shop openly in Washington for a hired gun of their choosing to grease the wheels of Congress and commerce to assure their coup d'état remains a fait accompli.

Enter Lanny Davis — a long-time friend and Yale Law School chum of Hillary Clinton and former White House Counsel to Bill Clinton [as well as a consummate shill for their agendas].

Davis also is a lawyer and lobbyist now employed by the D.C. office of global law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. In that capacity, Davis was recently retained by the Business Council of Latin America (CEAL) to hawk for the coup in Honduras — or as is the preferred description among the pushers of simulation, the administration of “de facto” Honduran President Roberto Micheletti [elected by virtue of having cast the most bullets in deposing the people’s choice in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya).

Davis is now scampering about the Hill setting up meetings with Congressional insiders and throwing money around on advertising and other such frills to build a case for supporting the new militarily elected Honduran regime.

Davis may be many things, but one thing he is not is cheap. So the question is begged: Whose paying for this charade?

The best way to get a peek under those covers most certainly should be to take a look at who is in bed with CEAL, Davis’ current contract employer.

Well, here’s the scoop on the pecuniary bedfellows:


Camilo Alejandro Atala Faraj, president of the Honduras chapter of CEAL, also happens to be a vice president of a major banking institution in Honduras, Banco Financiera Comercial Hondurena S.A [or Banco Ficohsa), which is part of the financial holding company Grupo Financiero Ficohsa.

[For an idea on why Tim Geithner's inept plan for "regulating" derivatives is wrong - read this - Myron Scholes Intellectual Godfather of Credit Default Swap: ‘Blow ‘em all up’. Seriously, watch the two videos, and read what Myron Scholes (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) said about blowing them up]

Hearings on Independence of the Federal Reserve, and Derivatives This Week

One of the friends of TBP on Capitol Hill sent a note yesterday about two important hearings before the House Financial Services Committee:

“Lots of interesting hearings coming up in the next month (next Monday is one on Too Big to Fail and one on Insider Trading by Government Officials). It’s a very critical month; Barney wants to get regulatory restructuring done by the end of July, so this is going to be an extremely heavy legislative session. This week has (among other things) hearings on the independence of the Federal Reserve and on derivatives on Friday (with Geithner). The links are below.”

[...]

Friday at 10am (7am Pacific): A Review of the Administration’s Proposal to Regulate the Over-the-Counter Derivatives Market

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/hrfc_081009.shtml (Live video at link)

[...]

In terms of derivatives, a joint Financial Services-Agricultural Committee hearing will be held Friday. There may be over a hundred members of Congress and one witness: Tim Geithner. As many of you know, I have been very critical of Geithner and his pandering to Wall Street. I continue to believe that the loans to AIG are in violation of the FRA because they are not fully collateralized and thus not sell-liquidating.

I asked the HFSC to explain the rational for having Secretary Geithner as the only witness for the joint hearing on OTC derivatives:

“Why is Chairman Frank only inviting Geithner for the OTC hearing? Aside from the fact that he is a puppet of JPM/GS/SIFMA, he does not really understand the subject matter!”

A senior staffer replied: “Ha! Answer: because Geithner appears to have forgot what happened to Icarus, although that is a more-global problem for him than just this one hearing.”

[I've wanted to do this for a week but haven't had time. And I know this has been covered ... a little bit ... but no where near as much as the Iranian elections which have had wall-to-wall coverage. Wonder why that is? And it's nice that the Peruvian Parliament has "suspended" the disputed laws which caused the protests, but I have a feeling they will go back into place once the US military base at Palanquero, Colombia gets built - what? you haven't heard of it? Hmmm, sounds like one of the next blogs. Anyway click the links for the three articles, and here's another really good one from indymedia Ireland]

Massacre in the Amazon: The U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement Sparks a Battle Over Land and Resources

Raúl Zibechi | June 16, 2009

On June 5, World Environment Day, Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alan Garcia in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands—a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States.

