A Nation on the Brink – Mexico’s July 5 Legislative Elections

A Nation on the Brink Mexico’s
July 5 Legislative Elections

Part 2 of a three part series (Part 1)

Michael Collins and Kenneth Thomas
Also posted at The Agonist

Mexico approaches this election confronting the rise of a narcostate, growing economic chaos, social inequalities, citizen disenchantment–or worse

As Mexico approaches the July 5^th mid-term elections, the nation confronts two critical problems. An expanding an increasingly violent “war on drugs” threatens to convert Mexico into a narcostate. This will lead to the inevitable compromise of the members of all political parties. An expanding economic crisis in the wake of NAFTA and the global financial situation, threatens private companies, the Central Bank, and government programs — as well as the income and employment of most citizens. Rising social inequality and a workforce crisis mean that many, perhaps most, Mexicans live in conditions parallel to those of sub-Saharan Africa.

Disenchantment and dismay reign. The volatile political situation foreshadows a change in the air. Close to 80% of Mexicans voted in mid-term elections in the 90’s. Tomorrow, turnout is expected to be less that 50%. An attempted “no confidence” vote on the government looms. Members of the various parties engage in what has been called “fratricide.” And there is talk — talk which hearkens back to the Revolution of 1910 — that it’s time for the people to ignore the major parties and take matters into their own hands.

The Old Guard

How are the political parties responding?

PAN. After securing the Presidency in 2006, the ruling National Action Party (PAN) launched a domestic “law and order” war on Mexico’s drug cartels. It is unclear that this war has achieved its stated results. Shootouts in Acapulco, jail breaks with guards acting like teamsters for jailed narco traffickers, and the occasional physical and sexual assault by out of control troops are becoming the norm. Mexico seems transformed into a Sam Peckenpah movie set but the bullets are real and the death toll is staggering. A least 15,000 have been killed since 2007, despite the government’s attempts to “disappear” the casualties on all sides. Recent reports suggest that many municipal and state governments have been infiltrated during this “war.” Well above half the Mexican people doubt Calderon’s campaign will have any positive effect.

As well, possibly as a result of human rights abuses by federal troops, the narcotraffickers and their political apparatus have come to enjoy a level of popular support. One message left by the cartels may express this simply: “We do not kill women and children. We have honor.”

PAN’s proposals for economic growth and social improvement have been couched in terms of the development of free markets under the NAFTA model and the efficiency of private sector enterprises and projects. More recently, in the face of economic crisis, President of the Republic Filipe Calderon has begun to speak in a mystical rhetoric concerning the economy and the role of the people. For example:

“El mandatario llamó a generar los acuerdos que permitan lograr el desarrollo y generar los empleos ‘que tanto necesitamos’, y argumentó que “pensar en México, creer en México y trabajar por México debe ser la ruta de todos, más allá de nuestras diferencias’”.

“The leader called for the creation of agreements which will generate development and the jobs ‘which we all need,’ and asked ‘that we think of Mexico, believe in Mexico and work for a Mexico which will be the path for all, greater than all our differences.’” Dec. 18, 2008

While the terms here echo — and may be meant to undercut — ­­the PAN’s 2006 campaign “Coalition For the Good of All,” it remains unclear what constitutes real meaning for the phrases “agreements which will generate development,” “believing in Mexico” or how that belief and “the path for all” will fix the economic crisis or make parties that can’t even achieve internal.

However, the PAN has also recently secured multi-billion lines of credit from United States Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These will be used to bail out failed Mexican firms. In addition, as President Calderon has promised, the funds will provide for social, infrastructural, and educational projects.

According to polls, the PAN is expected to lose 35 seats in the Chamber of Deputies from its current 170.

PRD. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has a different take on the war on drugs and the economy. A key PRD leader in the Senate called for the legalization of recreational drugs that fuel the war on drugs. The party has also shied away from supporting the use of the Army in street battles with drug cartel gunmen.

PRD is the only party that has attempted to chart a broad-based, well defined socio-economic program. Before the 2006 Presidential campaign, PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador assembled a team of experts to prepare an economic operating plan for Mexico. The plan included items such as mandatory reductions in the federal budget, negotiated cutbacks in entitlement programs such as social security and pensions, and reform of PeMex, as well as a program of educational and infrastructural investments.

After losing the controversial election in 2006, PRD presidential candidate AMLO outlined his vision for Mexican development. He included input from the six month’s of protests in Mexico City after the July 2006 election, and attempted to implement the project by a coalition in the Congress. A later collapse of the coalition, as well as political infighting, quashed implementation of this program and left the PRD in a tenuous position for future elections.

PRD is expected to lose forty of its 126 seats in the Chamber of Deputies

PRI. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Mexico from 1929 through 2000. Its rule has been characterized both by socialist and leftist tendencies, and the enforcement of a command economy with heavy traces of crony capitalism and tight controls over access to media, capital, public services — and political office. Under such a “one-party” system, the PRI typically gained 75% of the vote. During a forty year period, PRI accomplished the “Mexican Miracle,” which increased economic production six fold while the population only doubled.

The PRI has frequently been criticized as “wishy washy” in the war on drugs. PRI has advocated better implementation of law and policy. At the same time, the party has criticized for possibly having deep ties to the cartels trafficking in narcotics.

Economically, it is difficult to understand PRI’s platform or approach. It’s also hard to tell how the voters see PRI’s economic policy. Historically, the PRI fell from influence during pressures for openings for foreign development of the Mexican economic system. More specifically, the party took the blame for the post-1988 failures of US-led “open market” economics. Yet PRI remains a party closely identified by many with the nation itself.

Pre election polls strongly suggest that the PRI will be the biggest apparent “winner” on Sunday, more than doubling its current 106 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

“Nullification!?!” A forth major candidate on July 5 will be “voto nulo,” (null vote). Voters are urged to deliberately void their ballot to cast a vote of “no confidence.” The recipients are those who run a political system that continually fails to accomplish anything. The “null” option has also been described as the best statement possible of disillusionment and distrust with the electoral system and institutions. Voto nulo is the sleeper in this election (see part 3 of this series on Election Day). It’s was pegged at 11% in a poll just reported on June 30th.

Voto Nulo: Voting this way nullifies your ballot. The null ballot total becomes the total vote for those who reject the dominant parties and the electoral institutions.

Will the winners end up losing?

The July 5th elections will choose the 500 members of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Voters in 11 states plus the Federal District will elect governors. Within those states and the Federal District, 565 mayors will be elected.

What challenges will the winners face?

Mexicans are watching a “dirty war” fought in their streets, parks, and resorts. At the same time, the citizens are the victims of that war. The war is a PAN invention that models the U.S. war on drugs.

There are some important differences. The PAN government is more than willing to fight cartel gunmen on the streets. In the last two months, 18 were killed in an Acapulco shootout and 53 cartel gunmen were freed form a Mexican jail with no resistance. Drug lords competing for territory in the cocaine transit trade are kidnapping members of opposing gangs, decapitating them, and sharing the videos for an unfathomable purpose. The nation is peering into the abyss and may see a narcostate emerge soon without effective opposition. Slaughtering cartel gunmen on the streets has failed.

What will those elected do to address this madness?

Gross inequities in the economic system present a fearsome burden for the nation.

The wealthiest 20% of Mexicans control nearly 60% of the nation’s wealth while the lowest 50% has only 12%. This is somewhat better than the U.S. where the top 10% control 71% of the wealth. But Mexico has a Gross Domestic Product of $1.1 billion compared to the $14.3 billion for the U.S. There’s less to spread around.

What’s left for the vast majority and what is their incentive?

Year after year, the poor see their job opportunities and wages drop while the cost of food, energy, and other essentials rise. For them, it’s not a matter of giving up their medicine to eat. Simply having that choice would be a luxury.

Mexico has an annual outbound migration of 800,000, mostly workers. That’s three times the annual outbound migration of India and four times that of China. An estimated 12 million Mexicans live out of the country. This reduces the population on Mexican soil from 107 to 95 million and the active work force from 45 million to 33 million, less than a third of the total population. Workers left at home are placed in the increasingly arduous position of coming up with the revenues that run local, state, and federal programs.

Mexicans 19 years old and under comprise 40% of the population (ILO Laborsta). Will the state be able to educate and train this resource to capture the creativity of the people or will it squander this valuable opportunity as it has Mexico’s oil wealth.

The winners may end up as the ultimate losers as these imminent dangers reach maturity over the next few years?

Part 3 of this series will accurately predict the winner of elections and comment on an irresolvable inconsistency in the PAN war on drugs.

END

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A Matter of Trust – Mexico’s July 6 Congressional Election

A Three Part Series Part 1

In the wake of Felipe Calderon’s surprising electoral win over Andrés Manual Lopez-Obrador in 2006 Presidential Elections, demonstrators protesting alleged election fraud occupied the center of Mexico City from July through December. On three occasions, crowds of over one million were reported. Image: Erasmo Lopez

Michael Collins and Kenneth Thomas

Also published here

“Se requiere que las ciudadanos no estén ausentes ante una clase política que, desde el punto de vista ciudadano, no ha respondido y claramente ha fallado,” dijo el Presidente de la República. Sociedad civil confronta a los poderes de la Unión El Universal, June 25, 2009

Translation: “It is necessary that the citizens not be seated behind a political class which, from the citizen’s point of view, clearly has failed,” said the President of the Republic. (President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon El Universal, June 25, 2009)

Every once in a while, a politician tells the unvarnished truth. It’s difficult to recall the last time it happened. Outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of the dangers of the U.S. military-industrial complex comes to mind. Ike told the truth but too late to matter since he was leaving power.

President Calderon is just three years into his six year term as President of Mexico.

Just two days prior to Calderon’s statement, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (ALMO), Calderon’s opponent in the bitterly contested 2006 presidential election, had filed a complaint against the media conglomerate owned television network, Televisa. Obrador argued that Televisa has shown extraordinary bias against his party, the PRD. Candidates are entitled to make complaints about biased coverage to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) created as part of Mexico’s 1990 election reform law.

Obrador said:

“I stand in front of you because you are the owners of Televisa and because you form part of the power elite in Mexico.

“I have considered… that you may disagree with my certainty that the national tragedy is the fault of a group which is guilty of acquiring enormous wealth through the employment of public power, and at the cost of suffering for the majority of the Mexican people.” .El Universal, June 23, 2009

ALMO’s point reflects the fact that Televisa is owned and run by one of the twenty families, the wealthiest people in Mexico who dominate the political and economic life of Mexicans.

