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Agriculture Department Discrimination

Denn — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:25:13 +0000

Senate Denies Settlement Funds

by MARY CLARE JALONICK and BEN EVANS

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Black farmers, due $1.2 billion for a legacy of discrimination by the Agriculture Department, suffered a new disheartning setback this week, dispite the national spotlight provided by the quickly disavowed firing of a black department worker. The Senate refused again to pay the bill. Opponents say it's a question of where the money would come from, and that's a major issue with an election nearing and voters up in arms about federal spending.

Late Thursday, July 22, the Senate stripped $1.2 billion for claims from an emergency spending bill, along with $3.4 billion for a settlement with American Indians who say they were swindled out of royalties. Even the attention of the Shirley Sherrod case brought to issue the discrimination at the Agriculture Department couldn't bring lawmakers together on a deal. Instead, Republicans and Democrats alike proclaimed their support for the funding while blaming the other side for not getting anything done.

The result: Thousands of Black farmers and Indian landowners will keep waiting for checks that most lawmakers gree should have been written years ago. "If you say you support us then...do it!" said John Boyd the lead organizer for the black farmers' lawsuits.

For decades, minority farmers have complained of being shut out by local Agriculture offices. African Americans, for example, complained that loan commitees across the rural South were dominated by white "good ol' boys" networks that gave the vast majority of loans and disaster aid to whites, offering scraps to blacks.

The department also has faced persistent complaints of racism and discrimination in its on government audits going back two decades have found that complaints often sit for years without attention. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2008 that the Agricultural Department still was issuing misleading reports about discrimination and still didn't have a firm handle on how many complaints were outstanding.

The auditors said their findings raised questions about whether the department took the issue seriously.

July 24, 2010

Blocking the Votes

Dingo — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:57:20 +0000

Some counties in Georgia recently changed where people can vote – you can no longer vote at your closest polling station. Keith and I live down the street from a church that has a polling station set up. But we have to go over to the OTHER SIDE of the county to vote. Fortunately we have a car but there is always a lot of traffic between here and the other side of town, it can take about an hour to get there even though there are at least 3 polling stations within 10 minutes of our house, the church is less than 7 blocks away! Our county has the highest ethic mix in the state of Georgia BUT our county also has a lot of white GOP folks living in it who have a lot of money. In short, they don’t make it easy for the people of color to vote, many of these people have to use the bus or are one car families.

In recent state campaign ads in Georgia, several GOP candidates, are promising that if elected they will “protect voting” and “protect the elections.”

On July 7, 2010, in Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Georgia and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers' Committee) filed a motion in a Washington, D.C. federal court to intervene in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act brought by the state of Georgia. The civil rights coalition is defending the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Act and challenging the state's flawed and racially discriminatory voter registration practices.

Section 5 has protected racial and language minorities' access to voting across the South and the nation since 1965 and requires some states with a history of discrimination in voting procedures to submit new procedures for federal review before they are implemented.

"The many U.S. citizen minority voters in Georgia who were incorrectly flagged as non-citizens under the state's voter-verification procedures can attest to the fact that discrimination in voting continues and the need for Section 5 remains," said Laughlin McDonald of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.

The ACLU is filing similar motions against Alabama and several other states.

Several “red” states have attempted to circumvent the Section 5 preclearance requirement by unlawfully implementing election plans that dilute the minority vote. There has been a regular recurrence of discriminatory voting practices that have been alleviated by the Section 5 preclearance requirement.

In other states, GOP candidates are saying that they will support legislation to require the passing of literacy tests before someone can vote - these were old laws that we got rid of but they'll figure out a way to skirt around it. One southern GOP candidate said he wanted to do bring back the English only ballots. There are even a few GOP members out there who are talking about disallowing voting rights to anyone who has ever been convicted of a felony. DUI, DWI, writing bad checks, getting busted with less than an ounce of pot are felonies.

These are the campaign jingles they're doing, along with the promising to repeal the health care reform act - and a few using the word "succession."

In many states you are required to show a state ID or a state driver’s license at the poll before you can vote. If your name changes (from marriage) and the name doesn’t match what’s on the voting record, you can’t vote. If your ID or license has expired, you still can’t vote because the ID is expired. In some states if you don’t “resemble” the photo on the ID, you won’t get to vote – although that is highly unlikely to happen to the average person, transgendered people frequently face that issue and the name change issue as well.

A few GOP candidates in other states are talking about legislation (and similar laws) that would require showing proof that you are still living at a physical address in the state before you can vote. This means you’ll need to show a state ID or driver’s license that is current along with a voter’s card that has the same address. This is bound to create problems for the growing numbers of homeless people since many of them are migrating to other cities and states – getting a new state ID or driver’s license can easily cost $25 or more – money they don’t have.

What it all comes down to is blocking the vote any legal way they can. And if it’s not a law, they can attempt to change the law. Or as they have done is several states, redraw the lines in districting, a practice that continues to happen in southern states.

America's Worst Places to Cast a Ballot (or Try)

We used to think the voting system was something like the traffic laws -- a set of rules clear to everyone, enforced everywhere, with penalties for transgressions; we used to think, in other words, that we had a national election system. How wrong a notion this was has become painfully apparent since 2000: As it turns out, except for a rudimentary federal framework (which determines the voting age, channels money to states and counties, and enforces protections for minorities and the disabled), U.S. elections are shaped by a dizzying mélange of inconsistently enforced laws, conflicting court rulings, local traditions, various technology choices, and partisan trickery. In some places voters still fill in paper ballots or pull the levers of vintage machines; elsewhere, they touch screens or tap keys, with or without paper trails. Some states encourage voter registration; others go out of their way to limit it. Some allow prisoners to vote; others permanently bar ex-felons, no matter how long they've stayed clean. Who can vote, where people cast ballots, and how and whether their votes are counted all depends, to a large extent, on policies set in place by secretaries of state and county elections supervisors—officials who can be as partisan, as dubiously qualified, and as nakedly ambitious as people anywhere else in politics. Here is a list—partial, but emblematic—of American democracy's more glaring weak spots.

#1 The New Poll Tax
Atlanta, Georgia

In 2005, Georgia state legislators passed a bill requiring voters to present either a driver's license or a state-issued photo ID that costs between $20 and $35 and is available only from Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Supporters claimed this was necessary to keep people from casting votes in someone else's name, even though Georgia secretary of state Cathy Cox noted that her office had no evidence of this happening. Either way, the measure is likely to have a dramatic effect on who can vote. Two-thirds of the state's counties don't even have a DMV office; Atlanta, the state's largest city, has just one, where waits at the ID counters often run to several hours. In late June, the secretary of state issued a report finding that more than half a million active-status, registered voters in Georgia don't have valid photo IDs. Fully 17.3 percent of African American voters, and one-third of black voters over age 65, wouldn't be able to cast a ballot under the law. When the federal Department of Justice had five experts examine the ID legislation in 2005, four of them objected to it, as the Washington Post discovered. But higher-ups at Justice overruled them and the measure (pushed by conservative think tanks such as the American Center for Voting Rights) went on the books. In October of last year a judge blocked its implementation, and the law -- along with another version that offers free voter IDs -- remains in limbo as appeals continue.

At least two other states, Wisconsin and Missouri, have passed similar ID legislation. (Wisconsin's governor has since vetoed it.) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor John Pawasarat has found that fewer than a quarter of 18-to-24-year-old black men in that state have valid driver's licenses, the most common state-issued ID. In Indiana, a new law requires valid IDs to bear an expiration date, ruling out Veterans Affairs cards, among others.

"In my view it's an orchestrated vote-suppression strategy by less scrupulous strategists in the Republican Party," says Dan Tokaji, associate director of election law at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. "It's pretty clear to me that these are disenfranchisement strategies. I try not to use that word too often, but in this case it fits."

Runner-up: Arizona voters in 2004 passed Proposition 200, which requires "proof of citizenship" when a person registers to vote. There's no evidence that noncitizens had been flocking to the polls, but the measure is bad news for Native Americans, the poor, and the elderly, who often don't have the requisite documents. Driver's licenses issued prior to 1996 don't count -- a not-insignificant fact, given that Arizona licenses are valid until a person turns 65. Officials say that 14,000 voter registrations in Phoenix and environs have already been rejected because of the law.

#2 Machine Meltdowns
Beaufort, North Carolina; Fort Worth, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (tie)

In 2004, a touch-screen voting machine in Beaufort, North Carolina, erased 4,439 ballots cast during early voting two weeks before Election Day; they were never recovered. A similar problem in Burke County, North Carolina, resulted in several thousand votes for president not being counted. And, according to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a voting machine in Ohio managed to add 4,000 extra votes for Bush. But those episodes, voting experts say, are just a preview of balloting debacles to come: The federal Help America Vote Act requires most counties to replace punch-card or lever machines with newer technology by the end of this year, and election officials are scrambling to meet the deadline. Already during this spring's primaries, reports of trouble multiplied: Initial results in Fort Worth, Texas, showed 150,000 votes being tabulated in a county where only about 50,000 people voted. In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, machines suddenly began counting some candidates' votes backward. In Philadelphia, more than 5 percent of voting machines broke down on primary day.

The most sensational claims about voting technology have to do with the possibility of actually programming the machines to manipulate elections; computer scientists have warned that viruses could, for example, be inserted into vote-counting programs to delete a set number of votes and then erase themselves. So far no smoking guns have been found to prove such vote-fixing. But there have been myriad well-documented instances of human error and machine failures, and of extreme reluctance on the part of machine manufacturers to make their software accessible to outside experts. "Elections in this country are becoming proprietary," explains Lillie Coney, coordinator of the D.C.-based National Committee for Voting Integrity. "Vendors are saying, ‘You can't investigate our technology, or our software.' They've put the technology in place, but the mechanisms for public officials to manage the technology, they're just not there."

When Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor in Leon County, Florida, discovered last year that Diebold's machines could easily be tinkered with, the company responded by refusing to service or upgrade the county's voting equipment so long as Sancho remained in charge. Since then, researchers in Florida and California have discovered more problems with Diebold technology, finding that the machines could accidentally allow one person to cast multiple votes, could be tricked into terminating an election count before all the votes had been tallied, and could permit changes to election results without detection.

Even some of the "paper trail" systems for electronic voting are deeply flawed. On some machines, logs have been designed so badly that auditors are at risk of counting "tentative" votes instead of the voters' final choices; on others, a voter wanting to check whether her choice has registered must lift an inconspicuous door and then peer, through a plastic screen, at a tiny printout, with the actual vote often not even scrolling into view.

#3 Line Forms Here
Franklin County, Ohio

Like many states, Ohio theoretically requires equal treatment of voters in all parts of the state; in practice, it frequently ignores its own requirements, especially in urban, predominantly Democratic, neighborhoods. In Franklin County, for example, more than 2,500 voters in the city of Columbus found themselves crammed into a single precinct in 2004, even though the state's guidelines call for no more than 1,400—apparently because officials assumed that in a poor neighborhood, turnout would be low. The state only partially reimburses counties for buying electronic voting machines, so Franklin, like many poor counties, didn't have enough machines on hand to start with. When record numbers of voters showed up, massive lines snaked toward the handful of machines. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has sued Ohio; among the complainants was an elderly woman with arthritis who had to leave because no one could find a place for her to sit.

Runners-up: New Orleans and St. Louis have long been plagued by long lines in poor neighborhoods; in 2000, so many polling places failed to open on time in St. Louis that a judge ordered the polls be kept open late, a ruling that Republicans battled to the last minute. In Broward County, Florida, waits stretched to four hours even during early voting in 2004; on Election Day at least one polling station didn't open until the early afternoon, and poll workers frantically calling the county elections office got nothing but busy signals.

#4 Incompetence
Cuyahoga County, Ohio

Dominated by the city of Cleveland and its Democratic machine, Cuyahoga County has a stunning history of poll-worker incompetence and technology failures, resulting in de facto disenfranchisement on a massive scale. In primary elections this spring, so many poll workers failed to show up for work that numerous polling places opened more than an hour late, some because they didn't have extension cords or three-prong adapters. Once voting began, it was promptly undermined by a shortage of voting machines, confusion over precinct voter lists, and paper jams that poll workers did not know how to fix (some asked random voters to repair the machines). Though only 20 percent of registered voters turned out for the primary, it took more than a week to count their votes. Around the nation, says Brenda Wright, managing attorney at the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, election administration is massively underfunded, with poll workers paid mere pittances, trained only marginally, and overseen bystate officials who don't provide "any meaningful check on recurrent problems at the local level."

#5 Foul Play
New Hampshire

Intimidation, deception, and assorted trickery have long been staples of American elections, practiced with equal aplomb by both parties and by operatives working with (or without) a nod and a wink from party leaders. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2004, fliers from the nonexistent Milwaukee Black Voters League were distributed in black neighborhoods, warning residents that "if anyone in your family has ever been found guilty of anything, even a traffic violation, you can't vote in the presidential election," and that "if you violate any of these laws you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you."