Three MI-17 helicopters took off from the base of the National Police in El Milagro at six in the morning of Friday, June 5. They flew over Devil's Curve, the part of the highway that joins the jungle with the northern coast, which had been occupied for the past 10 days by some 5,000 Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples. The copters launched tear gas on the crowd (other versions say that they also shot machine guns), while simultaneously a group of agents attacked the road block by ground, firing AKM rifles. A hundred people were wounded by gunshot and between 20-25 were killed.

The population of the nearby city of Bagua, some thousand kilometers northeast of Lima near the border with Ecuador, came out into the streets to support the indigenous people's demonstration, setting fire to state institutions and local office of the official party APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana). Several police officers were attacked and killed in the counter-attack, and other indigenous protestors were killed by police. At the same time, a group of 38 police who were guarding an oil station in the Amazon were taken hostage. Some were killed by their captors, while some 1,000 Indians threatened to set fire to Station Number 6 of the northern Peruvian oil pipeline.

The versions are contradictory. The government claimed days after the events that there are 11 indigenous dead and 23 police. The indigenous organizations reported 50 dead among their ranks and up to 400 disappeared. According to witnesses, the military burned bodies and threw them into the river to hide the massacre, and also took prisoners among the wounded in the hospitals. In any case, what is certain is that the government sent the armed forces to evict a peaceful protest that had been going on for 57 days in the jungle regions of five departments: Amazonas, Cusco, Loreto, San Martin, and Ucayali.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), part of the Organization of American States, condemned the violent acts on June 8 and reminded the Peruvian government of its obligation to clear up the facts and to compensate for the consequences and called on both sides to promote a process of dialogue.1 On June 9, the National Coordination of Human Rights announced that it found a series of irregularities and possible human rights violations in the Bagua area. It denounced the government's refusal to divulge what police are in charge of the investigation of the events, and expressed concern for the situation of 25 detained at the El Milagro base and the 99 arrested since a curfew was imposed in Bagua.2

President Garcia accused the Indians of being "terrorists" and spoke of an "international conspiracy," in which, according to government ministers, Bolivia and Venezuela are involved because as oil- and gas-producing countries they want to keep Peru from exploiting these resources and becoming a competitor.3 Just a few weeks ago, Peru granted asylum to the anti-Chavez leader, Venezuelan Manuel Rosas, accused of corruption, and three former Bolivian ministers from the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lazada prosecuted for the death of nearly 700 persons during the "gas war" of October 2003.

[...]

Peru: Battle lines drawn over the Amazon

By Ben Powless

June 8, 2009

Translation: The Untold Story of Victor Jara and The Disappeared

United States complicity: The U.S., the Argentine Military and the Coup; The Pinochet File; Pinochet: A Declassified Documentary Obit; Chile and Operation Condor; Operación Cóndor; Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents relating to the Military Coup, 1970-1976

A human rights mystery is solved in Chile

Details emerge about a Pinochet-era murder

By John Dinges - GlobalPost

Published: June 3, 2009 12:02 ET

NEW YORK — A Chilean court has uncovered the gruesome details surrounding the death of one of Latin America’s most famous human rights victims, the folk singer Victor Jara. A 4,500-word account of the singer’s death was published last week by the Chilean investigative journalism site CIPER, the day before the court announced murder charges against a former soldier who confessed to participating in the brutal killing in 1973.

The case attracted international attention after the military coup in September 1973 that brought Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to power and overthrew the elected government of Socialist president Salvador Allende. Victor Jara was a leading figure in the flourishing cultural scene during Allende’s 1,000-day presidency from 1970 to 1973. He was a theater director, poet and guitarist whose numerous songs became icons of the Latin American Nueva Cancion (New Song) movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Jara was detained with other leftist activists at a Chilean university the day after the Sept. 11 military coup. His bullet-riddled body was found in the morgue four days later. The CIPER account, based on the court’s interrogation of soldiers at the detention center where Jara was held, described the brutal torture to which the folk singer was submitted, and the details of his execution in an interrogation cell. It also tells the story of a valiant government worker who discovered Jara’s body and prevented it from being buried anonymously in a mass grave.