As their parties approach the 2009 legislative elections, the opponents from the bitterly contested 2006 presidential election seem to suddenly agree. Calderon’s “political class,” which he says has failed the people, rules “at the bequest of” Mexico’s narrow moneyed elite, the class that the “leftist” Lopez-Obrador is accusing of biased coverage in the congressional campaign.

In the speech quoted in the opening of this article, Calderon admits “that the situation in place in matters of security and justice “is, without doubt, a consequence of many of our omissions, of indolence, of corruption, of illegality and of impunity’ “June 25, 2009.

Who can the Mexican people trust?”

The 2006 Mexican presidential election set the stage for this year’s July 5 national election for Mexico’s bicameral Congress of the Union consisting of the Chamber of Representatives (500 members) and the Senate (128 members). As of June 25, 2009, the two major candidates for president in 2006 see the election system as biased and flawed. ALMO’s affirmation is explicit and Calderon says that the problems are related to class issues. .

Numerous irregularities in 2006 raised suspicions. ALMO ran an effective campaign and was expected to win. Independent analysis of the early vote reports indicated that there was little relationship between actual precinct totals and those reported by the Federal Electoral Institute, the IFE.

A graph of the initial results also revealed an odd statistical curve that looked more like the result of a computer algorithm rather than real vote totals. Less than a week after the election, after analyzing this data Jorge A. López, Ph.D., a physics professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, concluded that, “The bottom line is that the data presented is ill, so ill that it appears to have been given artificial life by a computer algorithm.”

That finding is of interest because the brother-in-law of PAN candidate Calderon was the contract to program the IFE vote reporting system.

The flood of election irregularities added up to election fraud for millions of Mexicans. Over the second half of 2006, many demonstrated and met in Mexico City to plan and implement an alternative government in Mexico’s federal region, a right guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution.

How can Mexican citizens trust the electoral process to reflect their will? And why should they?

In the 1988 presidential contest, when it was apparent that his party would lose their first presidential election in decades, PRI President Miguel de la Madrid arbitrarily stopped vote counting and simply announced that the losing candidate (from his party), Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had been elected president of Mexico. de la Madrid told this story in a 2004 autobiography, 16 years after the election. The people of Mexico and the popular Mexico City mayor, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, representing what is now known as the PRD, had the presidency stolen from them by the direct admission of the election thief. New York Times, Mar 9, 2004

The belated confession by de la Madrid is another moment of unvarnished truth.

As a result of the scandal of 1988, just according to what was known at the time, the Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) was formed based on the input from European specialists. The 1994 and 2000 presidential elections, along with the 1997 legislative contests, were seen as honest vote counts.

But there is still a major theme of distrust running through the Mexican electorate. Why else would the IFE official in charge of the 2006 election, Luis Carlos Ugalde, make these comments about the current electoral system?

“In place of representing the voice of the citizenry, it strengthens the political parties, constricts the freedom of expression and the spaces available for participation, this is to say, it is oppressive, hidden from public view, that it works with political propositions but that it has come to hand the power to speak to analysts who are for economic change before electoral change, the first insufficient, the second oppressive.” El Universal, June 23, 2009

However, amidst his inspiring rhetoric, Ugalde failed to mention the many charges against IFE, the government agency he ran, in what is still thought of by many citizens as a stolen election.

High Stakes in the Election for Congress

In 2009, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Mexico’s citizens.

The country is running out of funds and may need $50 billion just to get through 2010.

A domestic war between the government and narco-traffickers rages through the nation. At least 12,000, likely many more, have been killed since 2007 in an extension of the U.S. war on drugs.

Migration out of Mexico has reached nearly 800,000 a year. The remaining labor force is strapped with taxes to cover the functions of federal, state, and local governments. There is inbound migration from the United States due to the economic collapse and absence of work.

Different sections of the nation are demanding more autonomy from the federal system for a variety of reasons, one being the control of some local and state governments by narco traffickers.

A dynamic legislature and an open political system, with the energy and ability to tackle these problems, are absolutely vital to rescue Mexico from the combined threats of economic, political and social collapse.

Trust is of the essence but will there be even enough trust to generate even a decent turnout?

END

Part 2 will offer an elaboration of the challenges facing Mexico and the solutions offered by the three major parties and the lesser state and regionally based political groups.

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“Give Me Liberty …” Iranian People Demand Democracy

“Give Me Liberty …”

Iranian People Demand Democracy

Iranian citizens charge police with courage, their bodies, and a few rocks to secure their rights to self determination and clean elections. Image

Also published here

Michael Collins

Neoconservatives and other con artists are now claiming to support the Iranian people.  Some are the same people who pushed to bomb Iran preemptively just a few years ago.  Others, who stood on the sidelines to see who would “win,” are now defenders of clean elections.   It doesn’t matter to the Iranian’s demanding respect and self determination.  For them, the real victory will be to emerge as a free nation that’s outside the “great game” of the major powers.

The actions of the Iranian people against the stolen election June 12, 2009 serve as an object lesson for oligarchs in nations around the world, including the United States. The people are sufficiently engaged and intelligent to notice blatant political manipulations. They’re willing to take to the streets and risk their lives for the absolute right of self determination.

The Iranian people know that their situation is far from hopeless. They learned that being told “there’s nothing you can do” is a lie and they are demanding their rights with an adamant presence in the streets of Tehran and other cities throughout Iran.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, spoke at Tehran University Friday to a staged crowd, one he ordered up from the countryside. He said that the election was just fine with him. That makes sense. His “guy” won in a landslide despite the clear historical trends of Iranian presidential voting over a twenty year period.

This year’s results were so clear to the vote counters; they were able to announce the tally in just hours. In past elections it took three days to count a similar number of ballots for the presidential elections. But the oligarchs knew the results in advance so why bother with counting? A Queen of Hearts move was all it took.

The people of Iran were disgusted with this. They did what men and women all over the world do after years of oppression. They took to the streets. But these were very mean streets.

The price of freedom and dignity is paid in the blood of Iranian demonstrators. If Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, would allow the slaughter of citizens, what’s a little election fraud? Image

The local police and a host of paramilitary groups were waiting to “keep order” (”order” meaning the suppression of free speech by any means available).

Here one of the government thugs gets ready to stab a demonstrator in the back for simply asking for a fair vote count. Image

There’s one less voter for Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to worry about. Despite the threats and the assaults by government agents, the people persevere. Image

The demonstrations started the day after the announcement of the vote total. On Friday June 19, the supreme leader gave a speech at Tehran University. He threw down the gauntlet. He ordered citizens to stop all protests. Then ominously he told them directly that “they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos.” June 19, 2009

The election fraud doubters seem to rely on a common but unstated assumption: the Iranian people lack the intellect and judgment to have made once again the free choice they’ve been making since 1989 — voting in the majority for reformist candidates. The notion that the atavistic Ahmadinejad won implies that there is something very wrong with Iranians.

Quite the contrary, there is something very right about the Iranian people standing up to a fascist regime that routinely devalues the lives and well being of its citizens. Where else but Mexico 2006 have we seen a sustained independent protest of a stolen election? Where else have people put their lives on the line through an independent movement that shows such respect for their natural rights?

The bravery and sincerity of the demonstrators undeniable.

Baton wielding Iranian paramilitary forces mounted on motorcycles charge citizens forced to run for their lives. These thugs are thorough. One of them captures a young woman in a strangle hold (marked section). Image

Take special note when you see fires like this. They are the captured and burning bikes of the forces of maximum leader Khamenei. Somehow, citizens dismounted the paramilitaries, stacked the bikes and set them on fire.

But the regime’s paramilitaries have more than dirt bikes to get them around. Image

Here they are arriving in buses to do their dirty work. Image

But brave Iranian demonstrators disabled their escape route. Image

The tactics of the Iranian rulers can no longer deny the popular will. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians assembled, as is their right, demanding that the fraudulent election be overturned. Image

As the crowds grew the oligarchs realized that this was not just a whim by the people. Deaths from demonstrating has risen to 150 Friday and Saturday according to some sources. Image

But the will of the people cannot be suppressed indefinitely or even for a few hours. The act of defiance is the true victory. Nothing is the same after that. Image

There are reports of a divide forming in the government. The conservative speaker of Iran’s legislative body, the Majlis, just said that there are serious doubts about the election.

Even worse for the oligarchs, the movement of the people has a symbol – Neda, an assassinated Iranian woman – that is spreading around the world today.

Here’s the Iranian citizen Neda, to the left, before being shot. She’s walking next to her father in the blue shirt. YouTube June 20, 2009

Here’s Neda after being shot by a paramilitary sniper. She’s comforted by her father and people in the crowd.  After someone said, “don’t give up” she died. Cries of grief can be heard in the background. YouTube June 20, 2009

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, his puppet Ahmadinejad, and their apologists who claim that this was a fair and representative election now face their worst nightmare. That nightmare is an examination of the facts of the election that point directly to election fraud and a rigged outcome (See Iranian Election Fraud 2009). Their success follows the efforts to those who fought the theft of the 2006 Mexican presidential election, those ridiculed for doubting the 2004 U.S. election, plus all the others who defy the election fantasies produced by oligarchs and their minions.

Why was there a purge of reformists and moderates at the election ministry before the election? Why was there police intimidation at the polls? Why were results announced within hours of the close of voting showing an Ahmadinejad victory? In past elections, it has taken three days to count votes. Why the hurry? How did the votes get counted in just a fraction of the normal time?

Just a simple review of past elections shows solid majorities for reformist candidates from 1989 through 2001. Even the 2005 election of Ahmadinejad, boycotted by reformists, showed their underlying strength. After four years of a failed economy and isolation in the region and the world, we’re expected to believe that reformist supporters defected in droves to elect the author of the nation’s suffering, the pretender president Ahmadinejad.

Neoconservatives and other con artists are now claiming to support the Iranian people.  Some are the same people who pushed to bomb Iran preemptively just a few years ago.  Others, who stood on the sidelines to see who would “win,” are now defenders of clean elections.   It doesn’t matter to the Iranian’s demanding respect and self determination.  For them, the real victory will be to emerge as a free nation that’s outside the “great game” of the major powers.

The people of Iran are just like people all over the world. They have a fundamental desire for freedom and respect. They are both outraged and aggrieved when they see these desires thwarted by oligarchs with power and wealth as their only objectives. Guilt and paranoia by the oligarchs led to cheating and then attacks on those who protest to loudly.

In Iran, the wages of a brave people fighting for their freedom are injury and death. For them, the alternative is simply unbearable. They deserve our support.

END

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Iranian Election Fraud 2009 Who was the Real Target and Why?

Iranian Election Fraud 2009

Who was the Real Target and Why?