Meanwhile, in (again) Franklin County, Ohio, fliers purporting to be from the county Board of Elections announced that because of high voter registration, Republicans would be voting on Election Day, and Democrats would cast their ballots the next day; they ended with the inspired line, "Thank you for your cooperation, and remember voting is a privilege." In the same county, a group of out-of-state Republicans known as the Mighty Texas Strike Force made phone calls from a hotel warning ex-prisoners that they could be returned to the slammer if they dared to vote, and reportedly telling other voters that their polling places had changed. Congressional investigators later discovered that the Ohio Republican Party had paid the Strike Force's hotel bills.

The dirtiest-trick award, however, goes to New Hampshire, where the state Republican Party -- its executive director, a veteran, working on the military principle of disrupting "enemy communications" -- hired a Virginia-based company named gop Marketplace to jam the Democrats' phone bank system during the 2002 U.S. Senate election. Republican John Sununu won the close contest; three men are serving prison terms as a result of the endeavor, and a fourth is under indictment, with evidence still surfacing that the action may have been approved by senior party officials in Washington.

#6 Gerrymandering
Travis County, Texas

In recent elections, 95 percent of members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been reelected; the vast majority ran in districts drawn to be entirely noncompetitive in the general election. In these districts, registered Republicans or Democrats may have a say in the primaries, but everyone else's vote is for all intents and purposes meaningless.

Gerrymandering got a major boost with the advent of redistricting software in 1991. The new algorithms were first used to boost the chances of black and Latino candidates; soon, both parties realized that you didn't need the fig leaf of minority representation, and they began slicing and dicing districts at will. In Texas, Travis County, which includes Austin, has long dominated a congressional district that reliably sent a Democrat to Washington. But in 2003, the Texas Legislature snipped off various chunks of Travis and attached them to a series of jagged-edged districts snaking north-south and east-west through strongly Republican areas outside the county. This, and a series of other creatively shaped districts in Texas, would be the ultimate legacy of Tom DeLay, who in 2002 launched a push to create a Republican majority in the Statehouse that would redraw the state's electoral map and thus cement the GOP's hold on Washington. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this was constitutional, even though Travis and other areas were carved up "with the sole purpose of achieving a Republican congressional majority."

At the state level, the redistricting game has also taken the uncertainty out of politics in many places. The New York Public Interest Research Group estimates that only 11 percent of New York's 212 legislative districts are competitive, and that 27 of the state's 62 Senate districts have been engineered to create Democratic advantages of at least 40,000 votes per district. Similarly, researchers at Claremont McKenna College in Pomona, California, have found virtually 100 percent of California legislative districts to be noncompetitive thanks to gerrymandering, and The Economist estimates that November's election outcome is uncertain in only one of the state's 53 congressional districts. Redistricting has produced crazy-looking, swirling districts whose shapes make sense only under an increasingly complex political calculus. In one notorious instance, in 2001, then-Senate leader John Burton, a Democrat, went out of his way to have a specific dis-trict's boundaries redrawn to weaken the election prospects of Fred Keeley, a Democrat from Santa Cruz whom Burton viewed as a troublemaker and who had announced interest in the Senate seat. The Senate district, which previously included all of Santa Cruz County, migrated north, extending a thin southward finger through the city of Santa Cruz. So effective was the maneuver, Keeley didn't even bother to run.

#7 No Felons Allowed
Mississippi Delta

Since the 2000 election, when the state of Florida disenfranchised thousands of people by falsely tagging them as felons, half a dozen states have gotten rid of laws permanently barring felons from voting, but felon bans still affect more than 5 million Americans. In Florida, close to 1 million people, or about 9 percent of adult citizens, cannot vote because they have felony records. In 2000 and 2004 the state went to the trouble of hiring private companies to "scrub" the rolls of suspected felons who had registered to vote; both times, it became apparent that because of shoddy database criteria the companies were flagging many people who either weren't felons or had had their voting rights restored.

But perhaps the nation's most scandalous disenfranchisement law is found in Mississippi, which in the early days of Jim Crow crafted its felon codes with the specific intent of disenfranchising only those convicted of "black crimes." In the Delta, about a quarter of African American men are for all practical purposes disenfranchised, and even more assume that they are: Though not everyone convicted of a felony is automatically barred from voting -- in fact, people convicted of drug felonies retain their voting rights -- corrections and election officials have made no effort to get that information out. One ex-con in Jackson told me that she knew people who were terrified of voting because they had become convinced that any interaction with authority would put them at risk of losing their welfare payments.

What's more, to get re-enfranchised in Mississippi, a felon has to persuade his state senator or representative to author a bill personally re-enfranchising him, has to get the bill approved by both houses, and then has to get the governor to sign it. In reviewing records from January 2001 to December 2004, I could identify just 52 people -- in a state with more than 25,000 prisoners, 2,100 parolees, and 21,000 men and women on probation -- who had managed to get their voting rights restored.

#8 Voting While Black
Charleston, South Carolina

Though the Voting Rights Act ended many race-based practices, local politicians continue to come up with creative methods to maximize white clout. A favorite is at-large voting, which dilutes minority votes. In Charleston, South Carolina, 38 of the 41 people elected to the county council between 1970 (when the county switched from district-based voting to at-large) and 2004 were white. A lawsuit from the federal government finally ended at-large voting for council seats in 2004. But Charleston still has at-large voting for school board members; in the 1990s, several black candidates nonetheless managed to get elected when the white vote split among a number of candidates. In response, a conservative state senator named Arthur Ravenel Jr., who'd made a name for himself by defending public display of the Confederate flag and mocking his opponents as the "National Association of Retarded People," pushed through legislation that made the school board election partisan, thus introducing a primary process that ensured a one-on-one fight in the final round. The number of blacks on the nine-member school board went from five in 2000 to one today.

Runner-up: The town of Martin, South Dakota, is sandwiched between two Lakota Sioux reservations; its City Council district map, which according to an aclu lawsuit was drawn specifically to ensure a white majority, was found unconstitutional earlier this year. Voting-rights monitors also allege that voter-registration personnel in South Dakota sometimes "forget" to give registration cards to Native Americans, and that sheriffs harass reservation residents coming into town (often across enormous distances) to vote.

#9 Suspect Students
Waller County, Texas

Prairie View A&M is a black school in the heart of east Texas, where the local leadership has, over many decades, worked to deny the students' claims to being full-time county residents and thus eligible to vote. In 2003, Waller County district attorney Oliver Kitzman wrote a letter to the elections administrator and the local newspaper warning that any students who tried to vote could face 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The NAACP filed suit, noting that as far back as 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling on a lawsuit brought by Prairie View students, held that students could register to vote in the communities in which they attended college. Students in Arkansas, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia have also been prevented or discouraged from registering; in Williamsburg, Virginia, William and Mary students were denied permission to register merely for acknowledging that they were going home on vacation.

#10 Failing to Register
Florida

Voter registration forms are easily lost. In 2004, for example, headlines focused on a Republican National Committee contractor named Sproul & Associates, which subcontracted with a company called Voters Outreach of America that, in Las Vegas, was found destroying forms filled out by people trying to register as Democrats. Incidents like this would seem to justify a new Florida law that imposes fines of $250 to $500 per form on anyone who registers voters and doesn't immediately deliver the paperwork to election officials, with no exceptions for difficult circumstances or natural disasters. But since it was already illegal in Florida to deliberately delay handing in voter registration forms, and since the new legislation does not apply to the two main political parties, its only likely effect is to intimidate independent voter-registration organizations; the largest among them, the League of Women Voters, has stopped doing voter registration in the state altogether.

#11 Politicos in Charge
Ohio

Election activists don't have Florida's Katherine Harris to kick around anymore, but in a system where most states' top election officials are also politicians, there's no shortage of other nominees for worst secretary of state. The current leading candidate must be Ohio's Ken Blackwell, now a Republican candidate for governor, who seems intent on making sure as few Ohioans as possible are registered to vote. In 2004 Blackwell achieved national notoriety when he announced that his office would accept only voter-registration forms printed on paper of at least 80-pound weight. Blackwell had to back off that requirement, but a slew of other restrictions remain, including one under which door-to-door registration workers must sign in with county officials, and another requiring them to personally mail in the registration forms they collect. "The constant promulgation of rules and regulations keeps members of the Board of Elections jumping around like cats on a hot tin roof," says Chris Link, executive director of the Ohio ACLU. "And this essentially hurts Democrats. Who is newly registering? People who've just become citizens, young people who've just gotten the right to vote." Meanwhile, Blackwell's office has done nothing to inform voters that come Election Day this year, they will have to bring photo IDs to the polls -- guaranteeing that tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters will be turned away.

Pigford vs Glickman Settlement is at Mercy of the Senate

Dingo — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:46:19 +0000

As many as 80,000 black farmers who were awarded a $1 billion settlement for racial bias still have not been paid by the federal government despite the fact that the payout deadline of March 31, 2010 has passed.

Money to pay for a discrimination lawsuit brought against the Department of Agriculture by black farmers remains stuck in a legislative body described as a place where bills go to die.

In July, the House approved a war supplemental bill that included money to pay for the settlement. It now remains stuck as senators examine the bill.

The 1997 Pigford v. Glickman case against the U.S. Agriculture Department was settled out of court 11 years ago. Under a federal judge's terms dating to 1999, qualified farmers could receive $50,000 each to settle claims of racial bias. (An in in depth post on this case appears at the end of this news post.)

As a senator, Barack Obama sponsored "Pigford II," a measure in the 2008 Farm Bill that reopened the case. In February of this year, his administration brokered a $1.25 billion settlement for Pigford II. But Congress missed two deadlines, one in March and the other in May.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday blasted Senate Republicans for holding up the process, saying that they have "rejected over and over again any legislation that has had the Pigford settlement in it."

House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked about Republican support for the black farmer settlement money, said "many of us are supportive of settling these claims."

"This issue has gone on for almost the 20 years that I've been here, and it needs to be resolved," he added.

The money, along with all the other added domestic spending that the House added to the war funding bill, is likely to be stripped out next week when the Senate is expected to approve money for Iraq and Afghanistan and other emergency spending items.

Sen. Kay Hagan, D-North Carolina, said in a statement Thursday that the federal government has failed to live up to its obligations to black farmers, including more than 4,000 North Carolinians.

"Sen. Chuck Grassley and I have been working together to right this wrong for our farmers," she said. "Since the settlement was agreed to in February, I have been focused on ensuring Congress appropriates the funding. I will continue working with my colleagues to secure the funding in the first piece of legislation that is headed to the president's desk."

Pelosi, meanwhile, said the push to get Senate action has had "no higher priority because of the events of recent days."

Boyd urged President Obama to step in and move the bill forward.

"We just need the president to focus in on this thing just a little while longer and ask that the black farmers get a vote on this very, very important issue before the recess," he said. "I want to go on record making sure that everybody understands that we support the president 110 percent. We just feel that we need a little push in the Senate to help get this done."

Boyd added that Obama should reach out to Republicans and Democrats to make sure that the farmers receive justice before the August recess.

The president promised to help black farmers who have not received the $1.25 billion settlement owed to them after years of being denied government farm loans and support from federal programs because of the color of their skin.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, in a briefing Wednesday, said the USDA is paying out the settlement for "decades-long discrimination."

"I think as you saw in the statements from Secretary Vilsack that, rightly, the department has a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination," he said. "If you look back at the history of some aspects of the way USDA benefits have been dispensed, they were done so in a way that people have acknowledged were discriminatory."

Vilsack, after a Wednesday night meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the Sherrod case, said he was working on getting the Senate to appropriate the money, and "our hope is it gets done quickly so we can resolve the case."

WEBSOURCE: com/2010/POLITICS/07/22/black.farmers.congress/index.html?iref=allsearch

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The Pigford case: Justice for black farmers on hold

Eleven years after the USDA settled a discrimination suit, over $1 billion promised goes unpaid

Virginia farmer John Boyd describes a scene from a painful past: a white U.S. Department of Agriculture loan officer only allows black farmers to apply for loans one day a week. "Black Wednesday," the farmers call it, and they line up outside the USDA office in Richmond, Va. The loan officer, James Garnett, leaves the door to his office open so that all the farmers in the hallway can hear the loan requests of their colleagues be summarily, and vehemently, denied.

But Black Wednesday was not an artifact of the '50s. This was the America of the '80s and '90s, and in 1994, the USDA itself commissioned a review of the treatment of minorities in its Farm Service Agency programs. The commission's study found that "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

The result was a massive class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which the USDA settled out of court in 1999, admitting to widespread racial discrimination against black farmers in its loan programs between 1981 and 1996. About 15,000 farmers were paid a total of more than $900 million in the settlement. But tens of thousands of farmers filed claims after the deadline, and many charged that the government's outreach had been insufficient, causing them to miss their opportunity.

In February 2010, President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack promised an additional $1.15 billion to cover the remaining claims, but the story doesn't end there. The settlement agreement mandated that Congress appropriate the funds by March 31 of this year. The deadline came and went with no action by Congress, and so the future of the settlement remains in limbo.