The soldier, Jose Alfonso Paredes Marquez, was an 18-year-old army draftee assigned to guard prisoners in the Chile Stadium, a Santiago sports and performance arena that had been turned into a makeshift prison holding several thousand prisoners. He said Jara was among 15 prisoners brought to an interrogation room in the basement of the stadium. Paredes said he and other soldiers recognized Jara, who had already been severely beaten.

He said a second lieutenant, who was not identified in the court documents, singled out Jara and began to play Russian Roulette, pointing his pistol at Jara’s head and pulling the trigger until it fired. Paredes said Jara fell writhing to the floor. The second lieutenant ordered Paredes and the other guards to fire their weapons at the body to finish the execution. When Jara’s body was eventually found, it had 44 bullet wounds.

American Death Squad

Obama inherits Cheney's army of assassins – and promotes their commander

by Justin Raimondo, May 20, 2009

As the story of Bush administration’s war crimes comes out in fits and starts, it appears that torture is only one aspect – and not the worst, by any means – of this horrific history. In an interview in mid-March, Seymour Hersh let slip the following:

"After 9/11 – I haven’t written about this yet – but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."

Well, yes, that’s hardly surprising. The PATRIOT Act and other legislation [.pdf] passed by Congress gives the government the legal "right" to spy on American citizens and, in the case of Jose Padilla, lock them up without a trial and throw away the key. But, as Hersh reveals, it gets worse. Much worse:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command – JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

“Congress has no oversight of it.It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. … Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

Well, yes, that’s not too surprising, either, actually. It’s so – what’s the word? – Cheneyesque. Those Rethuglicans! Well, we’re past all that now. The Dear Leader’s in the White House, and it’s time to move on, right? Oh wait…

It turns out the commander of this international order of assassins has just been appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As part of the "fresh thinking" in the Obama administration, epitomized by the COIN crowd, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal replaces Gen. David McKiernan. So who is McChrystal? A 2006 profile in Newsweek put it this way:

"JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work the dark side’ after 9/11. To many critics, the veep’s remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’ And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them."

The dark side includes McChrystal’s overseeing of Camp Nama, a detainee center outside of Baghdad (since renamed and relocated) notorious for its brutality. The very same administration that is up on its high horse about forbidding torture has just elevated one of the chief torturers to direct Obama’s war in Afghanistan. It is hardly inconceivable that what we saw at Camp Nama – beatings, degradation of prisoners, and outright, cold-blooded murder – is going to be replicated on a nationwide scale.

That’s what they call "fresh thinking" over at Obama’s Pentagon.

[More from Laura Flanders]

Baucus v. Democracy

By David Swanson

I can't recall a better corporate news video segment in at least the past decade than the story that Ed Schultz just aired on MSNBC in which he interviews Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and Senator Debbie Stabenow on the topic of healthcare reform.

Here's video.



Sure, Ed slaps a gratuitous insult on the heroines of Code Pink, says he's against protesting and "getting arrested" as a rule but thinks it's OK if doctors in suits and "educated professional people" do it, and pretends to believe (or actually believes) that President Obama favors considering the possibility of creating single-payer healthcare. But the heart of this story is the gaping chasm between majority opinion and the corporate agenda of the United States Senate. And Ed Schultz hits it out of the park.

Ed goes after the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the HMOs. He plays video of activist Kevin Zeese speaking up at the recent Senate Finance Committee hearing and being arrested. He explains perfectly what single-payer healthcare is. (I recommend this flyer (PDF).) And he denounces the anti-democratic exclusion of single-payer advocates by Committee Chairman Max Baucus.

And then Ed brings on Margaret Flowers who absolutely nails every question he asks, and he asks the right questions. Flowers lists the polls showing that over 60 percent of Americans and 60 percent of physicians want single-payer, explains that PNHP has 16,000 members and is part of the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Healthcare which has 20 million members. Flowers points out that the next senate hearing is on March 12th and that advocates are asking for at least one supporter of single-payer to be included.

That sort of mention of an upcoming event and very nearly inclusion of exactly what people can do to improve their country is rare indeed on our televisions. Let me take it a slight step further: Senator Max Baucus's phone number is (202) 224-2651.