Is this man the target of Iranian election fraud?
Hashemi Rafsanjani, former two term president
and Iranian power broker.  Image

Michael Collins

There most certainly was election fraud in Iran in this election and every previous election under the current electoral system.  The question is not, did fraud take place in this most recent election?  Of course it did.  You just need to study the Iranian Constitution and recent Iranian elections understand that, a step skipped by the major media and some nay-saying bloggers in the United States.

The real questions are who or what was the target of the fraud and why?

The 2009 presidential election produced a 75% turnout, an alleged landslide victory for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and widespread protests by supporters of the losing candidates.  It also produced a pervasive and violent crack down by Iranian authorities.

The reelection of Ahmadinejad is highly significant to Iranians and the rest of the world.  Iran is a major oil supplier and a political actor of major proportions in the South Asia and the Middle East.  Iran may joint the list of nations with nuclear weapons soon, it appears.

The most pressing current problem with Iran is posed by the nation’s president who happens to be certifiably insane.  He is a holocaust denier; not just once but every time he’s asked.  Ahmadinejad even hosted a world conference for other deniers.  The existence on the holocaust is not a required issue for discussion by Iranian politicians.  Ahmadinejad actually goes out of his way to showcase his break with reality.  He’s also continues the repellent acts of the death penalty for homosexuality and the application of the death penalty for capital crimes by children.

Yet he was approved once again by Iran’s Guardian Council as a candidate for the nation’s highest office.  The council consists of six Islamic jurists appointed by the Supreme Leader of Iran and six from the Majlis, Iran’s popularly elected parliament.  They screen presidential candidates through background checks and a detailed written examination.  Very few pass the test.  Since 2004, the counci hasl routinely rejected reform candidates.

That’s the fraud.  It couldn’t be more obvious.

The outcome of every election is determined by 12 men through the selection process that they devise.  The choice of Iranian voters is determined before they ever get to the polling place. Candidates represent a very narrow spectrum defined by the 12.  This process is supposed to accommodate the various major factions in the country to preserve civil order but the balancing act is entirely under the control of the guardian council.

The 2004 selection process by the guardian’s is referred to as the silent coup by many Iranians.  The selection of candidates for parliament was so biased against Iran’s reform parties, many ended up boycotting the election.  The boycott and lower turnout resulted in Ahmadinejad’s election as president and a parliament stacked with his supporters.  (Note on the use of “reformer” in Iranian politics)

The result of the 2009 election was too much to bear for supporters of the approved reform candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former president of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.  They’ve taken to the streets.

Demonstrators Prevail over Riot Police

BBC, June 13, 2009

The losing candidate, reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi,  is reported missing.  He supposedly has an account on Twitter.  An Iranian web site published a letter it reported was meant for his followers.  That web site is down at this moment.  In the letter, Mousavi said:

“The reported results of the 10th Iranians residential Election are appalling. The people who witnessed the mixture of votes in long lineups know who they have voted for and observe the wizardry of I.R.I.B (State run TV and Radio) and election officials. Now more than ever before they want to know how and by which officials this game plan has been designed. I object fully to the current procedures and obvious and abundant deviations from law on the day of election and alert people to not surrender to this dangerous plot. Dishonesty and corruption of officials as we have seen will only result in weakening the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran and empowers lies and dictatorships.

I am obliged, due to my religious and national duties, to expose this dangerous plot and to explain its devastating effects on the future of Iran. I am concerned that the continuation of the current situation will transform all key members of this regime into fabulists in confrontation with the nation and seriously jeopardize them in this world and the next.”   June 14, 2009 (Original web site not currently available)

There were reports of widespread voter intimidation at the polls by the police and ballot destruction.  There were also reports that the bureaucracy that runs elections had been purged of those not loyal to the Ahmadinejad regime.  Iran’s elections are run by the same group that selects candidates, the Guardian Council.  This may explain the suspicious nature of election reporting by government authorities.

An experienced reporter on Iranian politics, Laura Secor, was clear in her assessment:

“There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much.”  New Yorker, June 13, 2009

Her doubts are widely held in Iran, according to a just published story by Reuters:   INSTANT VIEW: Iran’s election result staggers analysts

Maziar Bahari of Newsweek erroneously reported that, “Less than a month before balloting starts, all the polls give a healthy edge to the hardline incumbent.”   That statement is simply wrong.  Pre election polls varied greatly.  The last national poll of 7,900 citizens showed a 57% to 24% Mousavi lead.  Checking the validity of any Iranian pre election poll is difficult due to limited to no access to data and methodology.  The momentum of the campaign measured by crowd size showed a wave of enthusiasm for Mousavi and his “Green” reform movement.

There were troubling patterns in the announced vote totals that indicated a rigged contest.  A statistical analysis from The Tehran Bureau (or pdf of site if it’s down) showed nearly the same difference in votes from the first through sixth phase of reporting by government authorities.  The poster, Muhammad Sahimi, concluded:

“Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own.”  The Teheran Bureau, Muhammad Sahimi, June 13, 2009 (or pdf of site)

This type of precision ignored factors like variable vote totals by region, ethnic group, and locality, e.g., city, town, and so forth.  Juan Cole outlined several of the glaring inconsistencies in the election results that support this analysis.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com took a look at this data, called it “dubious,” and concluded that it did not prove election fraud.  He compared the actual reports of Iran election results to special model he built for the 2008 United States presidential election.  His model presumed that states reported a) results in six phases (which they do not), as the Iranian results were reported, and b) by alphabetical groupings, e.g. Alabama through Illinois, etc. (which is not the case in real world U.S. election reporting).  Jumping through these self created hoops, Silver was able to fit the 2006 U.S. presidential election into the statistical pattern of the Iranian election.

In addition to a flawed comparison to U.S. election reporting, Silver ignored the electoral success of reform movement candidate Mohammad Khatami in 1997 (70% share/80% turnout) and 2001 (78% share/70% turnout).  Reform movement ally Rafsanjani won the two presidential elections before that in 1989 and 1993.   Ahmadinejad’s 2005 victory was a fluke due to a boycott by reformers after their candidates were by the guardian’s council.  Turnout was only 48%.  Clearly, reformers are the dominant vote getters in open Iranian elections

With a history of reform candidate dominance in high turnout elections, we’re supposed to believe that the 80% turnout in 2009 produced a lopsided victory for the radical Islamic candidate with failed economic policies.

Then there are the striking similarities between the Iranian election and the 2006 Mexican presidential election.  There was massive evidence of fraud from the destruction of ballots to phased election reports that were so perfect statistically that it appeared to be the product of computer generated program.

Ironically, Silver concluded that, “To properly analyze Iran’s election results is probably something best left to Middle East experts, rather than experts on U.S. electoral politics.”

Maybe he should check the Tehran Bureau’s web site to see people with American sounding names telling Iranians who’ve just risked their lives to protest election fraud that it was all a waste of their time.

Posted at the Tehran Bureau, Faulty Election Data (or pdf of site)

“Mike Thomas says:
June 13, 2009 at 16:55

“As much as I’m sure the Iranian elections are bullshit rigged. The mathematical analysis in this post is flawed. For a very neat explanation of why this is the case, visit http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ where Nate Silver links to this post and explains the problem.”

The “problem” is the impertinence of the poster’s “neat explanation” and his reference to Silver’s flawed and historically vacant critique of a fraud analysis that is just one part of a much larger picture of election fraud in Iran.  It is a life and death struggle faced by the Iranian people not an online fantasy game.

“People of Iran”

“Media, we are not opposition, we are people of Iran” reads sign left.  Iranians in Great Britain demonstrate at Iran’s Embassy.  Image

Why was this particular election fixed in the way that it was?

What were the high stakes that required a blatant cramdown of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s choice, the deranged Ahmadinejad?

The Iranian Revolution was not monolithic.  It consisted of leftist nationalists, represented by students and others, primarily in urban areas, a right wing based on Islamic law, and other distinct factions.  Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, is said to have balanced these constituencies to prevent the domination of one or the other opposed factions.  The complex counterbalancing powers assigned to various groups.  The Iranian Constitution reflects this goal.

Iran’s reformers favor a more open society, openings to the West, and a more capitalist economy.  Ahmadinejad’s faction has a radical interpretation of Islamic law that’s highly restrictive.  This restrictiveness includes criminal acts like executing those convicted of homosexual behavior.  Ahmadinejad is also pushing a hard for a redistribution of wealth.

Rafsanjani is opposed to this for several reasons.  According to Forbes he’s one of thee wealthiest men in the world.  He wants more openings to the West.  In this campaign, he has also been the target of highly personal attacks by Ahmadinejad who accused him of fraud in a presidential debate.

Rafsanjani fired back with an open public letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reminding him that he, not Ahmadinejad, was a true follower of the balance of power initiated by Khomeini.  The letter was also a preemptive notice to the current government to avoid stealing the election according to Hossein Bastini, an Iranian foreign policy analyst.

Of note, Rafsanjani is head of both the Expediency Discernment Council and the Assembly of Experts.  While both are powerful positions under Iran’s Constitution, the Assembly of Experts has fundamental power.  It selects Iran’s maximum leader, the supreme ruler, and it has the power to remove that leader if it determines the leader has strayed from Islamic principles.

Structuring the 2005 elections to take legislative power from Iran’s reform faction was the first step in moving on the reformers and their most powerful leader, Hashemi Rafsanjani and the entire reform movement.  Stealing the 2009 Presidential election was the second of four steps to secure total control of Iran.  The allegiance of the armed forces and the Supreme leader are the final two acts, it would appear, in Ahmadinejad’s drama.

The delusional president (s)elect seems to have forgotten the expressed will of the Iranian people.  Reformers won the parliamentary and presidential elections for the last two cycles until the guardian council shut down reform candidates for parliament and stole the presidential election a few days ago. Election fraud creates false majorities and a much larger group of dissatisfied citizens.

Ultimately this unresolved conflict may be resolved by the long term political power broker, Hashemi Rafsanjani.  Hardly a figure of real reform, Rafsanjani has the most to lose in the short term.  From his term as president, he knows the options of that office to confine dissidents, assassinate opponents abroad, and worse.  He’ll not likely volunteer for the role of victim without a fight.  He controls the council that has power over the selection and tenure of the supreme leader.  He has already asked Khamenei to reject the results of the presidential election.

Rafsanjani’s and candidate Mousavi’s ability to maneuver and the presence and strength of ongoing protests are the real indicators of the winner of this round of the Iranian power struggle.