After years of Black Wednesdays, John Boyd founded the National Black Farmers Association, spearheading both the original lawsuit and the effort to reopen the Pigford case in order to allow the claims of the farmers who missed the deadline. Salon spoke with Boyd about the history of the lawsuit and what the missed deadline means for farmers.

What happened between you and the USDA loan officer in Richmond?

Mr. Garnett had made 147 farm loans in Mecklenburg County, Va. Only one of those loans was to a black farmer, and he was the minority advisor to the USDA county committee. When they investigated Mr. Garnett, they asked him, "Do you have a problem making black farm loans?" Guess what he said? He said yes. He said yes, I think that they're lazy, and they're just looking for a paycheck every Friday.

Mr. Garnett took my loan application and tore it up and threw it in the trash can while I was sitting there in front of him. And he said he wasn't going to lend me any of his money. When I asked him why he wasn't going to make the loan, he said, "Well, I don't have any money now. If you want to come back again next year, that's up to you, but I think you need to go ahead and just sell your farm. I've got a farmer, Mr. Blaylock, and you can milk cows on his farm. I think that would be the best opportunity for you and your family."

I was mad. I was looking for a $10,000 operating loan to plant my crop. After nine years in a row I'd only gotten one loan from the USDA farm services, and I would apply every year.

I said, "Mr. Garnett, I don't think I can go back and tell my wife that I'm not going to get an operating loan again." And he said he didn't care. And when he said he didn't care, I told him to go to hell in a handbasket, and he began to use profanity, and he spit tobacco on my shirt.

When the investigator asked him, "Did you spit chewing tobacco on John Boyd's shirt?" He said, "Well, yeah." He claimed he accidentally missed his spit can.

When was this?

This was in 1994.

What was the result of the investigation?

In my case, they found Mr. Garnett guilty of discrimination. But they didn't terminate him. They allowed him to move to the sister county, which is Greensville County, Va., and they let him retire after two months in Greensville. He didn't see anything wrong with that.

This is a federal agency, admitting to racial discrimination in the very recent past. Why do you think more people aren't getting angry about this?

I think many people don't realize it. The problem that I have is that the USDA is the last plantation. I'm not using the past tense. It is the last plantation.

Hispanics have had problems, Native Americans, women -- they all have problems with the USDA and its lending programs.

[Native American farmers filed a lawsuit, known as Keepseagle, alleging discrimination against the USDA in 1999. The case is currently unresolved. -- Ed.]

The USDA was the last federal arm of this country to integrate. It filed lawsuits in federal court to prevent it from integrating. And to me that [influence] exists today. The average subsidy to the top 10 percent of farms is over $1 million per farmer. The average subsidy to a black farmer is $200.

How can the disparity be so extreme?

Very few black farmers take part in U.S. farm subsidy programs. We have these programs that we should be participating in, and we're not. I think it has to do with outreach, and a lot of it has to do with the "good old boys" system that remains in place. This is a system that needs to be revamped. That's part of what our original lawsuit was about.

What is the history of the current claim and the $1.15 billion settlement?

Eighty thousand farmers filed claims after the deadline. You know, they didn't know about it.

It took from 2000 to 2009 to get the case reopened. I spent eight years on [Capitol] Hill, getting the measure in place.

But Congress missed the March 31 deadline to appropriate funds. What does this mean for the farmers?

We're going to miss another planting season, so that means more black farmers out of business.

The government announced the settlement like it was all over. They didn't announce the settlement like there was another step that still had to be done. The farmers that read these articles around the country were thinking that they had money on the way. We've hired an additional phone bank to take all of these calls that are coming in about the cases.

I'm just hoping that the administration is going to help us get this done. The president is going to have to get involved. [Vilsack] released a statement saying that he was still committed, but the question is, committed at what level?

A billion dollars is not going to happen by itself. Let's be real here. The administration is going to have to push it. The same way [Obama] was out there fighting for healthcare, he's going to have to stand up with me and help us get this done. You can't just go out there and say, "Hey, I did my part. It's in the budget, it's done." The budget is like the president's wish list. If you want to turn that into a reality, you've got to put a little elbow grease in there.

I'm so tired of going to funerals and saying, "He died before he saw his settlement." I look at these families and say, "I'm sorry that your daddy didn't see the justice while he was living, but maybe you will."

WEBSOURCE: salon.com/food/feature/2010/04/08/john_boyd_pigford_glickman_settlement

Prep Like A Pro

GupsGold — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:41:32 +0000

Probably every bottom has his own routine for preparing himself for anal sex. Video star J.C. Carter may have a more elaborate system than most. All told, it takes him several hours to get the job done properly. "It makes me feel good," he says, "because I know I've taken my time and made sure that everything's clean. It's a good feeling to know! I can be confident that no accidents will happen, and that helps me open up and take whatever I can get my hands on."

For beginners or especially devoted fans, here's Carter's routine:

Step 1: "First I start with a hot water bottle with a douche syrinqe that's about six inches long. I run warm water into the bottle till it fills up; it holds about two quarts of water. Then I lube my asshole and insert the syringe pipe into my ass. I have the bottle hanging from the shower curtain bar to let the water flow downward into my ass while I'm in a kneeling position on the floor of the shower. Once the water starts flowing into me, I take as much as possible; then I evacuate. I repeat this process for at least an hour and a half. That way you're really deep-cleaning in the bowel area."

Step 2: "The second step is that I take an enema pipe that attaches to the shower head. This pipe is made of stainless steel and is about eight inches long and about three inches around. This pipe is great because the water shoots about five fast streams of water into you. I'm in the tub when I stick this into my ass. I also squat when performing this method; it forces you to push the water out. I do this for about an hour."

Step 3: "Then I shower, and my ass is clean! I let my ass muscles relax for a while -- an hour or so -- before being penetrated, just to give 'em time to recover. Then it's bring on the beef, baby!"

Originally published in Unzipped magazine, June 20, 2000

Cum Again
GupsMan

------------------------------------------------

Denn May 7, 9:41 am

Interesting post Gups, I dated a guy that did this exact ritual. I got him a hot water bottle for his birthday. The sex was great.

Banks Admit Financing Billions for Drug Cartels

PozVille — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:24:28 +0000

This is a classic: "Spokespeople for the banks said laws prevent them from discussing the cases." There are laws prohibiting the actions that are the subject of the cases, but it's the "no talk" rule the banks choose to follow!

This is an amazing story, for obviously banks are complicit in money laundering for the Mexican Drug Cartels with such large sums flowing through their banks in my opinion. Even more odious is the lack of prosecution when this is precisely how the 9/11 terrorists funded their activities. 23,000 murders exceeds the number of people murdered on 9/11.

All of that death and mayhem on our Southern Boarder and in the U.S. over the illegal drug trade of course brings in the Banksters to launder the money. A new report, outlined by Bloomberg, implicates three Banksters laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels. They are Wells Fargo, HBSC and Bank of America. Seems when a DC-9, carrying 5.7 tons of cocaine was busted in Mexico, the police found just a little bit of other stuff. The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp. This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers.

Gets better. This all comes out due to some sort of deal with Federal Prosecutors in North Carolina. Here we are, some major drug money laundered through our supposedly newly pristine banks, cleaned up after 9/11 and terrorist money laundering, called routine and prosecutors give Wells Fargo some kind of slap on the wrist deal. Look at this amount of blood money:

“Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.”

It's not just Wells Fargo either. More they are the latest to be busted. What is more astounding is the lack of prosecution in this obvious systemic problem.

“Miami-based American Express Bank International paid fines in both 1994 and 2007 after admitting it had failed to spot and report drug dealers laundering money through its accounts. Drug traffickers used accounts at Bank of America in Oklahoma City to buy three planes that carried 10 tons of cocaine, according to Mexican court filings.

Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009. Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, an investigation by the Mexican Finance Ministry found.”

Meanwhile the violence is off the charts with a Mexican gubernatorial candidate assassinated and 23,000 people have been executed by Mexican drug cartels since 2006, often in some of the most gruesome manners imaginable. Below is the Bloomberg video report:

The credit and reporting on this story goes all to Bloomberg, the full story is posted below the photo. Click on the photo to zoom in on larger sized image.

Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal

Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet.

They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else.

The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue.

This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.

The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.

‘Blatant Disregard’

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.

Since 2006, more than 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related battles that have raged mostly along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border that Mexico shares with the U.S. In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, 700 people had been murdered this year as of mid- June. Six Juarez police officers were slaughtered by automatic weapons fire in a midday ambush in April.

Rondolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was gunned down yesterday, less than a week before elections in which violence related to drug trafficking was a central issue.

45,000 Troops

Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed to crush the drug cartels when he took office in December 2006, and he’s since deployed 45,000 troops to fight the cartels. They’ve had little success.

Among the dead are police, soldiers, journalists and ordinary citizens. The U.S. has pledged Mexico $1.1 billion in the past two years to aid in the fight against narcotics cartels.

In May, President Barack Obama said he’d send 1,200 National Guard troops, adding to the 17,400 agents on the U.S. side of the border to help stem drug traffic and illegal immigration.

Behind the carnage in Mexico is an industry that supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines to Americans. The cartels have built a network of dealers in 231 U.S. cities from coast to coast, taking in about $39 billion in sales annually, according to the Justice Department.

‘You’re Missing the Point’

Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year -- enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans -- in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.

“It’s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,” says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia’s branch network.

“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods says.

Cleansing Dirty Cash

Wachovia is just one of the U.S. and European banks that have been used for drug money laundering. For the past two decades, Latin American drug traffickers have gone to U.S. banks to cleanse their dirty cash, says Paul Campo, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s financial crimes unit.

Miami-based American Express Bank International paid fines in both 1994 and 2007 after admitting it had failed to spot and report drug dealers laundering money through its accounts. Drug traffickers used accounts at Bank of America in Oklahoma City to buy three planes that carried 10 tons of cocaine, according to Mexican court filings.

Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009. Mexican drug dealers used shell companies to open accounts at London-based HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, an investigation by the Mexican Finance Ministry found.

Following Rules

Those two banks weren’t accused of wrongdoing. Bank of America spokeswoman Shirley Norton and HSBC spokesman Roy Caple say laws bar them from discussing specific clients. They say their banks strictly follow the government rules.

“Bank of America takes its anti-money-laundering responsibilities very seriously,” Norton says.

A Mexican judge on Jan. 22 accused the owners of six centros cambiarios, or money changers, in Culiacan and Tijuana of laundering drug funds through their accounts at the Mexican units of Banco Santander SA, Citigroup Inc. and HSBC, according to court documents filed in the case.

The money changers are in jail while being tried. Citigroup, HSBC and Santander, which is the largest Spanish bank by assets, weren’t accused of any wrongdoing. The three banks say Mexican law bars them from commenting on the case, adding that they each carefully enforce anti-money-laundering programs.

HSBC has stopped accepting dollar deposits in Mexico, and Citigroup no longer allows noncustomers to change dollars there. Citigroup detected suspicious activity in the Tijuana accounts, reported it to regulators and closed the accounts, Citigroup spokesman Paulo Carreno says.

Criminal Empires

On June 15, the Mexican Finance Ministry announced it would set limits for banks on cash deposits in dollars.

Mexico’s drug cartels have become multinational criminal enterprises.

Some of the gangs have delved into other illegal activities such as gunrunning, kidnapping and smuggling people across the border, as well as into seemingly legitimate areas such as trucking, travel services and air cargo transport, according to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center.

These criminal empires have no choice but to use the global banking system to finance their businesses, Mexican Senator Felipe Gonzalez says.

“With so much cash, the only way to move this money is through the banks,” says Gonzalez, who represents a central Mexican state and chairs the senate public safety committee.

Gonzalez, a member of Calderon’s National Action Party, carries a .38 revolver for personal protection.

“I know this won’t stop the narcos when they come through that door with machine guns,” he says, pointing to the entrance to his office. “But at least I’ll take one with me.”

Subprime Losses

No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. Founded in 1879, Wachovia became the largest bank by assets in the southeastern U.S. by 1900. After the Great Depression, some people in North Carolina called the bank “Walk-Over-Ya” because it had foreclosed on farms in the region.

By 2008, Wachovia was the sixth-largest U.S. lender, and it faced $26 billion in losses from subprime mortgage loans. That cost Wachovia Chief Executive Officer Kennedy Thompson his job in June 2008.

Six months later, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which dates from 1852, bought Wachovia for $12.7 billion, creating the largest network of bank branches in the U.S. Thompson, who now works for private-equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners LLC in New York, declined to comment.

As Wachovia’s balance sheet was bleeding, its legal woes were mounting. In the three years leading up to Wachovia’s agreement with the Justice Department, grand juries served the bank with 6,700 subpoenas requesting information.

Not Quick Enough

The bank didn’t react quickly enough to the prosecutors’ requests and failed to hire enough investigators, the U.S. Treasury Department said in March. After a 22-month investigation, the Justice Department on March 12 charged Wachovia with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to run an effective anti-money-laundering program.

Five days later, Wells Fargo promised in a Miami federal courtroom to revamp its detection systems. Wachovia’s new owner paid $160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009.

If Wells Fargo keeps its pledge, the U.S. government will, according to the agreement, drop all charges against the bank in March 2011.

Wells Fargo regrets that some of Wachovia’s former anti- money-laundering efforts fell short, spokeswoman Mary Eshet says. Wells Fargo has invested $42 million in the past three years to improve its anti-money-laundering program and has been working with regulators, she says.

‘Significantly Upgraded’

“We have substantially increased the caliber and number of staff in our international investigations group, and we also significantly upgraded the monitoring software,” Eshet says. The agreement bars the bank from contesting or contradicting the facts in its admission.

The bank declined to answer specific questions, including how much it made by handling $378.4 billion -- including $4 billion of cash-from Mexican exchange companies.

The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to report all cash transactions above $10,000 to regulators and to tell the government about other suspected money-laundering activity. Big banks employ hundreds of investigators and spend millions of dollars on software programs to scour accounts.

No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.

‘No Capacity to Regulate’

Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.

Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.

The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.

“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught.”

Wachovia’s run-in with federal prosecutors hasn’t troubled investors. Wells Fargo’s stock traded at $30.86 on March 24, up 1 percent in the week after the March 17 agreement was announced.

Moving money is central to the drug trade -- from the cash that people tape to their bodies as they cross the U.S.-Mexican border to the $100,000 wire transfers they send from Mexican exchange houses to big U.S. banks.

‘Doesn’t Stop Anyone’

In Tijuana, 15 miles south of San Diego, Gustavo Rojas has lived for a quarter of a century in a shack in the shadow of the 10-foot-high (3-meter-high) steel border fence that separates the U.S. and Mexico there. He points to holes burrowed under the barrier.

“They go across with drugs and come back with cash,” Rojas, 75, says. “This fence doesn’t stop anyone.”

Drug money moves back and forth across the border in an endless cycle. In the U.S., couriers take the cash from drug sales to Mexico -- as much as $29 billion a year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That would be about 319 tons of $100 bills.

They hide it in cars and trucks to smuggle into Mexico. There, cartels pay people to deposit some of the cash into Mexican banks and branches of international banks. The narcos launder much of what’s left through money changers.

The Money Changers

Anyone who has been to Mexico is familiar with these street-corner money changers; Mexican regulators say there are at least 3,000 of them from Tijuana to Cancun, usually displaying large signs advertising the day’s dollar-peso exchange rate.

Mexican banks are regulated by the National Banking and Securities Commission, which has an anti-money-laundering unit; the money changers are policed by Mexico’s Tax Service Administration, which has no such unit.

By law, the money changers have to demand identification from anyone exchanging more than $500. They also have to report transactions higher than $5,000 to regulators.

The cartels get around these requirements by employing legions of individuals -- including relatives, maids and gardeners -- to convert small amounts of dollars into pesos or to make deposits in local banks. After that, cartels wire the money to a multinational bank.

The Smurfs

The people making the small money exchanges are known as Smurfs, after the cartoon characters.

“They can use an army of people like Smurfs and go through $1 million before lunchtime,” says Jerry Robinette, who oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations along the border in east Texas.

The U.S. Treasury has been warning banks about big Mexican- currency-exchange firms laundering drug money since 1996. By 2004, many U.S. banks had closed their accounts with these companies, which are known as casas de cambio.

Wachovia ignored warnings by regulators and police, according to the deferred-prosecution agreement.

“As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk,” the bank admitted in court. “Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business.”

One customer that Wachovia took on in 2004 was Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a Puebla, Mexico-based currency-exchange company. Pedro Alatorre, who ran a Puebla branch in Mexico City, had created front companies for cartels, according to a pending Mexican criminal case against him.

Federal Indictment

A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Puebla, Alatorre and three other executives in February 2008 for drug trafficking and money laundering. In May 2008, the Justice Department sought extradition of the suspects, saying they used shell firms to launder $720 million through U.S. banks.

Alatorre has been in a Mexican jail for 2 1/2 years. He denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer Mauricio Moreno says. Alatorre has made no court-filed responses in the U.S.

During the period in which Wachovia admitted to moving money out of Mexico for Puebla, couriers carrying clear plastic bags stuffed with cash went to the branch Alatorre ran at the Mexico City airport, according to surveillance reports by Mexican police.

Alatorre opened accounts at HSBC on behalf of front companies, Mexican investigators found.

Puebla executives used the stolen identities of 74 people to launder money through Wachovia accounts, Mexican prosecutors say in court-filed reports.

‘Never Reported’

“Wachovia handled all the transfers, and they never reported any as suspicious,” says Jose Luis Marmolejo, a former head of the Mexican attorney general’s financial crimes unit who is now in private practice.

In November 2005 and January 2006, Wachovia transferred a total of $300,000 from Puebla to a Bank of America account in Oklahoma City, according to information in the Alatorre cases in the U.S. and Mexico.

Drug smugglers used the funds to buy the DC-9 through Oklahoma City aircraft broker U.S. Aircraft Titles Inc., according to financial records cited in the Mexican criminal case. U.S. Aircraft Titles President Sue White declined to comment.

On April 5, 2006, a pilot flew the plane from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Caracas to pick up the cocaine, according to the DEA. Five days later, troops seized the plane in Ciudad del Carmen and burned the drugs at a nearby army base.

‘Wachovia Knew’

“I am sure Wachovia knew what was going on,” says Marmolejo, who oversaw the criminal investigation into Wachovia’s customers. “It went on too long and they made too much money not to have known.”

At Wachovia’s anti-money-laundering unit in London, Woods and his colleague Jim DeFazio, in Charlotte, say they suspected that drug dealers were using the bank to move funds.

Woods, a former Scotland Yard investigator, spotted illegible signatures and other suspicious markings on traveler’s checks from Mexican exchange companies, he said in a September 2008 letter to the U.K. Financial Services Authority. He sent copies of the letter to the DEA and Treasury Department in the U.S.

Woods, 45, says his bosses instructed him to keep quiet and tried to have him fired, according to his letter to the FSA. In one meeting, a bank official insisted Woods shouldn’t have filed suspicious activity reports to the government, as both U.S. and U.K. laws require.

‘I Was Shocked’

“I was shocked by the content and outcome of the meeting and genuinely traumatized,” Woods wrote.

In the U.S., DeFazio, who had been a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent for 21 years, says he told bank executives in 2005 that the DEA was probing the transfers through Wachovia to buy the planes.

Bank executives spurned recommendations to close suspicious accounts, DeFazio, 63, says.

“I think they looked at the money and said, ‘The hell with it. We’re going to bring it in, and look at all the money we’ll make,’” DeFazio says.

DeFazio retired in 2008.

“I didn’t want anything from them,” he says. “I just wanted to get out.”

Woods, who resigned from Wachovia in May 2009, now advises banks on how to combat money laundering. He declined to discuss details of Wachovia’s actions.

U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan told Woods in a March 19 letter his efforts had helped the U.S. build its case against Wachovia.

‘Great Courage’

“You demonstrated great courage and integrity by speaking up when you saw problems,” Dugan wrote.

It was the Puebla investigation that led U.S. authorities to the broader probe of Wachovia. On May 16, 2007, DEA agents conducted a raid of Wachovia’s international banking offices in Miami. They had a court order to seize Puebla’s accounts.

U.S. prosecutors and investigators then scrutinized the bank’s dealings with Mexican-currency-exchange firms. That led to the March deferred-prosecution agreement.

With Puebla’s Wachovia accounts seized, Alatorre and his partners shifted their laundering scheme to HSBC, according to financial documents cited in the Mexican criminal case against Alatorre.

In the three weeks after the DEA raided Wachovia, two of Alatorre’s front companies, Grupo ETPB SA and Grupo Rahero SC, made 12 cash deposits totaling $1 million at an HSBC Mexican branch, Mexican investigators found.

Another Drug Plane

The funds financed a Beechcraft King Air 200 plane that police seized on Dec. 29, 2007, in Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of Mexico City, according to information in the case against Alatorre.

For years, federal authorities watched as the wife and daughter of Oscar Oropeza, a drug smuggler working for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, deposited stacks of cash at a Bank of America branch on Boca Chica Boulevard in Brownsville, Texas, less than 3 miles from the border.

Investigator Robinette sits in his pickup truck across the street from that branch. It’s a one-story, tan stucco building next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Robinette discusses the Oropeza case with Tom Salazar, an agent who investigated the family.

“Everybody in there knew who they were -- the tellers, everyone,” Salazar says. “The bank never came to us, though.”

New Meaning

The Oropeza case gives a new, literal meaning to the term money laundering. Oropeza’s wife, Tina Marie, and daughter Paulina Marie deposited stashes of $20 bills several times a day into Bank of America accounts, Salazar says. Bank employees got to know the Oropezas by the smell of their money.

“I asked the tellers what they were talking about, and they said the money had this sweet smell like Bounce, those sheets you throw into the dryer,” Salazar says. “They told me that when they opened the vault, the smell of Bounce just poured out.”

Oropeza, 48, was arrested 820 miles from Brownsville. On May 31, 2007, police in Saraland, Alabama, stopped him on a traffic violation. Checking his record, they learned of the investigation in Texas.

They searched the van and discovered 84 kilograms (185 pounds) of cocaine hidden under a false floor. That allowed federal agents to freeze Oropeza’s bank accounts and search his marble-floored home in Brownsville, Robinette says. Inside, investigators found a supply of Bounce alongside the clothes dryer.

Guilty Pleas

All three Oropezas pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Brownsville to drug and money-laundering charges in March and April 2008. Oscar Oropeza was sentenced to 15 years in prison; his wife was ordered to serve 10 months and his daughter got 6 months.

Bank of America’s Norton says, “We not only fulfilled our regulatory obligation, but we proactively worked with law enforcement on these matters.”

Prosecutors have tried to halt money laundering at American Express Bank International twice. In 1994, the bank, then a subsidiary of New York-based American Express Co., pledged not to allow money laundering again after two employees were convicted in a criminal case involving drug trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego.

In 1994, the bank paid $14 million to settle. Five years later, drug money again flowed through American Express Bank. Between 1999 and 2004, the bank failed to stop clients from laundering $55 million of narcotics funds, the bank admitted in a deferred-prosecution agreement in August 2007.

Western Union

It paid $65 million to the U.S. and promised not to break the law again. The government dismissed the criminal charge a year later. American Express sold the bank to London-based Standard Chartered PLC in February 2008 for $823 million.

Banks aren’t the only financial institutions that have turned a blind eye to drug cartels in moving illicit funds. Western Union Co., the world’s largest money transfer firm, agreed to pay $94 million in February 2010 to settle civil and criminal investigations by the Arizona attorney general’s office.

Undercover state police posing as drug dealers bribed Western Union employees to illegally transfer money, says Cameron Holmes, an assistant attorney general.

“Their allegiance was to the smugglers,” Holmes says. “What they thought about during work was ‘How may I please my highest- spending customers the most?’”

Smudged Fingerprints

Workers in more than 20 Western Union offices allowed the customers to use multiple names, pass fictitious identifications and smudge their fingerprints on documents, investigators say in court records.

“In all the time we did undercover operations, we never once had a bribe turned down,” says Holmes, citing court affidavits.

Western Union has made significant improvements, it complies with anti-money-laundering laws and works closely with regulators and police, spokesman Tom Fitzgerald says.

For four years, Mexican authorities have been fighting a losing battle against the cartels. The police are often two steps behind the criminals. Near the southeastern corner of Texas, in Matamoros, more than 50 combat troops surround a police station.

Officers take two suspected drug traffickers inside for questioning. Nearby, two young men wearing white T-shirts and baggy pants watch and whisper into radios. These are los halcones (the falcons), whose job is to let the cartel bosses know what the police are doing.

‘Only Way’

While the police are outmaneuvered and outgunned, ordinary Mexicans live in fear. Rojas, the man who lives in the Tijuana slum near the border fence, recalls cowering in his home as smugglers shot it out with the police.

“The only way to survive is to stay out of the way and hope the violence, the bullets, don’t come for you,” Rojas says.

To make their criminal enterprises work, the drug cartels of Mexico need to move billions of dollars across borders. That’s how they finance the purchase of drugs, planes, weapons and safe houses, Senator Gonzalez says.

“They are multinational businesses, after all,” says Gonzalez, as he slowly loads his revolver at his desk in his Mexico City office. “And they cannot work without a bank.”

WEBSOURCE: bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html?loc=interstitialskip

WP's Top Secret America Special Project

Dingo — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:01:52 +0000

Vast portions of our economy are based on war. The price of allowing the military industrial complex to drive this nation’s foreign policy is immense. But it will be almost impossible to make meaningful cuts in federal spending without deep reductions in defense expenditures.