The Associated Press said that, “The outcome will not sharply alter Iran’s main policies or sway major decisions, such as possible talks with Washington or nuclear policies. Those crucial issues rest with the ruling clerics headed by the unelected Khamenei.”  June 12, 2009

AP ignores the balancing act of Iranian politics and the fact that the supreme leader is appointed and can be removed as well.  It seems that AP sees no difference in dealing with a holocaust denier who steals elections, denies the will of citizens, and routinely executes homosexual versus, Mousavi, the leader of the “Green” revolution who promised a more open society and productive relationships with Iran’s neighbors.  Positive contact with the United States is also in the plans.

Freedom

May the Iranian people have the right to express their will through elections open to all factions with voting, vote counting, and reporting that is transparent, verifiable, and accurate.  Of all the elements in Iranian politics, the two that offer the most hope are citizens as indicated by earlier voting patterns, candidate Mousavi for his resistance to fraud, and those true reformers excluded from election system by the so called guardians of Iran’s election process.

END

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The Binary Fallacy and The End of Both Parties

Michael Collins

Also posted here

(Wash., DC)  The results of eight years of Bush-Cheney at the helm make the demise of the Republican Party an easy call.  Our financial system is on life support.  The major banks are insolvent, according to banking and legal authority William K. Black.  If they’re not, they’re in intensive care.  No matter how many trillions of dollars worth of infusions they receive, they’re not making loans.  The economy is in a free fall with growth down 6% a quarter and job losses running at nearly  600,000 a month.  We’re stuck in two catastrophic wars.  Despite President Obama’s election, we’re viewed with suspicion and disregard throughout the world.

The public knows which party bears the primary blame for all of this and they’re not about to forget any time soon.  The Republican Party is headed for the political graveyard.

They’re not going to rely on past achievements though.  Through their self-proclaimed national leader, the odious Rush Limbaugh, they’ve chosen to attack the first Latino nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, for being a “racist.”  Former Oxycontin addict Limbaugh said, “She brings a form of bigotry and racism to the court.”  He went on to say that nominating her was like nominating Klansman and Aryan Nation advocate David Duke for the highest court.

These charges are quite literally bizarre, particularly with Limbaugh calling anyone else a racist.  Newt Gingrich has joined Limbaugh in a duet of stupidity.  This is appropriate since Gingrich is the architect of the power and policies used by Republicans to drive the nation into its current crisis.

The political impact for Republicans will be devastating.  Sotomayor is the first Latino nominated to the Supreme Court.  Latinos represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States.  They went for Obama 67% to McCain’s 33%, and comprised 9% of the electorate in 2008.  Among Latino youth, the fastest growing segment of the Latino population, the choice was 76% Obama compared to 19% McCain.

Sotomayor is also a woman nominee.  Women comprised 53% of the electorate in 2008 and they went for Obama 56% to 43% for McCain.  Many of those women are working and struggle with fools like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on a regular basis.

The Republicans are like an early adolescent frenetically trying on new identities, each seemingly stranger than the last.  Led by the Southern wing, the party began by opposing the bailout for the big three U.S. automakers.  Acting as though the nation doesn’t need any heavy industry or a few million people don’t need a job, their mask of fiscal rigor hid the fact that key southern states have the manufacturing base for major foreign automakers.

They then turned to Rush and, at the same time, held a national protest in April.  Sparsely  attended, this nationwide event acquired the unfortunate name of “Tea bagging.”   It failed to produce anything more than some Jerry Springer quality footage for a brief spot on local news.  Recently, the national Republican Party, backed by early presidential aspirant Gingrich, tried to rename the Democrats as the “Democratic Socialist Party.”  There is no end in sight to this parade of irrelevant, out of touch efforts.

We’re now seeing the final phases of the Republican dance macabre.  The Limbaugh-Gingrich anti-Latino campaign is so dangerous that some Republican senators, including right wing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), are moving away from the slanders against Sotomayor.  John McCain (R-AZ) also sees the implications for his party.  He’s signed up to attend the National Council of La Raza conference this summer to counter the anti Latino rhetoric spread by other Republican leaders.

Democratic loyalists are acting as though the Republican demise is an accomplishment on their part.  It is as though their understated — but very complicit — support of the Republican policies of empire and wealth transfer to the ultra wealthy will go unnoticed.

Congressional Democrats voted in the majority to authorize the Iraq invasion.  They voted in the majority to fund the Iraq adventure long after the lies leading to war were well known.  A majority of Senate Democrats voted for the Patriot Act.   A Democratic controlled Senate allowed further government spying on personal communication (FISA Amendments) in 2008 and a third of Senate Democrats supported the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gutted habeas corpus, and

Democrats voted for the initial Wall Street welfare bill; also know as the bailout.  Right now, the Obama administration is responsible for doubling the Bush administrations cash transfer form the U.S. Treasury to Wall Street and the banks.  Democrats failed to pass the only major bill to ease rampant foreclosures.  This left 1.7 million families likely to lose their homes.  Democrats did pass a credit card reform bill but forgot to cap those 29% interest limits that the banks arbitrarily assign.

There was an announced policy to leave Iraq.  To date, all we’ve seen are plans to open up a new phase of the Afghan war with tens of thousands of troops simply switching job assignments from Iraq to an even more treacherous landscape.  Ominously, we now have plans for super embassy in Pakistan to rival the fortress constructed in Iraq.

Democrats don’t want people to see pictures of Bush-Cheney torture from the prison at Guantanamo, probably because it occurred with funding that they helped provide.  They don’t want to close that facility if it means housing prisoners in the United States.  This forced their president into the extraordinary and troubling position of maintaining current prisoners in Cuba.   As the Democratic Senators participated in the 90 to 6 vote to refuse President Obama funds to close Guantanamo, they were resolute in failing to mention that only10 of over 400 prisoners there are charged with a violent crime.  To borrow an appropriate response, You’ve done enough.   Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Apparently not.

Democrats won’t even talk about the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians due to civil strife caused by the war that they funded.  Failing to talk about it means it never happened, they hope.

Despite all of the alleged but obvious crimes of Bush-Cheney against people here and around the world, the Democrats want to “look forward” and bypass prosecutions of any sort against the Bush administration.

The Binary Fallacy

The binary fallacy is the crude dialectic that assumes that the two political parties are the only choices for voters and that what’s bad for one party will always be good for the other.  As evidence for this, we have Nixon’s Watergate scandal followed by huge Democratic victories in congressional elections.  President Carter’s economically distressed four years begat the Reagan revolution and so forth.

Democrat Party operatives see the collapse of the nation and attendant pain as working against the Republicans since they were in control when the decline was assured by Republican sponsored programs.  The situation is so bad, they argue, no one will take the Republicans seriously over the near and midterm.  Add the highly favorable demographics among youth, women, and the emerging Latino population and you’ve got the dominant political party of the next few decades.

Republican loyalists speak of the risks that the Obama administration has inherited.  When he falters, as he may given the circumstances that Republicans know all too well, his failure will assure a Republican comeback they argue.

Both parties fail to realize two flaws in their embedded fallacy.

First, the fallacy became a manufactured truth over decades due to the rigged game of U.S. politics.  Funding and access to major media presume membership in one of the two major parties.  Third party candidates need to poll equal or ahead in the public opinion polls, as Ross Perot did in 1992, in order to get any media attention or money.  When the system is heavily rigged to exclude third parties, then, of course, there are only two choices.

The second flaw in the binary fallacy is embodied by our current troubles.  The fallacy does not take into account successful performance during extreme crises.  We’re either in a depression or we’re in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.  Times are desperate for tens of millions.  The vast majority lives in fear of entering the world of the unemployed, homeless, and bereft.  Iraq is the biggest foreign policy disaster in modern times.  Our new plans for an Afghanistan adventure have the potential to equal Iraq in terms of national loss and increased threats of blowback.

One party created the current disaster.  The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed — wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive fantasies of empire through war.

The two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other.

When you’re broke, you know it.

When you’re out of work, you know it.

When there are no jobs, you know it.

And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it.

The game is up.  The party is over.  The people have a fundamental right to survive, at the very least.  If both parties continue to promote policies that leave out almost all citizens, as is now the case, there will be alternatives that look nothing like the current two political parties.  The binary fallacy and the two parties that fail to address our crises will be no more.  Relying solely on the failures of the opposing party while embracing their programs will soon be defunct.

END

Special thanks to Kathyn Stone for her helpful comments.

Images:  Gingrich Geithner-Obama

Permission granted to reproduce in part or whole with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

SHIP OF STATE OR SHIP OF FOOLS

SHIP OF STATE OR SHIP OF FOOLS

The Money Party at Work

We keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results.

Michael Collins
See also

Who are the officers guiding our ship of state, steering us through the troubled waters of a failed economy and two tragic and costly wars?

Do we have bold leaders ready to move us away from the failed policies that generated a free market kleptocracy for insiders and their masters, the ultra wealthy?

Are they brilliant tacticians who can think far enough outside of the box to get us out of calamitous foreign adventures that generate nothing but death, destruction, and ill will on the part of those we seek to “help”?

At the start of President Obama’s administration, it was clear that this would be a cabinet that spanned those few degrees of that mythical political spectrum called “the middle.”  The political middle, like the Hobbits’ “middle earth,” is a contrivance, although much less artful.  It’s where you’re supposed to be if you’re the president.  You stand for those who count; those with the vested interests in the economy.  You are that special gatekeeper at the intersection between avarice and the nation’s wealth.

Will anything truly change?

We can tell by the key players in domestic and foreign policy.

Chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner are the stewards of economic policy and programs.  They have a long public track record.  Summers was a key player in repealing the Glass Steagall Act in 1999.  In place since the Great Depression, that law prevented banks from wild, risky speculation.  Since it was repealed in 1999, banks have run free doing the very things that the act prevented.

Summers was also a key player in the passage of the Commodity Services Modernization Act of 2000.  That act brought back derivatives which had been illegal since 1906.  These highly speculative market products were the very thing Glass-Steagall would have prevented.

Geithner served as one of the nation’s top bank regulators as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful Fed by far.  He had his own stress test for banks in 2007 and thought everything was fine.  Most of those banks are so stressed two years later that they require welfare from the federal government just to stay afloat.

Summers is guiding government policy in the most spectacular welfare program of all – Wall Street welfare.  Banks have now received twice as much in welfare payments as they received under Bush and its just beginning.

As Treasury secretary, Geithner is making this happen. He’s also working to see that the Federal Reserve offered trillions more in credit guarantees for the failed banks and bankers.  Geithner also ratified what most experts called an illegal tax break for the nation’s largest banks written into code by a Bush Treasury staffer.  It’s a $140 billion giveaway that no one will even talk about.  By failing to repeal or even discuss it, it’s become Geithner’s giveaway.

Citizens aren’t doing so well.  The foreclosure relief bill failed despite Senator Richard Durbin’s (D-IL) exceptional effort.  That would have kept 1.7 million families in their homes.  No help on that one from Summers and Geithner.  The credit card bill of rights failed to cap interest rates on credit cards.  The 29% rates common at any bank’s whim, could have been capped at 15%, President Obama’s suggestion.

But there were no breaks for us.  Our so-called credit card bill of rights lacks the one right that would have helped — a ban on usurious fees from the failed banks.  We don’t get any special tax code changes from Treasury staffers but the banks get $140 billion that simply stays in place because no one in power seems to care.  This makes it clear to us who really counts.

Our foreign policy is changing in some ways.  We’re supposedly reducing our commitment to the war in Iraq but increasing it in Afghanistan.  Perennial diplomatic envoy Richard Holbrooke made his views clear when he signed on with Madeleine Albright and other notables to advocate a more aggressive military policy in the Middle East.

The media anointed peace maker is now the president’s special envoy to South Asia.  He showed his stuff during an April visit to Pakistan.  The diplomacy was so adept that the trip was described by a U.S. scholar as “the worst-ever visit” by an American team to South Asia in history.  It was a complete disaster.”

That diplomacy was complicated by the policies of General David Petraeus, Commander of the United States Central Command.  He’s responsible for the Predator drone (unmanned killer aircraft) attacks on Pakistan’s western region.  The drones do a good job of killing both Taliban rebels and innocent Pakistanis.  Pakistani’s are taking special exception to their fellow citizens being killed by outsiders, the Taliban or robot killer drones.

They’ll be seeing more of that in the near future, perhaps.  The new policy in neighboring Afghanistan will involve a lot of killing if past records indicate future performance.  General Petraeus appointed General Stanley McCrystal to lead the war in Afghanistan.  Former head of the top secret Joint Special Operations Command, McCrystal has a reputation for rough tactics that get the job done.  Seymour Hersh called the group “an executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Bush and Cheney in the past.

Summers and Geithner have been wrong for over a decade.  They supported from the massive deregulation of banks and the enabling of the complicated Ponzi scheme referred to as derivatives.  They’ve continued the flow of trillions from the U.S. Treasury to failed Wall Street financial instructions.  And there’s no record that they’ve done anything directly for the vast majority of citizens.

Holbrooke is a constant warrior in diplomat’s clothing.  He even implied a threat of another 9/11 with the absurd claim that 5,000 Taliban thugs were going to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to scare the public into supporting a blank check in South Asia.

General Petraeus has filled in the details of that check despite the lack of public response to Holbrooke’s scare tactics.  It’s going to involve just the type of highly aggressive campaign in Afghanistan that has made us enemies throughout the Middle East.

Is this what we voted for?  We’ve got two Wall Street veterans presiding over the continued looting of the Treasury in behalf of failed banks and financiers.  While CEO’s keep their jobs at insolvent banks, citizens get nothing.  After seven years in war based on shameless lies and over a million dead, we’re about to move the action to Afghanistan.  We keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results.

All aboard the Ship of Fools.

END

Annotated references

Images:  Geithner, Summers, Petraeus, Holbrooke

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The Big “Con”: Taliban take Pakistan and its “Another 9/11″

The Big “Con”

Taliban About to Defeat Pakistan,

Take Control of Nukes, and It’s Another 9/11

Michael Collins
Also published here

(Wash. DC, May 9, 2009)  A strange feeling of déjà vu arises while listening to the administration sell further U.S. military intervention in Pakistan (our Predator drones are already there).

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen claimed in late March that Pakistan’s intelligence service has “close links with al Qaeda and the Taliban network.”  In fact, Mullen warned, the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is “offering logistical support to them (the Taliban).”

In early April, veteran foreign policy icon and special advisor to the president on Afghanistan and South Asia, Richard Holbrook, let us know what this meant.  There is a fundamental difference between the Pakistan conflict and the Viet Nam war, he argued.  Pakistan has nuclear weapons.  Holbrook went on to say this:

“And the people who are in this area who we are fighting either pose a direct threat, having committed 9/11, having done Mumbai, having killed (Benazir) Bhutto, and they have publicly said they are going to do more of the same. That is: al Qaeda of course and their allies the Taliban.”  Richard Holbrooke, May 5, 2009 (Repeating April 19, 2009 statement)

On May 9, General David Petraeus supported his superiors as he announced that Pakistan was now “the world headquarters for the al Qaeda senior leadership.”

There is even talk in the U.S. media that Pakistan is at risk of becoming a failed state controlled by Muslim extremists.  Using Holbrooke’s logic, the U.S. would then be faced with a nation of 170 million Hell bent on more 911’s, Mumbai massacres, and nuclear blackmail.

This threat accounts for the use of unmanned drone aircraft to bomb Taliban fighters.  The Pakistan’s government opposes the unauthorized drone attacks as destabilizing and counterproductive.  This is a recent example of U.S. policy that results in majorities of Pakistani’s opposing al Qaeda’s terrorist goals but, at the same time, favoring the goal of “driving U.S. forces out of their country.”

Pakistan has a different take on events.

Fundamentalists in the rural, mountainous regions have sought Muslim law (Sharia) for decades.  The largely urban population of Pakistan and its central government oppose this.  Armed conflict has ebbed and flowed over time.  This issue and conflict is a distant second to Pakistan’s overriding focus on its hostile relationship with India.  Three major wars with India and an ongoing tension between the nations since Pakistan was formed on August 14, 1947 account for this.

Pakistani fundamentalists in the volatile northwestern provinces gained strength during the 1980’s due to their utility in fighting the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained this to Congress on April 25, 2009, “Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union.”

Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, worked with the United States to fund religious extremists from Pakistan and elsewhere that were willing to fight the Soviet Union’s forces occupying Afghanistan.  Billions of dollars were committed to this effort by the United States.

Respected journalist Ahmed Rashid noted that, “CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujahideen.”  A prime recruiting area was the sparsely populated, conservative Muslim population in Pakistan’s border provinces.

That cooperative effort became old news after September 1, 2001.  U.S. policy toward Afghanistan went from funding the Taliban rulers to destroy poppy crops to evicting them supposedly as a first step in the search for bin Laden.

The turmoil in Afghanistan spread to the border regions of Pakistan.  By 2008, new Taliban leadership emerged in Pakistan and the extremists were on the move.  Pakistan’s western provinces are lightly guarded by the Pakistani Frontier Corp.  The Taliban’s initial successes allowed them to show their unique style of governance:

“Militants unleashed a reign of terror, killing and beheading politicians, singers, soldiers and opponents. They banned female education and destroyed nearly 200 girls’ schools” Reuters May 7, 2009.

The preoccupation of Pakistan’s government with the Indian border resulted in the attempts to negotiate a peace which might simply calm the situation in the west.  This was deemed unacceptable by the United States.

At the same time, United States ignored warnings from different factions that the ongoing drone attacks, in defiance of Pakistan’s objections, were creating major problems for both the U.S. and Pakistan’s new government which was seen as powerless to do anything but complain to U.S. officials.

Diplomatic incursion

Special advisor Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mullen took a diplomatic road trip to Pakistan to make the case for more aggressive action by Pakistan’s regular military in early April

What are the chances Pakistan could fall to the Taliban?  If you listen to presidential advisor Richard Holbrooke, we are looking at another 9/11 unless Pakistan gets its act together.   Mullen was equally strident in his concerns and criticisms of the Pakistanis.

Both officials had made public statements prior to the trip stating the danger to the United States by failure to act decisively against the Taliban.  One of the charges was that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, was in league with the Taliban and that the government was doing little or nothing to change things.

This created uproar in Pakistan’s capitol.  The head of the ISI refused to meet with Mullen and Holbrooke and the normally mild mannered foreign minister sat the two down for a “frank exchange.”   Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi summarized his meetings with this advice: “‘We can only work together if we respect each other and trust each other. There is no other way and nothing else will work,’ he said rather bluntly” Dawn, Apr 9, 2009.

In an interview on National Public Radio on April 21, even Shuja Nawaz from the establishment oriented Atlantic Council was driven to exasperation when describing the Holbrooke – Mullen mission.  “This is probably the worst-ever visit by an American team to South Asia in history.  It was a complete disaster.  And if this is how you want to win friends, I just wonder how you want to create enemies” NPR, Apr 21, 2009.

But lets return to the 9/11 card played by Richard Holbrooke. That’s a very serious charge.  It hinges on the likelihood of Pakistan falling to the Taliban

Here’s how they match up?

Pakistan is a nation of 170 million people.  It had an impressive run of economic growth until the recent economic crisis.  It is the most urbanized nation in South Asia and has a large educated class.  The Pakistani Army is a well armed force of 650,000 with a substantial reserve force.  The Army has fought three major wars with India, has a modern command structure, and is held in a positive regard by citizens.  It is the largest single contributor to UN peace keeping efforts.

The Pakistani Taliban consists of an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 members.   Their funding may be from the opium trade with other sources hard to pin down.  They promote a violent brand of Islam rejected by the vast majority of Pakistani citizens and they are not held in any regard other than fear due to their violent version of Islamic law.

If Pakistan fell to the Taliban, it would be the most remarkable victory in the history of warfare based on the measure of forces and experience.

Is this likely to be the case?

The Economist dismissed the chances of a Taliban victory over Pakistan.

“If, unthinkably, the disparate warlords who make up the Pakistan Taliban were to mass together for a frontal attack, Pakistan’s army, which is 620,000-strong and well-drilled for conventional warfare, could crush them. Indeed, many pundits reckon that an Islamist takeover in Pakistan would be possible only with the army’s support.”  The Economist, Apr 30, 2009

Scholar and commentator Juan Cole said the notion of a Taliban victory simply “makes no sense.”  He pointed out that the two largest vote getters in the last election for president were not Muslim fundamentalists and that the vast majority of the nation’s Muslims are not fundamentalists (Informed Comment, Apr 26, 2009).

The most recent major political controversy in Pakistan has been the broad public support and protest for a return of the Supreme Court justices fired by then President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf.  These justices found that the president was not qualified by to run in the 2008 presidential elections.  This type of issue hardly indicates a population ripe for radical Islam.

But what about the threat to the United States?

Advisor Holbrooke and Admiral Mullen claim an imminent danger from a Taliban victory.  The senior Taliban leader in Pakistan is doing all he can to promote that storyline.  Baitullah Mehsud told the Los Angles Times that, “Our mission is to continue jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to avenge drone attacks, even inside America,” Apr 1, 2009.  This was nothing less than the 9/11 threats that Holbrooke and Mullen see in the mountains of Pakistan.