The beginning of this military industrial complex began with the US emerging from World War II largely unscathed by the ravages of war while the rest of the industrialized world lay in ruins. At that time, our nation began an expansionist foreign policy characterized by interventions in various places in the third world via assassinations and sponsoring of coups. In the post WWII period, there has not been a time where the US has enjoyed a long protracted period of peace. There have either been interventions, low intensity conflicts or full out wars. Due to this situation, our nation has been consistently on a war footing for the last 65 years and the obvious implication of this fact is that both our foreign policy and major portions of our economy are based on war and the pursuit of empire.

The top secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

FRONTLINE goes inside The Washington Post's major two year examination into the massive, unwieldy, top secret world the U.S. government has created in response to 9/11. This video posted on YouTube by PBS today (July 19, 2010) is a preview of Frontline’s Special, coming fall 2010 to PBS. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin talk about how they went putting this report together.

The Washington Post published the opening installment of its Top Secret America project, a two-year investigation into the national security buildup in the United States that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a series of articles by Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, a host of interactive graphics and a searchable database, the series details the unintended downside of ballooning governmental funding for agencies and departments that have been unable to spend the massive influx of money responsibly, the inevitable turf battles that emerged as spending and responsibilities shifted and overlapped, and the near impossible task of determining the effectiveness of a system that has grown so massive so quickly and with so little transparency.

For FURTHER INSTALLMENTS, location maps, photos, videos, and ALL related material for this report visit the Washington Post Top Secret America website at:

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

Editors’ Notes from the Washington Post’s Interactive Web

"Top Secret America" is a Washington Post project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site's revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies' own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

Editors Washington Post

A hidden world, growing beyond control

The top secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

The Post's investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

The Post's online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today's article describes the government's role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday's article describes the government's dependence on private contractors. Wednesday's is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. "Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, 'Okay, we've built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?' " he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI's rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency heads don't really want to give up the systems they have. But there's some progress: "All my e-mail on one computer now," Leiter says. "That's a big deal."

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth's geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government's Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices "on the order of the pyramids," in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television monitors. "Escort-required" badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. "Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. "It's the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it," said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. "I saw tremendous overlap."

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. "I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!" he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington's bureaucracy. "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?" he said. "Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"

He's hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It's too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

"Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?"

"Why does it have to be so bulky?"

"Why isn't it online?"

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

"Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach," CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

"Cyber is tremendously difficult" to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. "Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf." Why? "Because it's funded, it's hot and it's sexy."

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan's increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk "adverse events." He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902's commander had decided to turn the unit's attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment "didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," said the Army's senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.

"There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs - that's God," said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration's nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. "I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value," he said. "The DNI ought to do something similar."

The ODNI hasn't done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

"There are so many people involved here," NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

"Everyone had the dots to connect," DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. "But I hadn't made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility."

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn't the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. "We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence," White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. "Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation."

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

A note on this project

"Top Secret America" is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site's revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies' own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

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Search Top Secret America’s Database of Private Spooks
By Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman at wired.com July 19, 2010

Figuring out exactly who’s cashing in on the post-9/11 boom in secret programs just got a whole lot easier.

U.S. spy agencies, the State Department, and the White House had a collective panic attack on Friday over an upcoming Washington Post expose on the intelligence industrial complex. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin posted the report online today on the Washing Post’s website.

It includes a searchable database cataloging what an estimated 854,000 employees and legions of contractors are apparently up to. Users can now to see just how much money these government agencies are spending and where those top secret contractors are located. Check out this nine page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/functions/air-and-space-ops/

No wonder it scares the crap out of Official Washington: it’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes, and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.

But this piece is about much more than dollars. It’s about what used to be called the Garrison State — the impact on society of a Praetorian class of war-focused elites. Priest and Arkin call it “Top Secret America” and it’s so big, and grown so fast, that it’s replicated the problem of disconnection within the intelligence agencies that facilitated America’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. With too many analysts and too many capabilities documenting too much, with too few filters in place to sort out the useful stuff or discover hidden connections, the information overload is its own information blackout. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe,” a retired Army three-star general who recently assessed the system tells the reporters.

The Post — whose editorial page has been notably receptive to the growth of the security state over the years — explains in an editorial comment that it ran its constellation of websites by security officials to ensure that it wasn’t jeopardizing national security. In one instance, the editors deleted certain unspecified specific “data points” the project initially disclosed. And they further explain that most of what the project documents, like the locations of contractor and agency facilities, is already public information, distributed on company and agency websites. So it’s not as if the paper has put anyone in harm’s way. (Some of those overlapping contracts issued by the “263 organizations [that] have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11″ might now be in danger, however.)

Still, in compiling all this information, there’s a risk that the Post provides a hostile foreign power looking to infiltrate the U.S. security apparatus now has an online yellow pages for sending out his resume. Ironically, the very nature of the phenomenon Priest and Arkin document might be enough to foil an infiltrator. Security agencies and their companies produce more information than anyone can consume, adding uncertain value to the amount of information already public. And the spigot — contained in congressional budgets that are either politically sacrosanct or entirely secret — doesn’t seem to be able to close. One impressed observer notes to the paper about a useless intel program scheduled for closure, ”Like a zombie, it keeps on living.”

That rise in what might be called the counterterrorism-industrial complex is a story we’ve covered since this blog set up shop in 2007, as have many of our friends, because privatized intelligence is one of the major security developments of the last decade-plus. It’s also been enshrouded by near-baroque secrecy. The intelligence community would not even disclose just how many contractors it employs, for instance, until the Post did so.

That secrecy has concealed — barely — how inextricable the contractors are from the intelligence community. Take Bill Black, who ended his nearly-40 year career with the National Security Agency in 1997, when he became a vice president of intel contractor SAIC. That lasted for barely two years before Black returned as the agency’s deputy director — with some ideas about what company could revamp NSA’s software. Long story short: several years and a billion dollars later, the only thing the program yielded was an indictment of a whistleblower accused of leaking it to reporter Siobhan Gorman.

That’s been par for the course after the post-9/11 cash-in. Similar to their military counterparts, intelligence companies (sometimes they’re the same companies) often “bid back” the nation’s spies, enticing veteran intel professionals to the contracting sector with greater salaries — raising the overall price of the U.S. security infrastructure when the spy agencies basically contract out for their old workforce. Want data-mining, or to build a logic layer for your surveillance architecture? Contractors are often able to take a piece of the job with less red tape getting in the way.

Except that the information produced in Top Secret America has questionable ability to thwart, capture or kill terrorists. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab made his way onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253, and only alert passengers prevented him from detonating a bomb in his underwear. In fairness, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have racked up notable successes in recent years, like arresting Najibullah Zazi before, an indictment alleges, he could place suicide bombers in the New York City subway. And the fact remains that the closest thing the nation has experienced to a second 9/11 came from a deranged Army major who shot up Fort Hood in November, a horrific act that killed over a dozen people, not thousands.

Still, this is a critique that resonates:

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Um, three wars? Only in Top Secret America…

UPDATE: Acting Director of National Intelligence David Gompert just released a wet-noodle response to Top Secret America. “The reporting does not reflect the Intelligence Community we know,” Gompert says in a statement. “We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day.”

In recent years, we have reformed the IC in ways that have improved the quality, quantity, regularity, and speed of our support to policymakers, warfighters, and homeland defenders, and we will continue our reform efforts…. We will continue to scrutinize our own operations, seek ways to improve and adapt, and work with Congress on its crucial oversight and reform efforts. We can always do better, and we will. And the importance of our mission and our commitment to keeping America safe will remain steadfast, whether they are reflected in the day’s news or not.

In other words: we’re doing just great, and pinching pennies, too. Now stop looking at that database.

WEBSOURCE FOR SPOOKS: wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/search-through-top-secret-americas-network-of-private-spooks/#ixzz0u9a0FSSG

A Damning New Report On George W. Bush

Denn — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:59:58 +0000

by CESAR CHELALA, MD,PhD

Foreign correspondent the MIDDLE EAST TIMES International Australia

Commondreams

George W. Bush is among the five least accomplished U.S. presidents, according to a new survey by the U.S.'s top 238 presidential scholars. They have been polled by the Siena College Research institute's (SR) annually for the last 28 years. While president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led the country from 1933 until his death in 1945, ranked first in overall accomplishments, former President Bush ranked worst among modern presidents-and fifth worst in history.

According to the U.S. Survey of U.S. Presidents the top five, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, are Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The presidential scholars ranked the U.S. Presidents on six personal attributes ( background, imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck and willingness to take risks), five forms of ability ( compromising, executive leadership, communication and overall abilities); and eight area of accomplishment including domestic affairs, economic, working with congress and their party, appointing Supreme Court justices and members of the executive branch, avoiding mistakes and foreign policy.

If one analyzes just the Bush administration approach to foreign policy, health care and human rights pne may consider the biggest foreign policy blunders the Irag and Afghanistan wars. The Bush adminstration blantanly ignored the advice of General Eric Shinseki, who estimated that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. Even more seriously, the war against Iraq was based, from the beginning, on false premises.

Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly stated that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11," in spite of the fact that there was no evidence for such assertion. The bipartisan 9/11 Comission itself found that Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacts and no collaborative operational relationship with Al Qaeda.

Compounding the wrongness of the approach towards Iraq is the right to iniate a preemtive war, flaunting international law. The 2006 updated National Security Strategy of the United States had established that,"...The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. "There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD."

As was clearly demonstrated not only did the government of Iraq not have any WMD, but at no point could have been considered a threat to the United States, given the obvious difference in military capability between the countries. This was no impediment for former President Bush and his closest associates to continue using that rationale for war against that country. That war and the justification for engaging in preemptive wars are among the most serious and damaging foreign policy descisions of the Bush administration.

If one analyzes the Bush presidency regarding its approach to health care one can find a policy of disregard for people's health and support for corperate interests, which is, after all, only a reflection of the Bush administration descisions on almost all economic matters.

The Bush administration blocked efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate cheaper prescription drugs for seniors thus negatively affecting their health and quality of life, while simultaneously depriving American taxpayers of savings from the very marketplace competition touted by White House economists. The adminsitration also went to court to block lawsuits by patients who had been injured by defective prescription drugs and medical devices. In addition, the General Accounting Office conducted a study that concluded that the Bush administration created illegal, covert propaganda to promote its industry-supported Medicare bill.

The Bush administration record on human rights is dismal. Who can forget the photos of prisoners abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and carried out by the U.S. Army and other U.S. Government agencies and that have tainted forever the image of the U.S. as a defender of human rights? To compound the magnitude of abuse, Janis Karpinsky, a commander at Abu Ghraib estimated later that 90 percent of the detainees in the prison were innocent.

Recently Physicians for Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration conducted illegal and unethical human experiments and carried out research on detainees in CIA custody. In addition, medical personnel engaged not only in torture of prisoners but also in the crime of illegal experimentation, activities in clear vilation of the Nuremberg Code.

It would be naive to think that all negative aspects of the Bush adminstration are the responsibilty of former President Bush himself. He obviously is the face for members of his adminstration and others who were influencing policy descisions. But the ultimate responsibilty falls on him. And he is the one that will have to respond to history for his actions.

July 2010

GOP and Liberal Activism

Denn — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:17:32 +0000

Remember the court's sodomy decision? Conservatives don't.

by STEVE CHAPMAN

The Chicago Tribune

In Elana Kagan's confirmation hearings, conservative senators have made two things clear: their disdain for "liberal activists" judges and their fear she will be one. What the Republicans want are judges who will apply the Constitution according to the original meaning as understood by the framers. They believe that when the constitution gives us no explicit guidance, judges defer to the democratic branches of government.

What Republicans oppose, as Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions put it, are judges who use "their power to redefine the meaning of our constitution and have the result of advancing that judge's preferred social policies."

When conservatives talk about judicial activism, they have in mind a variety of Supreme Court descisions-legalizing abortion, hindering the death penalty, allowing flag burning and preventing officially sponsered prayer in public schools. All these, I believe, ignored the plain words or the original meaning of the text. But there is another descision that fits any definition of a liberal activist approach. It came in a 2008 case, Lawrence V. Texas, involving two men who were prosecuted after police caught them having sex in a private bedroom.

In a 1986 challenge to sodomy laws, the Supreme Court derided the notion that the Constitution protects "a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." But this time it ruled such statutes unconstitutional.

How come? Because the government may not regulate private, consensual noncommercial sex among adults, straight or gay. "Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government." wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. At the time, the outcome was controversial. Conservative commentator David Frum said it would have been "unimaginable to the Constitution's author."

The conservative Family Research Council lamented that "judicial activists have used their fertile imagination to create rights that simply don't exist in the Constitution." and "imposed their own moral judgements in place of state legislatures."

The descision bore the telltale signs of liberal activism: it did not rest on any clear provision of the Constitution. It did not match up with the laws in effect at the the time of the nation's founding. It discarded well-established precedents. And it created a social policy strongly favored by liberals. But after the initial denunciations, something odd happenend: The descision vanished from public debate.