Five weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times did a comprehensive report on this question citing sources from various government agencies.  A “military officer” said Mehsud’s statements showed “how dangerous he and his group are.”  A CIA source discounted Mehsud’s importance and a “counterterrorism official” was quoted as saying, “I think it’s a lot of boasting on his part.” Los Angeles Times, Apr 1, 2009

The Times described a FBI document on Mehsud that said, “The bulletin discounted his U.S. threats describing them as ‘aspirational.’”  The FBI was willing to go on the record through spokesman Richard Kolko who remarked, “We are not aware of any imminent or specific threats to the U.S.”

The Taliban faction attacking civilians in the Swat administrative district near Pakistan’s capitol, Islamabad, is lead by Maulana Fazlullah.  He leads a force estimated at 5,000 fighters (of a Taliban in Pakistan estimated at 50,000).

He came to prominence by being the most strident voice opposing U.S. Predator drone bombings of the region.  His solution was strict Islamic law and excessive violence for the people of Swat who are characterized as more interested in commerce and making a living than radical politics.  The districts shopkeepers dislike the Taliban for ruining their business and the government and United States for bombing them.

This is the great threat to the United States that Holbrooke, Mullen and Petraeus warn us about:  a group of 5,000 extremely violent religious thugs who frighten the populace with acts of random violence, attacks on girls schools (200 in all), and bans on vaccines.  They are motivated by the same philosophy that had the Taliban in Afghanistan’s capitol ban   soccer then use the stadiums for public executions.

The Fazlullah lead Taliban can only control the Swat district, a region just larger than Rhode Island, in the absence of real opposition.  The government presence, the Frontier Corp, is a paramilitary police force that won’t stand up to the Taliban.  When the regular army threatened to show up, the Taliban pretended to retreat only to be caught and punished with significant losses.  When they did show up, the slaughter began and the Taliban, by reports, have taken serious losses.

Yet we are being told that they could actually defeat the Pakistan Army, take over nuclear facilities, and attack the United States.

What’s this all about?

In the presidential campaign, President Obama caused a stir when he said, “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again.  If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will” Times Online, Aug 2, 2008.   The issue wasn’t discussed much until Obama came into office when he made official the already underway Predator drone attacks on targets in Pakistan on January 23, 2009.

This was the origin of the new 9/11 threat as storyline shoved in the face of Pakistani officials by Holbrooke and Mullen on their visit to Islamabad in early April, 2009.

On one level, the histrionic claims by the administration, denied by named and unnamed officials within their own government, are aimed at creating public fear that will justify whatever military action might be planned or viewed as necessary at any moment.  Who opposes preventing another 9/11?  No one.  Therefore, just about anything we do to prevent that is justified.  Does this sound familiar?

On another level, the conflict on both sides is about cutting a deal.  Pakistan’s government seems largely indifferent to the senseless violence against citizens of a backwards, under populated western region.  Why else would they fail to act on the atrocities already committed?

But Pakistan’s real concern has to be the threat of another war with its very hostile neighbor India or even a proxy war in the disputed area of Kashmir.  India has 900,000 troops, and 11 million paramilitary forces, an array of modern weapons systems for its army, navy and air force plus nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration managed to allow the escape of bin Laden from Afghanistan and turn the positive of routing the Taliban into the negative of a prolonged conflict and the role of occupier.  The current administration is stuck with this mess.  Whether the intention is to leave entirely or maintain a residual force for U.S. “interests,” any success in Afghanistan requires an end to the Pakistan refuge allowed the government’s preoccupation with the very real threat of a conflict with India.

This chapter of the drama may be coming to a close.  The Prime Minister of Pakistan went on national television on May 7 to announce the deployment of a major contingent of Pakistan’s armed forces to the western provinces victimized by the Taliban.

At about that time, the Asia Times reported a deal between Pakistan and the administration.  The United States would guarantee a peaceful interlude with India on its eastern border while Pakistan voluntarily weakened it’s position there to send troops against the Taliban in the West  The Asia Times went on to report:

“According to reports, the US has told Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, currently in Washington that if this plan goes ahead, US Predator drone strikes inside Pakistan against militants will immediately be stopped. The scores of attacks over the past year or so have created bitter resentment in Pakistan as they have killed numerous civilians as well as militants.”  Asia Times, May 8, 2009

We’ll know the deal was done if the Predator attacks stop.

Perpetual 9/11

We’re experiencing an example of the enduring power 9/11 as a justification for just about anything.  Military adventures that kill foreigners have the potential to create what Chalmers Johnson so eloquently described as “blowback” in his trilogy on the perils of aggressive foreign policy.  We’re expected to believe that our violent actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including robot killer aircraft, will somehow produce a different result this time.  We will be “safer.”

There are now over a million dead Iraqi civilians due to the civil strife cause by the Bush invasion.  There may be a much lower body count for Pakistan’s civilians due to the current administrations lethal military action in Pakistan.  But the legacy will be one of fear, disrespect, and hatred of the United States due to deaths and injuries that were entirely unnecessary.

Ironically, Pakistan Daily, an online, user generated news service, published this – 70 Reasons To Question Official 9/11 Story.  It is a listing of nearly every alternative theory to the official U.S. government version of that tragic event.

The handling of this affair has made even more enemies for the citizens of the United States, those who may ultimately pay the price.  It has resulted in ridicule regarding the very justification for U.S. intervention in Pakistan, the still unexplained and uninvestigated story of 9/11.

But there is still a sliver of hope.  Fourteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent this letter this letter to the president urging withdrawal and restraint rather than more troops and action in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Ron Paul (R-TX), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Walter Jones Jr. (R-NC), John Conyers (D-OH) plus 10 other representatives urged a major shift in policy:

“We are also concerned that any perceived military success in Afghanistan might create pressure to increase military activity in Pakistan. This could very well lead to dangerous destabilization in the region and would increase hostility toward the United States.”

The citizens of the United States have every right to expect that their government will provide protection against domestic terror attacks, as well as, infectious diseases, floods, hurricanes, and other large scale disasters.   We also have a right to the truth.  When the so-called experts tell us that 5,000 religious fanatics (or 50,000 at full strength) are an imminent threat to the country, it’s time to say:  Surely you’re not serious?  How could you have weakened us so that this is the case?

END

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THROW THE BUMS OUT – ALL OF THEM Senate Millionaires Kill Mortgage Assistance for Citizens

THROW THE BUMS OUT – ALL OF THEM

Senate Millionaires Kill Mortgage Assistance for Citizens

Michael Collins
Also published here

(Wash. DC, May 1, 2009)  The United States Senate took a swipe at the spirit of May Day in a spectacular show of callous indifference when it voted down a bill to provide limited assistance to citizens at risk for losing their homes.  The final vote was 45 in favor, 51 opposed to Senator Richard Durbin’s (D-IL) mortgage assistance bill.  The original version of the bill covered some but not all of those requiring assistance.  The final version was even more restricted.  It applied to only homeowners currently in foreclosure as a result of actions prior to the start of 2009.

The denial of assistance to citizens by Senators is ironic given the fact that the origins of the current economic crisis came from Senate legislative actions in 1999 and 2000.

While their avarice knows no bounds, their memory suffers.

Apparently these multimillionaire aristocrats of the Senate “gentlemen’s club” haven’t been watching the news.  The International Monetary Fund declared that the United States is in a depression almost three months ago.  Delinquency and foreclosure rates around the country are rising at spectacular rates.  Unemployment has jumped by 3.3 million in the last five months.  Economic growth has declined at a rate of 6.3% in the first quarter of 2009.

What part of economic crisis can’t they understand? Apparently all of it.

Memo to stingy Senators:  Workers and their families are in serious trouble or about to be in trouble.  That means they lack the money to pay for their homes (also known as shelter, a basic human need).  These citizens did nothing to bring on this crisis.

You, the members of the Senate, are largely to blame and you know it. One of the most revealing remarks came from Democrat Ben Nelson (D-NE) who said:

“Do I want to have my rate go up so that somebody else might be able to cram down” their mortgage payment?” asked Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., who voted against the bill.  Associated Press, Apr. 30, 2009

Nelson has never been regarded as the sharpest tool in the shed but he’s set a new standard for ignorance with this remark.  Nelson was worth at least $7.0 million as of reporting in 2008.  Obviously he needs to skimp on every penny to stay afloat.  He’ll offer no breaks for financially strapped citizens on the brink of ruin even if they are in trouble as a result of his support of Wall Street welfare.  The bill would have no impact on his or anybody else’s mortgage rate unless they qualified for help.  In those cases, the rate would go down.

The Durbin bill offered a reasonable change in bankruptcy law that would allow those in foreclosure to ask (simply ask) bankruptcy judges to invoke a “cramdown.”  In that process, the bankruptcy court would set a lower interest rates and longer terms on loans.  This takes the case out of foreclosure and allows citizens to keep their homes and the lets banks collect the money owed at a lower rate over an extended period.  (See this for a real cramdown to benefit all citizens)

The bill was hardly revolutionary since it presumed that homeowners at risk had the money to get in bankruptcy court; that the courts would be able to handle all those in need; and that the judge would accept the request for a cramdown to keep people in their homes.  But the bill might have helped as many as 1.7 million homeowners.

Even with those limitations, Sen. Durbin was forced against the wall and had to negotiate the bill to a lower level of protection.  The final bill rejected by the Senate.  Associated Press reported:  “The latest proposal would have restricted eligibility to homeowners already in foreclosure whose lender had not offered better terms. Homes would also have to be worth less than $729,000 and apply to mortgage loans originated before 2009.” Apr 30, 2009

Durbin’s last stand would have provided protection some homeowners but now there’s no protection for anyone.

William K. Black is the chief fraud investigator who untangled the 1980’s Savings and Loan fiasco.   His comments on the current economic meltdown are instructive and assign blame:

William K. Black: ‘We need some chairmen or chairwomen … in Congress, to hold the necessary hearings (on banking fraud) and we can blast this out. But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it isn’t just that they’re terrible business people, though they are. It isn’t just that they lack integrity, though they do. Because they were engaged in these frauds … they’re not going to disclose the truth about the assets.”  Bill Moyers Journal, Apr 3, 2009

Senators, you allowed changes in banking regulations that turned Wall Street in to a big casino for the “in crowd” and wiped out millions of small investors and retirement funds.

You failed to monitor the new freedoms you gave the banks and Wall Street after you stripped away citizen protections in law since the Great Depression.

You created the current depression. And now, you’re so stingy you won’t even help a few of the many people victimized by the massive corporate fraud schemes, Ponzi schemes according to Black.