Roe V. Wade led to endless battles over abortion laws. The school prayer descisions have been defied in many districts. But once the sodomy laws were gone, they were forgotten. No one mourned them, and no one tried to bring them back.

Well, almost no one.

The Texas GOP's new platform says unabashedly, "We oppose the legilization of sodomy, We demand that Congress excercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy." Last year, the Oklahoma Republican courts came out against "the elimination of laws against sodomy." The Montana GOP agrees. That's right. They want to allow the states to put gay and lesbian couples in jail for something ( oral or anal sex) that millions of heterosexaul couples do all the time.

But this sentiment is not exactly sweeping the country-even the red hot states GOP senators had the chance to ask Kagan what she thought about the sodomy descision, and not one of them did. No one had the slightest desire to denounce or even revisit the court's ruling.

There are a few possible explanations for that. Maybe the Republicans think sodomy laws are impossible to justify and secretly don't mind that the courts struck them down. But that amounts to favoring judicial activism if you like the results, which is exactly what they lambaste liberals for doing.

Or maybe it's because, though they would prefer for the court to uphold sodomy laws, they fear the political consequences of saying so. But that suggests that when the court's activists imposed their moral preferences, they were also "imposing" those of the American people.

Or maybe they realize that laws trampling liberties that most people take for granted can't be squared with the spirit of freedom and equality that defines the Constitution-even if the letter of the Constitution has nothing obvious to say on the particular matter at hand.

Senate Republicans may vocally oppose judicial activism. But sometimes. they really, really don't want to fight it.

July 7, 2010

Argentina First Country in Latin America Legalizing Gay Marriage

Dingo — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:54:51 +0000

Argentina legalized same sex marriage Thursday, becoming the first country in Latin America to grant gays and lesbians all the legal rights, responsibilities and protections that marriage brings to heterosexual couples.

After a marathon debate, 33 lawmakers voted in favor, 27 were against it and 3 abstained in Argentina's Senate in a vote that ended after 4 a.m. Since the lower house already approved it, and President Cristina Fernandez is a strong supporter, it now becomes law as soon as it is published in the official bulletin.

The law is sure to bring a wave of marriages by gays and lesbians who have increasingly found Buenos Aires to be more accepting than many other places in the region.

The approval came despite a concerted campaign by the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical groups, which drew 60,000 people to march on Congress and urged parents in churches and schools to work against passage.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said "everyone loses" with gay marriage, and "children need to have the right to be raised and educated by a father and a mother."

Nine gay couples had already married in Argentina after persuading judges that the constitutional mandate of equality supports their marriage rights, but some of these marriages were later declared invalid.

As the debate stretched on for nearly 16 hours, supporters and opponents of held rival vigils through the frigid night outside the Congress building in Buenos Aires.

"Marriage between a man and a woman has existed for centuries, and is essential for the perpetuation of the species," insisted Sen. Juan Perez Alsina, who is usually a loyal supporter of the president but gave a passionate speech against gay marriage.

But Sen. Norma Morandini, another member of the president's party, compared the discrimination closeted gays face to the oppression imposed by Argentina's dictators decades ago.

"What defines us is our humanity, and what runs against humanity is intolerance," she said.

Same-sex civil unions have been legalized in Uruguay, Buenos Aires and some states in Mexico and Brazil. Mexico City has legalized gay marriage. Colombia's Constitutional Court granted same-sex couples inheritance rights and allowed them to add their partners to health insurance plans.

But Argentina now becomes the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, granting gays and lesbians all the same rights and responsibilities that heterosexuals have. These include many more rights than civil unions, including adopting children and inheriting wealth.

Gay rights advocates said Argentina's historic step adds momentum to similar efforts around the world.

"Today's historic vote shows how far Catholic Argentina has come, from dictatorship to true democratic values, and how far the freedom to marry movement has come, as twelve countries on four continents now embrace marriage equality," said Evan Wolfson, who runs the U.S. Freedom to Marry lobby.

He urged U.S. lawmakers to stand up "for the Constitution and all families here in the United States. America should lead, not lag, when it comes to treating everyone equally under the law."

Among the opponents were teacher Eduardo Morales, who said he believes the legislation was concocted by Buenos Aires residents who are out step with the views of the country.

"They want to convert this city into the gay capital of the world," said Morales of San Luis province.

Ines Franck, director of the group Familias Argentinas, said the legislation cuts against centuries of tradition.

Opposing the measure "is not discrimination, because the essence of a family is between two people of opposite sexes," he said. "Any variation goes against the law, and against nature."

The president, currently on a state visit to China, spoke out from there against the Argentine Catholic Church's campaign and the tone she said some religious groups have taken.

"It's very worrisome to hear words like 'God's war' or 'the devil's project,' things that recall the times of the Inquisition," she said.

Some opposition leaders have accused her of promoting the initiative to gain votes in next year's presidential elections, when Fernandez's husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, is expected to run again.

The vote came after Sen. Daniel Filmus urged fellow lawmakers to show the world how much Argentina has matured.

"Society has grown up. We aren't the same as we were before," he said.

WEBSOURCE: news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_argentina_gay_marriage

New Federal Health Care Requirements - Free Health Tests

Keysman — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:04:21 +0000

Health Plans Must Provide Some Tests at No Cost
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: July 14, 2010

WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday issued new rules requiring health insurance companies to provide free coverage for dozens of screenings, laboratory tests and other types of preventive care.

The new requirements promise significant benefits for consumers — if they take advantage of the services that should now be more readily available and affordable.

In general, the government said, Americans use preventive services at about half the rate recommended by doctors and public health experts.

The rules will eliminate co-payments, deductibles and other charges for blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol tests; many cancer screenings; routine vaccinations; prenatal care; and regular wellness visits for infants and children.

Other services that must be offered at no charge include counseling to help people stop smoking; screening and counseling for obesity; and tests for infection with the virus that causes AIDS.

“Getting rid of cost-sharing is a long-overdue step in the right direction,” said Kenneth E. Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we will have to do a major public education campaign to get people to take advantage of these clinical preventive services.”

The rules stipulate that no co-payments can be charged for tests and screenings recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of scientific experts. The rules apply to new health plans that begin coverage after Sept. 23 and to existing health plans that make significant changes after that date. The administration said the requirements could increase premiums by 1.5 percent, on average.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the rules would extend benefits to 31 million people in new employer-sponsored plans and 10 million people in new individual plans next year.

In many cases, insurers will be allowed to charge for goods and services needed to treat a condition detected in a screening. For example, consumers can receive free screenings for depression and high cholesterol, but they might be charged co-payments for antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering drugs.

In some cases, the task force has specified how frequently a service, like colonoscopy, should be performed. If the guidelines are silent, the rules say, an insurer may use “reasonable medical management techniques to determine the frequency” of services.

The administration is working on a supplemental list of free preventive services for women.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America says insurance plans should be required to cover contraceptives without co-payments.

“For women, what could be more basic preventive care than birth control?” asked Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood.

Other services that must be provided without charge include genetic counseling for certain women with a family history of breast cancer, counseling to promote breast-feeding by new mothers and screening for osteoporosis in older women.

Ms. Sebelius said that 100,000 deaths could be averted each year if doctors and patients effectively used five services: colorectal and breast cancer screening, flu vaccines and counseling on smoking cessation and on aspirin therapy to prevent heart disease.

Bipartisan Stupidity On Afghanistan

Denn — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:00:42 +0000

by TED RALL

Commondreams

NEW YORK-As I pack for my return trip to Afghanistan next month, many people are asking me: Why are we losing? What should we do there? The short answer is simple: Afghan resistence forces live there. We don't. Sooner or later, U.S. troops will depart. All the Afghan resistence has to do is wear us down and wait us out. As I have pointed out before, no nation has successfully invaded and occupied any other nation since the 19th century. All occupations ultimatly fail.

For those who prefer their punditry longwinded, here's a longer answer.

Even taking historical precident into account, America's post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan-its longest war ever-has been notably disastrous. Wonder why? Everything you need to know was contained in this week's war of words between the chairmen of the two major political parties.

The Afghan War Kerfuffle that revealed the boundless stupidity of our national political leadership began on July 1st. Republican National Committee Chairmen Michael Steele told GOP donors in Conneticut that the war in Afghanistan could not be won and should never have been fought. "If [Obama is] such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that's the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who's tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed," Steele said. Steele's main point is beyond dispute. There's a reason Afghanistan is known as "the graveyard of empires," as opposed to say, "the number one producer of tasty, nutritous pomegranates."

Steele's all too typical ahistoricity is in the details. Which he gets wrong.

Would-be conquerers have had trouble with Afghanistan not for over 1,000 years, but for 2,000 years. Alexander the Great sent supplies through the Khyber Pass in 327 BCE in an attempt to subjugate the Konar Valley. Characteristically, the locals waged a ferocious resistence. The Macedonian conquerer, nearly killed by an Afghan arrow, beat a retreat to the Indus River and withdrew.

But it's Steele's "land war" qualifier that really gets me. According to the GOP Chairmen, the British Army might have spared itself total annihilation in 1842 if it had conducted an air war instead. Using what-hot air balloons?

Then things get really weird.

"This was Obama's choosing" Steele said.

Huh?

True, Obama made the Afghan war his own by sending in more troops. But Bush started this mess. Doesn't Steele remember that?-Or-this thought is even more frightning-does he think WE forgot?

"This is not something the United States has activily prosecuted or wanted to engage in," he continued. This surely comes as welcome news to the lens of thousands of Afghans killed by tens of thousands of American bombs. Chin up. Imagine how many more would have died if the U.S. had "actively prosecuted" this fiasco. Not to be outdone in the moronitude department, Democratic National Spokesman Brad Woodhouse retorted that "we are there because we were attacked by terrorosts on 9-11."

Um...we were attacked by Saudis and Egyptians. Who were trained by Pakistanis. None of the major figures linked to 9/11-including Osama Bin Laden-were in Afghanistan on 9/11. ( Bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in Islamabad.) By 9/11, both Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan had been closed. Al Qaeda's operations were based entirly in Pakistan.

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11...Nothing.

None of the Afghans I interviewed in November and December of 2001 had even heard of 9/11. None had heard of Al Qaeda. Other journalists reported the same thing.

As far as I can tell, we attacked Afghanistan for fun. To disrupt Iran and India. To test weapons that would be used against Iraq. To test the resolve of the American antiwar movement. And to build an oil and gas pipeline between Central and South Asia. Not because of 9/11.

Woodhouse continued: "It's simply unconscionable that Michael Steele would undermine the morale of our troops when they need our support and encouragement. Michael Steele would do well to remember that we are not in Afghanistan by our own choosing, that we were attacked and that his words have consequences."

Dubya-is that you?

Can we tell which party is which anymore?

No wonder we are losing. The parties have forgotten what they stand for-and they never learned the history of the countries they invade.

COMMENT: I heard the same vapid, stupid comments come out of the mouth of Democratic Chief of staff Rhom Emanual in an interview Friday on the PBS News with Jim Leherer. Emanual stated that, "we are in Afghanistan because of 9/11," I doubt that he, like most of the gutless wonders on Capitol Hill will ever admit the real reasons we have invaded that part of the world. It's all about maintaining the statusquo, which means extracting wealth from other parts of the world, privitizing our military, even if it means sending our young men and women to their deaths.

BlkDawg

DADT Survey Leaked

Dingo — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:07:40 +0000

There are times when religious right figures say things so nastily homophobic, so unbelievable that it's a waste to decipher the comment. The only thing you can do is just allow the comment to speak for itself.

Wednesday’s (July 7) piece by Coral Ridge Ministry writer (and perennial anti-gay) Robert Knight on DADT in the Washington Times is a perfect example. Here is a choice morsel:

“Forcing open homosexuality on the armed forces would destroy the volunteer military and bring back the compulsory draft. Since women are now deployed close to combat, and the only legal reason they are not eligible is their combat exemption, a new draft could include our daughters. And some would face pressure to have on base abortions in order to complete their tours of duty.

Chaplains would be the first victims of Mr. Obama's homosexualization of the military, followed by anyone who violated "zero tolerance" policies for homosexual acceptance. Bible believing Christians would quickly find themselves unwelcome in Barney Frank's new pansexual, cross-dressing military.

Other fallout includes family housing, reduction in retention, recruitment and unit cohesion, an increase in homosexual sexual assaults and a boost to overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act.”

He forgot the rampant cannibalism and forced tattooing. Or does that come later? I wouldn't know because national headquarters hasn't sent me the latest copy of the "Gay Agenda" as of yet.

WEBSOURCE: http://huffingtonpost.com/alvin-mcewen/robert-knight-dadt-repeal_b_638838.html

---------------------------------------------

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Survey Leaked

The Pentagon doesn't want to know whether service members are gay, but is curious whether they've ever shared a room or shower with homosexual colleagues, according to portions of a questionnaire sent this week to 400,000 active duty and reserve troops.