Is there any reason why even one single Senator of the 51 who voted down this assistance should remain in office to complete his or her term? I

s there any reason to hold back from demanding their resignations in every state that they represent? I can’t think of one.  Can you?

END

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Appendices:  Hall of Shame, Things to Come, and Resources

Hall of Shame

The votes lined up in the usual way, with the majority of citizens losing out on positive action.  Of note, the “moderate” Republicans Collins and Snow of Maine both opposed the bill.  The new Senator from Montana, Democrat Tester, voted no.  And Democrat “changling” Specter said no also.

Things to Come

See: Too Little Too Late – The Money Party at Work  Feb. 18,  2009

There are 4.9 million Alt-A and subprime loans.  Alt-A’s are loans to those with higher credit ratings that have special introductory features.  Subprimes are loans to people with marginal credit.

15% of Alt-A loans were at risk in at the start of the year.  30% of subprimes were at risk.

A majority of Alt-A loans will “reset,” increase interest, in the next 2 plus years.  25% of subprimes will do the same at a much higher rate.  That spells disaster since the “resets” are a major trigger for bankruptcy.

Some Resources

Bill Moyers Journal – Interview with William K Black  Bill Moyers Journal, Apr 3, 2009
(Transcripts:  PBS pdf Word.doc) William K Black in the News Stiglitz:  Capitalist Fools  (Essential Reading”
Economic Disaster — Are You Next?  Feb. 5, 2009 Too Little Too Late – The Money Party at Work  Feb. 18,  2009
Enough of Everything But Dollars Mar. 2, 2009
Enabling Acts for an Era of Greed – The Money Party at Work Apr. 14, 2009

ENABLING ACTS FOR AN ERA OF GREED The Money Party at Work

ENABLING ACTS
FOR AN ERA OF GREED

The Money Party at Work

Michael Collins
Also published here

Huge majorities in both houses of Congress voted for legislation to allow the biggest bank heist of all time.   But this time, it was the banks pulling the heist.

Our financial system looks ruined beyond repair.  The credit default swaps crisis is 40 or so times bigger than the real estate meltdown over subprime derivatives.  The top 25 banks in the United States are loaded down with $13 trillion in credit default swaps and the deal is coming unraveled.  If we accept the highly dubious assumption that the debt from the financial meltdown needs to be repaid by us, were looking at $43,000 a citizen right now.  And we’re just starting.

It didn’t get that way by accident.  There was special legislation that enabled the current crisis.

This was classic Money Party strategy and tactics.

The strategic goal was to turn Wall Street into a big casino for the “in crowd” of major investors, funds, and institutions.  No rules and no regulations: “let the market take care of it” was the philosophy.

The tactics were easy.  First you set up a scholarly group called the Law and Economics movement to give your scheme legitimacy.  Then you give money and other favors to members of Congress.

At the right moment, you call in your congressional markers to let the banks start doing what they did to spark the Great Depression.  Walk into the Wall Street casino loaded with cash and spend like they’re on coke.  Your corny academic group has a couple of judges who decide a case that gives legal grace to the scheme.  The casino is legit says the court.  You then go for the whole nine yards by bringing back the long outlawed derivatives, subprimes, credit default swaps, etc.

The corporate media either ignores your “long con” altogether or covers it on their back pages.

Done deal!  It’s the perfect storm to create economic chaos allowing the most massive transfer of wealth since the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE.  It’s all about socialism for the rich and survival of the fittest for the rest of us.

But Congress and the Treasury Department will preserve the financial elite in perpetuity.  Why?  To begin with, they’d have to admit that they created the problem in the first place with their enabling legislation.  Congress would also have to admit to absolutely zero oversight on this matter despite warnings.

Legislative, Judicial and Executive Branches – Acting in Unison Deliver the Goods

Three distinct events enabled the current economic chaos.  The baseline requirement for the era of greed was satisfied in 1999 when Congress repealed key provisions of the Glass-Steagall act. That law was established during the first Great Depression. It tightly restricted the opportunities for reckless speculation by banks..  They were barred from selling stocks and other speculative schemes.  Title 1 of Financial Services Modernization Act, 1999 says it all:

“Facilitating affiliation among banks, securities firms and insurance companies”

“Commercial banks, brokerage firms, hedge funds, institutional investors, pension funds and insurance companies can freely invest in each others businesses as well as fully integrate their financial operations.”

This was a bipartisan effort with the Senate version passing 90 to 8 and the House 362 to 57.

The once scorned derivatives had been the Holy Grail for “free” market radicals on Wall Street and elsewhere for years.  They said that the restrictions on these products were unnecessary and stifled the free market (”free” for them).  Even before Congress acted definitively in December 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit struck down the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to rein in ruinous high risk financial schemes on Sept.1, 1999.

Reagan appointees Richard Posner, then chief judge, and current chief judge Richard Easterbrook were key movers.  They’re also heavily involved with the Law and Economics movement, a right wing, free market movement that opposes almost all regulation in Pavlovian fashion.

7th Circuit judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook started the demolition of SEC regulatory power of high risk derivatives.

Credit default swaps and other derivatives had been illegal for decades.  In 1981, specific rules were set up to tighten restrictions against these schemes.  But all that changed on Dec. 21, 2000 when the lame duck Congress passed the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000′” making these products legal.  The legislation also barred the gathering of information that would serve as early warning on the legalized gambling on credit worthiness.  Regulators were helpless in looking out for the public.  Here’s the title of the House version of the bill:

“To reauthorize and amend the Commodity Exchange Act to promote legal certainty, enhance competition, and reduce systemic risk in markets for futures and over-the counter derivatives, and for other purposes” 106th Congress, 2nd Session,  H. R. 5660

This is the vital wording modifying the Securities Act of 1933 that undid the economy:

“Section 2A–Swap Agreements   The Commission is prohibited from — promulgating, interpreting, or enforcing rules; or issuing orders of general applicability.”  The Senate and House bills were combined in to H.R. 4577, an appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education signed by President Clinton.   Someone had a perverse sense of humor.

In other words, Congress legalized what had been illegal for decades and it secured the 7th Circuit’s opening gambit of handcuffing the SEC in dealing with the new high risk financial products.  Congress fixed the game so that the short staffed regulatory agencies couldn’t monitor the market even if they wanted that function.

Good luck trying to find the legislative debate on this momentous change.  There was none.  The enabling legislation for this disaster was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives and by unanimous consent in the Senate.

It’s important to have a “Roll Call” for the sponsors of the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.”  They made it happen.

Top row:  Senators (S. 3283:  Richard Lugar (R-IN), sponsor, cosponsors Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Tim Johnson (D-SD).plus cosponsors, Retired Senators Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL), Phil Graham, (R-TX), Chuck Hagel (R-NE).  Bottom:  Representatives (all retired) (H.R. 5600)Thomas Ewing (R-IL) sponsor; cosponsors Thomas Bliley, Jr. (R-VA), John J. LaFalce (D-NY), Jim Leach (R-IA).

Expect More of the Same

The bailout and other efforts to save Wall Street firms and the large banks are essentially an effort to deal with the problems of derivatives and other market failures.  Wall Street got the court decisions and legislation it wanted and then promptly proceeded to create today’s disaster.

They sold these risky products and now they have to pay off.  But they don’t have the money even with the current bailouts.  Where will they get it?  The federal government was the only sucker left to tap and that bet came through to the tune of $4.6 trillion.  There’s $4.6 trillion awaiting further requests from the Federal Reserve

The culprits are still in place at failing financial institutions.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for political action to fix the situation.  Both parties were in on this mess.  Huge majorities in both houses of Congress voted for key legislation to allow the biggest bank heist of all time.  But his time, it was the banks pulling the heist.

That’s why the bankers have to stay in place.  To remove them, would be telling, as William K. Black said recently:

“But the other element of your question is we don’t want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn’t cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.”

William K. Black, Apr. 3, 2009

But it was all legal, wasn’t it?

END

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Murder Trumps Torture Says Bugliosi

Murder Trumps Torture Says Bugliosi

2003 State of the Union, Jan. 29, 2003. WikiCommons

Bush Crimes

“If we prosecute those in America who only commit one murder, under what theory don’t we prosecute a president who is criminally responsible for over four thousand murders?”  Vincent Bugliosi

Michael Collins

Also published at The Journal – e Pluribus Media

(April 7, Wash. DC)  The legendary Los Angeles County prosecutor and top selling true crime author, Vincent Bugliosi, continues to make the case that he argued in detail in his New York Times best seller, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.  His crime, according to the esteemed former prosecutor:  deliberately deceiving the United States into an illegal war that resulted in the deaths of 4,200 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000,000 Iraqi civilians.

He has the help of a citizens group called ABA Publishing headed by Arminda and Bob Alexander with Jude Morford.  The all volunteer group recently sent Bugliosi’s  cover letter and book to 2,200 local prosecutors across the country.

Bugliosi is offended by the prominence of proposed torture charges to the exclusion of what he argues is the much larger charge:  murder.  .

Prof. Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University School of Law was asked what charges were the most likely if there’s ever a serious investigation into Bush administration criminal activities.  Turley noted:

The two most obvious crimes in this administration are the torture program and the unlawful surveillance program. Despite the effort to pretend that there is some ambiguity or uncertainty on these crimes, the law is quite clear.
Blog of Legal Times, Dec. 23, 2008

Torture and illegal wiretapping are important concerns to Bugliosi.

But murder is by far the larger crime with a much stronger case, Bugliosi argues.

The former top prosecutor demands justice for the deaths of 4,200 U.S. citizens, soldiers who gave their lives in a war based on calculated lies by the Bush administration.  Their loss is the basis for his murder charge.  While Bugliosi couldn’t find a way to attach the 1.2 million dead Iraqi civilians to the indictment, those deaths are part of the larger record of Bush crimes Bugliosi stated with passion.

I interviewed Vincent Bugliosi about his book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder in August 2008.  He outlined his case in detail and the challenges he’d faced in getting the word out after the corporate media blacked out advertising and interviews on his groundbreaking book.

Recently, I contacted Mr. Bugliosi to explore his reaction to President Obama’s position on prosecuting Bush and others members of the regime and his opinion of the focus on a Bush prosecution for torture instead of the much more serious murder indictment.

Interview with Vincent Bugliosi

Conducted by Michael Collins

March 29, 2009

_______________________________________________

MC:  Do you think that President Obama is reluctant to investigate and, presuming the findings we’d expect, prosecute Bush and others in his administration for their alleged crimes.

VB:  President Obama was on the ABC news program This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and the issue came up about the prosecutions of the Bush administration, potential prosecutions, and he said words — I can give you his exact words.  He said that he was of “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” ABC News, Jan. 11, 2009..  Now, the interpretation that has been placed on these words, and I agree with that interpretation, is that he does not intend to pursue George Bush or his administration for any crimes they may have committed.

This is in contradistinction to what he said months ago before he became president.  He said words to the effect that if he became president, he would have his attorney general investigate the Bush administration to see if things that they had done involved crimes or just merely bad policy.  He said if they involved crimes, he said no man is above the law, and the implication was that he would ask his attorney general to proceed forward, so he’s changed his position.

I was mentioning the interpretation on his words.  The article in The New York Times that quoted him:  “President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.”  New York Times, Jan. 12, 2009

I have to say that I’m disappointed in the president on his apparent position that he doesn’t want the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation.

MC:  What would you say to the president if you had the opportunity?

VB:  If I were to speak to President Obama, I would inform him of one thing and advise him of a couple of other things.  I’d inform him, and I guess this sounds a little sarcastic, but I would inform him that when he talks about only looking forward and not backwards, I agree that most of his efforts have to be towards the future.  I’m not quarreling with him on that, but you can’t forget the past.

When he says that he intends to give Bush a free pass simply because whatever crime Bush may have committed was in the past, I would inform him of something he already knows:  that all criminal prosecutions, without exception and by definition, have to deal, obviously, with past criminal behavior.  Obviously we cannot prosecute someone for a crime that they may commit in the future.

And if we prosecute for even petty theft in America, what do we do with Bush, who I’m very convinced took this nation to war under false pretenses and has caused incalculable death, horror, and suffering?

I would advise him of two things, kind of using his words against him. If indeed Obama’s sole emphasis seems to be the future, I don’t think anything could improve our image around the world more, restore our credibility more than prosecuting George Bush for his monumental crimes.  We would be telling the world’s people that what George Bush did in taking this nation to war on a lie against a sovereign nation like Iraq, without any provocation whatsoever, was not the real America.  That was only George Bush’s America.  The real America would never do something like that.  And then in the real America, no man is so high he is above the law, and even presidents have to be accountable for their crimes.  So talking about the future, using President Obama’s own emphasis, I think it would be very advisable to bring Bush to justice if, in fact, he’s guilty, as I say he is.

Talking about the future, if we want to deter future presidents from taking this nation to another war under false pretenses, some president in the future that gets a funny thought, I think that deterrence would increase immeasurably if he knew what America did to George Bush, put him on trial for murder, and if he was convicted, of course, the punishment would either be life imprisonment or the imposition of the death penalty.

I gave you a long answer to the question, but I had always suspected that if there was going to be a prosecution in this place, it would be at the local level.  The ideal venue is, in fact, the Department of Justice.

MC:  Ultimately, isn’t it the responsibility of the attorney general to determine the crimes that are investigated and what aren’t?  For example, if Obama called up Holder and said, “Lay off any prosecutions against the Bush crew,” Holder may take that advice or he may not.  But wouldn’t he have to ignore the request?

VB:  Well, there’s no question that independent of Obama, Holder has the authority to bring criminal charges against Bush, no question about it.  There’s also no question that each of the 93 U.S. attorneys around the country have the power and the authority to do so, but let’s jump from there to reality.  The reality is if there’s some U.S. attorney in Chicago that wants to do it, it’s possible, but he’s not going to do it without checking with his boss.  You don’t take on the biggest most important murder case in American history without letting your boss know about it, you know — that is, not if you want to remain a U.S. attorney; and likewise with Holder.  He has the authority and he has the power to completely ignore Obama, but the reality is what do you do?  If Obama indicated that he was opposed to it, it would take quite a man to overrule the president.

MC:  Where does that leave the cause of justice for those who died?

Since Obama’s not going to do anything and the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction, the reality is that the only game in town is what took place several weeks ago up in Seattle when Bob Alexander, just a regular citizen, but an American patriot, sent out with volunteers, copies of my book, The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder, to DAs all over the country, with a cover letter from me, asking the DAs to read the book, and, if they agreed that the evidence of guilt was clear and that there’s jurisdiction to proceed against him, I offered to help out in any way that I could, any way that they deemed — any way that they wanted me to, which would range all the way from being a consultant up to and including being appointed as special prosecutor.

ProsecuteGeorgeBush.com

” — although I may not succeed, I’m not going to be satisfied until I see George Bush in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first degree murder. George Bush cannot be permitted to get away with murder. I realize my biggest obstacle is the perceptive observation made by Mark Twain: “Why is physical courage so common, but moral courage so very rare?” Cover letter for distribution of Bugliosi’s book to 2200 local prosecutors,

_______________________________________________

MC:      I’ve followed Professor Jonathon Turley of George Washington University, and he’s come out and said there are two clear crimes to prosecute Bush for.  One is torture, which Bush has essentially admitted, and the other is under the statutes against illegal surveillance.  I’m trying to understand why Turley doesn’t — and I don’t know if you’ve talked to him or not –

VB:  No, no.

MC:  I’m trying to understand where the murder charge is.

VB:  I told you that I was disappointed with Obama.  I have to take it a step further and say I am offended.  I am offended by this movement by those who want to get, quote, even with Bush to just talk about torture.  I find it very offensive.  And I’ll tell you why.  I’m not saying that Bush and his people should not be prosecuted for torture, but I want to get into that in depth in a while.  But it should only be at most a footnote to going after him for murder.  It should only be a footnote.

The New York Times said in an editorial a month and a half or so ago that there were two dozen verifiable cases of torture at Abu Ghraib.  Let’s assume that that number is very conservative, very conservative.  Let’s say there’s 100 cases; let’s say there’s 200 cases of torture that can be verified.

How do you compare 200 cases of torturing Iraqis with the unlawful death, if what I say is correct, of one million Iraqis and 4,200 American soldiers?  How do you compare these two?  Again, is there something that I don’t know?  Is there something that I have to be told?  How do you compare the two?

They can’t be compared, obviously, and yet all I hear is torture, torture, torture, torture, and I’m offended by that, not because I’m not saying that Bush shouldn’t be prosecuted for torture, but because what’s wrong with these people?  To give Bush a free pass on taking this nation to war on a lie.  The majority of American people believe that Bush took this nation to war on a lie, and I can’t tell you the number of times there’s been TV and radio shows and articles about the lies of the Bush administration in taking this nation to war.  Now all of a sudden they want to forget all about that, these people, and just talk about torture, torture, torture, torture.

There was a cover story in, I think it was Harper’s Magazine about two months ago, about prosecuting Bush.  Obviously, I bought the magazine, and I opened it up to the prosecution.  What was it all about?  Torture.  The New York Times had a pro and con in the op-ed section about two months ago, pro prosecution to Bush, anti prosecution to Bush.  So I looked at what the prosecution was about — torture.  I’m offended by this.

Who’s fighting to bring about justice for the perhaps one million innocent Iraqi men, women, and children and babies in their graves?  Actually, I shouldn’t say I’m going to bring about justice for them, or try to, because I was unable to establish jurisdiction to go after Bush for the deaths of the Iraqi citizens.  I did establish jurisdiction to go after him for the deaths of the 4,200 American soldiers.  In any event, it would be a symbolic effort to bring about justice for the million people in their graves.  Let’s say that number’s high.  In my book I say over 100,000.  Certainly there’s over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, children and babies who died as a result of Bush’s war.  Some numbers put it in excess of one million, and we know there’s 4,200 American soldiers.

Who’s fighting to bring about justice for those in their graves, decomposing in their cold graves right now as I’m talking to you, Michael?  Who’s doing that out there?

MC:  Right.

VB:  No one seems to be interested in that.  It’s all torture, torture, torture, torture, so apparently torturing 24 or 200 Iraqi citizens or Iraqi insurgents or what have you is more important than bringing about justice, let’s say, for 4,200 American soldiers who died in Bush’s war.  So you can see where I am offended about that.

I’m not saying that Bush should not be prosecuted for torture.

Let’s talk about why it’s even more offensive to me than I’ve already told you.  I’ve given you the main reason why I’m offended by it, that that’s all they talk about, as opposed to saying let’s go after him for taking this nation to war under false pretenses, and then let’s also add a count to the indictment for torture.  Do you follow?

MC:  Yes I do.  Where does torture fit into the larger picture?

VB:  I’m not saying he shouldn’t be prosecuted if he’s guilty of torture.  I just don’t think it should be all that people are talking about.  But let’s take it to another level.  Who are these people who were tortured?  Well, I guess virtually all of them were insurgents.  There never should have been a war in Iraq.  Iraq — there were no terrorists in Iraq, and when you go to war, a war against terror, you go against the terrorists, and there were no terrorists in Iraq, but we’re acting on a set stage here, so in Bush’s — in the Bush administration’s mind, once they were in custody there, they viewed — the Bush administration viewed these insurgents as enemies.  So that’s their state of mind.  If these insurgents are enemies, why would the Bush administration be authorizing torture?  Well, to coerce from them intelligence information that would be helpful to America?

MC:  Right.

VB:  Which does not eliminate the legal liability but diminishes the moral culpability.

But there was no justification whatsoever under the moon that was helpful to America in invading Iraq, nothing, zero, cipher.  Hussein had nothing at all to do with 9/11.  He was not an imminent threat to the security of this country.  Bush and his people lied to convince the American people on both of those things, that he was an imminent threat and that he had been involved in 9/11.  So that diminishes the torture thing even further.

The main guy we’ve got to go after, and there would be many named in the indictment, of course, many others, at least Rice and Cheney, of course, but I believe Rove; the main guy is George Bush.  Why is he the main guy?  Because he’s the one that authorized it.  If he didn’t authorize it, none of these things would ever have happened.  I don’t care who influenced him, if anyone at all.  He said, yes, let’s do it.

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MC:  Since we last spoke, there’ve been more revelations on the outrages of the Iraq War, all a direct result of the lies Bush and Cheney used to sell the war..  How do those revelations build your case?

VB:  While all of these revelations are very good, you have to know, Michael, they don’t mean anything at all unless we do something about it.  The revelations by themselves, by definition, don’t go anywhere.  And that’s why when people hear these revelations, you know, they’re prompted to ask, “What now?  Where do we go from here?”

MC:  Right.

VB:  And, again, not boasting, it’s just a fact that The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder is the what now, where do we go from here book, the only book, out of the probably over 100 out there attacking Bush, that provides a legal blueprint for bringing George Bush to justice

END

ProsecuteGeorgeBush.com (Citizen group web site)

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Vanguard Press, 2008

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder:  An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi – Part 1  Aug. 8, 2008

Bush, Manson, and the Media Blackout:  An Interview with Vincent Bugliosi – Part 2  Aug. 12, 2008

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