A copy of the survey was provided to The Washington Post by the University of California's Palm Center, which studies gays in the military. The group said it obtained the questionnaire from an active duty service member who received it.

The Full Survey can be viewed by going to Scribd (click on the link below):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34114846/2010-DoD-Comprehensive-Review-Survey-of-Uniformed-Active-Duty-and-Reserve-Service-Members

The Defense Department confirmed the copy’s authenticity and called its unauthorized release unhelpful.

“We’re not playing games here, we’re trying to figure out what the attitudes of our force are, what the potential problems are with repeal,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. “We need this survey and we need people to participate in this survey to get a sense of the attitudes of the force.”

Military officials leading the study wrote the survey’s questions with Westat, an independent research firm based in Rockville. The survey has cost the Pentagon about $4.5 million, Morrell said.

It includes about 20 questions regarding marital status, housing, family perceptions of military service, career intentions and whether the participant socializes with members of their unit. The next series of questions asks about a service member’s interactions with gay or lesbian colleagues, subordinates or unit leaders.

Questions include, “Do you currently serve with a male or female service member you believe to be homosexual?” and “In the unit where you had a leader you believe to be gay or lesbian, about how many other unit members also believed the leader to be gay or lesbian?”

The survey also asks participants how repealing "don't ask, don't tell" might impact the military's ability to enforce its personal conduct policy and maintain good order and discipline.

Questions next focus on personal interactions with gay or lesbian colleagues, including "Have you shared a room, berth or field tent with a service member you believed to be homosexual?" and "Have you been assigned to share bath facilities with an open bay shower that is also used by a service member you believed to be homosexual?" They are also asked how they might behave in such situations in combat.

The review team identified bathing and housing situations as potential areas of concern, Morrell said.

“We don’t know scientifically at least, the attitudes of the force until we ask them,” he said.

Family and housing considerations are also probed:

"If don't ask, don't tell is repealed and a gay or lesbian service member attended a military social function with a same sex partner, which are you most likely to do?"

-- Continue to attend military social functions
-- Stop bringing my spouse, significant other or other family members with me to military social functions
-- Stop attending military social functions
-- Something else
-- Don't know

"If don't ask, don't tell is repealed and you had on-base housing and a gay or lesbian service member was living with a same-sex partner on-based, what would you most likely do?"

-- I would get to know them like any other neighbors.
-- I would make a special effort to get to know them.
-- I would be uncomfortable, but access to the exchange, commissary, and MWR facilities is more important to me than who my neighbors are when deciding where to live.
-- I would be uncomfortable, but the quality of on-base housing is more important to me than who my neighbors are when deciding where to live.
-- I would be uncomfortable, but the cost of moving makes it unlikely I would leave on-base housing.
-- I would probably move off-base.
-- Something else.
-- Don't know.

Service members have until Aug. 15 to complete the survey. Results will be included in the working group’s final report, which is due to President Obama and top military leaders by Dec. 1.

Troops may also provide their thoughts on the policy by accessing an online forum established by the Defense Department.

But Servicemembers United, the nation’s largest group of gay and lesbian troops and veterans, said the survey includes “derogatory and insulting wording, assumptions, and insinuations.”

“The Defense Department just shot itself in the foot by releasing such a flawed survey to 400,000 servicemembers, and it did so at an outrageous cost to taxpayers,” said the group’s executive director Alexander Nicholson.

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a nonpartisan legal services group providing counsel to troops discharged under the policy, said the survey’s design may yield skewed results.

“Surveying the troops is unprecedented; it did not happen in 1948 when President Truman ended segregation and it did not happen in 1976 when the service academies opened to women,” SLDN executive director Aubrey Sarvis said. “Even when the military placed women on ships at sea, the Pentagon did not turn to a survey on how to bring about that cultural change.”

In response to such criticism, Morrell said Gates asked military officials to systematically engage the force in multiple ways. “We’re doing so through private online communications and we’re doing so through this survey,” he said.

The Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s largest gay rights groups, provided tepid support for the survey.

“While surveying the troops on an issue like this is problematic from the start and the questions exhibit clear bias, the fact remains that this study exists,” said HRC spokesman Michael Cole. “We urge the department to analyze the results with an understanding of the inherent bias in the questions and use it as a tool to implement open service quickly and smoothly.”

WEBSOURCE: voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/07/a_pentagon_survey_sent_this.html

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell survey: GLBT fear 'Devil in the details' would get them kicked out of military

The Service Members Legal Defense Network has issued a statement warning gay and lesbian service members that "SLDN cannot recommend that lesbian, gay, or bisexual service members participate in any survey being administered by the Department of Defense."

Among the questions posed in the survey: "If don't ask, don't tell is repealed and you are working with a service member in your immediate unit who has said he or she is gay or lesbian, how would that affect your own ability to fulfill your mission during combat?" Respondents can answer with a range of choices from "very positively" to "very negatively," as well as "no effect" or "don't know."

Critics said the wording of some questions made it likely that the responses would be overwhelmingly negative and that the results would be used to justify discriminatory measures against homosexual service members, even if the current ban is repealed.

A sampling of the more than 100 questions include:

• Have you been assigned to share bath facilities with an open bay shower that is also used by a Service member you believed to be homosexual?

• If Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and you are working with a Service member in your immediate unit who has said he or she is gay or lesbian, how, if at all, would your level of morale be affected?

• If Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and a gay or lesbian Service member attended a military social function with a same-sex partner, which are you most likely to do?

* In a unit that you serve in, if you knew your commander was gay or lesbian, would you have a problem serving under someone who is openly gay or lesbian?

* If you had to share a room, bathroom, or open bay shower facilities in a war zone with other service members believed to be gay or lesbian, how would you react?

* Would you talk about behavior issues?

* Would you consult a chaplain, or would you just get on with your Military life such as it is in a war zone under any circumstances?

* Would repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve, impact your Military service?

* Would it make you decide not to serve in the Military?

For the GLBT community, this survey seems to be a two edged sword. If they respond, many feel that their answers will inadvertently out them and lead to possible prosecution and loss of military career. However, if they don't respond, then only the viewpoints of heterosexuals will be considered, effectively skewing the results. The survey went out yesterday (July 7) and may impact the final repealing of DADT.

As seen in above video, ask an administrator and troop opinions don't matter. Below, when General Pace is asked, it's a whole different story. Congressman Harkin condemns General Pace for speaking out against repeal of DADT on the basis that homosexual acts or heterosexual acts, outside of marriage, are against the law and homosexual acts are against his Christian beliefs.

Harkin claims General Pace has no right to speak his personal opinions and that gay men and lesbian women are "some of our most outstanding law abiding and moral citizens". Even when Congressman Harkin erroneously states that homosexual acts are not against the law, General Pace doesn't back down. Not on his belief that homosexual acts are immoral and in fact, are illegal, under present military law or that the DADT law, as it is, allows all gays and lesbians to serve in the military without breaking the laws of the land. Harkin, who showed no embarrassment that he didn't know the law and was wrong, merely responded, "It should be changed then."

A Gay Rights Victory - Don't Tread on Me - The 10th

Dingo — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:59:29 +0000

"The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and, in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment. For that reason, the statute is invalid," he wrote.

The tenth amendment is “The Don't Tread On Me” amendment that the tea party and right wing radical groups love to throw around.

A federal judge ruled Thursday (July 8) that part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional. Judge Joseph Tauro, of U.S. District Court in Boston, issued rulings on two separate cases on Thursday.

"This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status," Tauro wrote in the decision for Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services.

In the other case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, Tauro ruled that DOMA violates the equal protection principles in the Fifth Amendment, according to Bay Windows. From his decision:

“In the wake of DOMA, it is only sexual orientation that differentiates a married couple entitled to federal marriage-based benefits from one not so entitled. And this court can conceive of no way in which such a difference might be relevant to the provision of the benefits at issue.

By premising eligibility for these benefits on marital status in the first instance, the federal government signals to this court that the relevant distinction to be drawn is between married individuals and unmarried individuals. To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning.

And where, as here, "there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects" from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification. As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

In both cases, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, ruled specifically on section 3 of DOMA, which reads:

“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word "marriage" means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word "spouse" refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”

Same sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts case was brought by the state Attorney General, Martha Coakley; the Gill case was filed by the New England-based legal group GLAD.

Judge rules DOMA unconstitutional – trumped by the 10th Amendment “don’t tread on me”

What the DOMA ruling means for marriage

--------------------------------------

Why the Defense of Marriage Act Is a Legal Albatross

Fourteen years ago, Congress enacted the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the worst pieces of federal legislation ever passed. The law was always unnecessary and unwise. And on Thursday, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled that it is also unconstitutional.

The main impetus behind the 1996 law was the fear among conservative politicians and activists that if Hawaii -- where a same-sex marriage lawsuit had been filed -- issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the other 49 states would have to recognize them. But that fear was always unfounded because courts had never held that states were constitutionally required to recognize marriage licenses issued by other jurisdictions.

Although the Constitution does require that judicial judgments issued by the courts of one state be recognized by those of other states, the issuance of a marriage license is an administrative rather than a judicial act. As a result, Congress knew (or should have known) that courts had consistently ruled that states were permitted to refuse to recognize marriages from other jurisdictions that were inconsistent with their public policies.

Well-settled principles of law, then, made DOMA's attempt to relieve states from the obligations of recognizing same-sex marriages solemnized in other states entirely unnecessary.

But DOMA was not just unnecessary; it was also unwise. For more than two hundred years, the federal government had left it to the states to determine who was eligible to marry. Prior to 1996, federal law looked solely to state law to determine who was legally married and therefore who was entitled to the hundreds of federal rights and benefits available to spouses. The federal government did this because it was widely recognized that states had different marriage eligibility criteria -- related, for example, to age and consanguinity -- and that it made no sense to enact federal legislation that would, in effect, establish a national, one-size fits all definition of marriage.

The Defense of Marriage Act, therefore, was a radical departure from the more than two hundred years of history in which Congress refused to get involved in matters of domestic relations law that had always been under the control of the states.

Not every law that is unnecessary and unwise is automatically unconstitutional. The main reason why DOMA violates the Constitution is that it codifies raw prejudice against gay people. Supporters of the law have always claimed that it is necessary in order to promote heterosexual marriage. But as the federal court in Massachusetts recognized, no straight couple decides to marry simply because Congress has passed a law denying gay people all of the federal rights and benefits that accompany marriage.

While debating DOMA in 1996, members of Congress repeatedly referred to homosexuality as "immoral," "depraved," "unnatural," "based on perversion," and "against God's principles." It is clear that Congress enacted DOMA to send a message of disapproval of gay people and their relationships. And this is the true reason why the statute is a legal disgrace: Laws are supposed to address social issues and problems; they should not be used to further stigmatize a minority group for who they are and whom they love.

Posted July 9, 2010, by Carlos A. Ball
Author of "From The Closet to the Courtroom" and Professor of Law at Rutgers University
WEBSOURCE: huffingtonpost.com/carlos-a-ball/why-the-defense-of-marria_b_640756.html

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'Today' Show To Allow Gay Wedding After GLAAD Protest

After a meeting with gay and lesbian activists on Thursday, NBC's "Today" show said it is changing the rules for its annual wedding contest to allow same sex couples to apply for a ceremony conducted on morning TV.

NBC extended the deadline for applications until Monday. Already thousands of couples have expressed interest in the on-air wedding, which the top-rated morning show has sponsored for a decade, a spokeswoman said.

"We're thrilled that `Today' show's `Modern Wedding Contest' now recognizes what most fair-minded Americans have already concluded – a wedding celebrates love and commitment, whether the spouses are straight or gay," said Jarrett Barrios, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Viewers plan every aspect of the wedding, from the cake to the clothing styles of attendants. NBC picks four couples from thousands of applicants, and viewers vote on which of those couples will participate.

Same sex couples have been excluded because New York state law does not allow them to get wedding licenses. But NBC said GLAAD pointed out that a same sex couple would be able to get a license from another state and still have their ceremony in New York.

NBC said it had listened to voicemails and read e-mails protesting its decision not to allow same sex marriages. The show considers relations with the gay and lesbian community very important, it said in a statement.

"Moving forward, we ensure that our future wedding contests will be inclusive to all couples," NBC said.

The only time same sex couples were allowed to apply for the "Today" wedding was in 2005, when an out-of-state wedding was held, said show spokeswoman Megan Kopf. No gay or lesbian couples were among the finalists, however.

Although "Today" viewers will decide which couple to get married on TV, it will choose from among four that "Today" producers screen and put up for a vote. So there's no guarantee that even if same sex couples apply for the on-air wedding, viewers will have a chance to select one to participate.

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught

Denn — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:04:55 +0000

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught

by MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL

Sister Citizen

The Nation

I spent Memorial Day in New Orleans, where I watched a group of citizens lay a wreath at the foot of a statue of Jefferson Davis. It was a jarring reminder of how the South understands American history. Memorial Day was founded after the Civil War to honor Union soldiers. When Southerners choose to memorialize Confederate leaders, it is an act of subversive historical revision and an indication of the unresolved political and cultural anxieties that stir just below the surface of the "New South."

The white New Orleanians paying their respects to Davis made me nervous. Few things disgusted Confederates more than property-owning women, free blacks and evidence of miscegenation. I am all of these, so I feel the very legitimacy of my citizenship challenged by their nostalgia.

But I noticed that those gathered at the monument appeared to be mostly senior citizens. In contrast, young New Orleans were hanging out in intergrated groups in the park, listening to music, drinking beer and worrying about how the impending hurricane season would affect the BP oil disaster. The generational divide in how these Southerners spent Memorial Day was jarring and instructive.

In May, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill cutting state funding for schools that offer classes "designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group." or "advocating ethnic solidarity." The law aims to ban ethnic studies curriculums and implies that classes in African-American history or Latino literature are dangerous and discriminatory. Then the Texas State Board of Education voted to introduce a considerably more conservative slant to the social studies curriculum.

In the rivised Texas version of history, there is an increased emphasis on Phyllis Schlafly, segregationlist George Wallace and the National Rifle Association, while the United Nations is presented as an enemy of American Sovereignty and seperation of church and state is reduced to an idealogiical suggestion rather than a constitutional mandate.

The celebration of Confederate traitors as American heroes, the whitewash of school curriculums and the conservative re-interpretation of national history are weapons in Americas's decades-long culture war. These policies reflect an impulse similar to the Cultural Revolution of Communist China; an attempt to gain authority by controlling the very definitions of truth available to young people. After all, it is among young Americans that conservatives are losing this war, and if they are serious about taking back their country, the education of American youth is the critical terrain where they plan to make a stand.

Young Americans are significantly different from their older counterparts. At the end of the Clinton administration a majority of young Americans strongly supported multiculural education and believed that the government should ensure intergrated schools and workplaces. In the year George W. Bush was re-elected, an overwhelming majority of young Americans believed gay men and lesbians should have equal protection in housing and employment and should be protected under hate crimes legislation.

Barack Obama garnered two of every three votes cast by people under 30. Across parties, idealogies, regions and religions, young people are less likely to subscribe to racial stereotypes, more likely to support legal equality for gay Americans and more likely to beleive tolerance is an important idea. These enduring generational trends have prompted some observers to question the long term-viablity of the GOP-which seems to be growing older but not grander.

These statistics are comforting for progressives, who tend to believe that generational replacement will be enough to usher in a new liberal majority. They wax poetic about how the Obama generation-young people coming of age with a black president, female secretary of state and Hispanic justice of the Supreme Court-will undoubtedly extend the social safety net, end discriminatory state practices and create a more just nation.

But the differences between younger and older Americans are neither automatic nor inevitable, they are the result of demographic, policy and curricular changes that occurred as the result of protest and struggle in post-civil rights America.

Although poor urban minorities continue to suffer the effects of hyper-segregated communities, young white Americans live in a more diverse world than their parents did as children. More than ever, white children learn in intergrated classrooms, have mothers who work outside the home, encounter racial minorities in positions of authority, learn about different religious traditions, read literature by diverse authors, encounter same-sex families as a routine part of the popular culture and have technology-based access to a dizzying array of opinions.

These experiences are widely seen as necessary components for contemporary citizenship. In fact, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Bollinger decision, the state's compelling interest in ensuring diverse educational environments is the legal standard on which affirmative action rests.

Social conservatives shudder with apocalypic anxiety about these generational trends. They understand that the best defense against this frightening, changing world is to wrest control of the historical narrative. To retake the country, they must first reshape young people's reality by revising the meaning of their daily lives. They must make traitors into heros, erase the contributions of marginal groups, decry self-knowledge as sedition and reinforce fear of those who are different.

I'm reminded of the lyrics of a song in South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein's controversial 1949 musical: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear/You've got to be taught from year to year/It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear-/You've got to be carefully taught."

Arizona and Texas policy-makers seem to be using the lyrics as a guide to curriculum development, but they may find that the world has already moved beyond their fearful grasp.

June 2010

Patients With H.I.V. Seen as Separated By a Racial Divide

Keysman — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:02:26 +0000

By LINDA VILLAROSA
Published: August 7, 2004

Last January in Manhattan, at the memorial service of a colleague who died of an AIDS-related illness, Joseph Bostic lost feeling in his legs and had trouble standing. A friend, Keith Cylar, hailed a cab, crumpled some bills into the driver's palm and sent Mr. Bostic home to Brooklyn. Two months later, Mr. Bostic died of heart and kidney failure related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Within three weeks, Mr. Cylar, too, was dead of heart disease related to the virus.

The loss of these two men -- both of them AIDS activists who had lived with H.I.V. for years -- shocked many who had nearly forgotten the days when attending funerals and memorial services was a constant, unsettling ritual. In the United States, death rates from H.I.V./AIDS have sharply dropped in the past eight years as new medications have made the disease manageable for many patients.

But among African-Americans like Mr. Bostic and Mr. Cylar, AIDS is still a killer.

In 2002, almost twice as many blacks with AIDS died compared with whites, a gap that has been increasing since 1998. Researchers say the reasons include late diagnoses and inferior care, along with complications because blacks are more likely than whites to suffer from other illnesses.

As a result, health experts say, many blacks in the United States have far more in common with their counterparts in Africa than they do with white patients.

''The area my clinic's in is essentially a suburb of the third world,'' said Dr. Joseph C. Gathe Jr., an infectious-disease physician in Houston and director of a nonprofit AIDS clinic. ''It's a shame no one seems to know that the problem in Africa looks like the problem in inner-city Houston, Chicago and New York.''

Though African-Americans make up just over 12 percent of the United States population, they accounted for 54 percent of the 40,000 new diagnoses of H.I.V./AIDS in 2002, the most recent year for which statistics were available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the estimated 385,000 people living with AIDS, 42 percent were African-American. For them, the disease leads disproportionately to death.

Among black men ages 25 to 44, the death rate from H.I.V./AIDS was more than six times greater than for whites. For black women in the same age group, the numbers are even more startling: the death rate is more than 13 times greater than for whites. The most common method of transmission has been from infected sexual partners, followed by transmission through injected drugs.

The experiences of Mr. Cylar, who was 45, and Mr. Bostic, who was 51, help explain why managing the disease is so precarious for many African-Americans.

''Though Keith was well educated, had private health insurance, a wonderful doctor and was consistent with the dosing of his medication, he experienced in his own life what many of our clientele experience,'' said Charles King, who with Mr. Cylar founded Housing Works, a New York City nonprofit organization that provides services for homeless people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

''Keith had severe asthma and in childhood spent more days in bed or in the hospital than in school,'' said Mr. King, who was Mr. Cylar's partner for nearly 15 years. ''He also dealt with many of the particular problems that occur with black gay men.'' Mr. Cylar endured chronic depression and had used drugs in the past as an escape from anger, Mr. King said.

''With the H.I.V., the asthma and the medications,'' Mr. King said, ''there was not a day that Keith didn't know physical pain.''

Mr. Bostic had led a troubled life: he served three prison terms for a total of 17 years, the first one for manslaughter, and ended up homeless and H.I.V. positive in 1999. Less than a year later, he turned his life around and co-founded the New York City AIDS Housing Network, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn for low-income people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

But dealing with his disease was difficult. Mr. Bostic could barely make ends meet on his salary from the struggling organization and had health insurance only some of the time. His friends say he took H.I.V. drugs, which are expensive, off and on rather than consistently.
''Joe wasn't taking his medicine regularly,'' said Shirlene Cooper, a friend. ''He was very intelligent, but when the medication is so toxic that it makes you sick and you can't function, you get tired of taking it.''

Seeing Unequal Tracks

Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, director of AIDS research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says he believes there are two very different and unequal tracks of H.I.V. treatment and care in the United States.

''In the ideal track,'' Dr. Kuritzkes said, ''a person discovers they are H.I.V. infected, seeks medical care, has regular follow-up and avoids complications by taking a regimen reliably, which he or she is able to tolerate. There is every expectation that this person will lead a normal life.''

But others follow a more dangerous path. ''These are the patients that come to the hospital with full-blown AIDS as their initial diagnosis,'' Dr. Kuritzkes said. ''They may have limited access to care because of finances or because other social or medical problems interfere. By and large, the deaths are among this group, which tends to be African-American.''

According to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, African-Americans are more likely to say they have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year than Latinos or whites. But some research has shown that they are also more likely to learn that they are infected at a later stage, when the disease is harder to treat.

Jay, who asked to be identified only by his middle name because acquaintances do not know he is infected with H.I.V., says he believes he contracted the virus in the late 1980's from a dirty heroin needle. But his condition was not diagnosed for another six years, after he contracted a case of shingles so severe that he had to be carried up and down the stairs of his home.

''I had so much heroin and cocaine in my body that I couldn't feel anything, so I had no idea if I was sick or not,'' said Jay, 54, who says he has been off drugs for 11 years and now owns a small business in Chicago.

Once they do find out they have been infected with the virus, African-Americans receive life-sustaining treatment less often than whites, according to several research studies. Part of the problem is tied to an inability to pay: African-Americans with H.I.V./AIDS are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured than whites. According to the government AIDS Drug Assistance Program, antiviral drugs cost at least an average of $12,000 a year per patient.

In June, the Bush administration announced that it was moving $20 million into the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which helps obtain medications for those who cannot pay for them. But the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors and other organizations believe that 10 times that much money is needed to close the gap.

Even when insurance and income are the same, evidence is mounting that blacks receive lower-quality medical care than whites. A study two years ago by the Institute of Medicine, an independent research group, found that African-Americans were less likely to be given the most sophisticated treatments for H.I.V. than whites, even when money was not a factor.

Effects of Other Illnesses

For those who do get the care and medication that they need, other medical problems -- and the medications needed to treat them -- can get in the way of H.I.V. treatment. African-Americans have a shorter life expectancy than whites and higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, some forms of cancer, sexually transmitted infections, asthma and other illnesses.

''African-Americans have a higher incidence of common illnesses other than H.I.V., so the reality is that most of the people who I see with H.I.V. don't have H.I.V. as the only thing wrong with them,'' said Dr. Kimberly Y. Smith, an assistant professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and an attending physician at an outpatient H.I.V. clinic. ''We have more hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and at younger ages. This makes treatment more complex.''

Karen, a black woman who contracted H.I.V. from a former boyfriend, says she laughed when she first heard AIDS referred to as a manageable disease. Since the virus was diagnosed in her in 1992, she has battled numerous side effects of antiretroviral medication, including kidney stones, weight loss and severe nausea. She has also required surgery to remove her appendix, gall bladder and an ovarian cyst, and she takes medication to control endometriosis.

She says she is poor and struggles to pay for her medication. ''I am trying to stay positive with this disease and with these drugs, but I'm losing organs right and left,'' said Karen, 42, who is a single mother and lives in a city in the Northeast. She asked that her last name and city not be identified to protect the privacy of her son.

''Sometimes it's hard for me to stay on the medications, because I feel better when I'm off the drugs,'' she said. ''I've had stomach pain so bad that I couldn't get out of bed and I could eat only baby food. The pain of the kidney stones was like giving birth to triplets. I've got so many things wrong with me that I'm like a carnival ride. I know that the drugs are working, and I don't mean to sound ungrateful. But it is a struggle to stay on them because of how it affects your quality of life.''

Part of a Struggle

Those who treat AIDS patients and others who are infected with the virus are acutely aware of that struggle. Phill Wilson, director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles and a friend of Mr. Bostic and Mr. Cylar, said he was stricken by their deaths. Mr. Wilson was infected with H.I.V. in the mid-1980's. ''Black people are continuing to die of AIDS though you don't hear much about it,'' he said, ''and every time another one of us dies, it feels like you are one less person closer to being the one who is next.''

Dr. Valerie E. Stone, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who has treated H.I.V./AIDS patients for the past two decades, sees the toll among her patients. She says she is increasingly alarmed about the death rates among blacks.

''In 1994, I remember being burned out, because 27 of my 90 to 100 patients died in one year,'' said Dr. Stone, who is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. ''But then the new potent combination regimens came on the scene and everything changed. These medicines made such a difference that by 1997 we didn't have a single person die of H.I.V. in our program. There was tremendous hope for change.''

''However, it is now clear that management of this very complex disease is much more difficult than just taking pills, particularly for my African-American patients who often have very difficult life challenges,'' she said. ''So now when I go to these international AIDS meetings and hear that the problem is solved here, I get incredibly angry. This epidemic is out of control in the black community. There is no magic bullet.''

FRIDAY -- Black women infected with AIDS through sex with former inmates underscore the link between high rates of AIDS and imprisonment among African-Americans.

TODAY -- Almost twice as many blacks with AIDS die compared with whites.

Economy Hurts Government Aid for H.I.V. Drugs

Keysman — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 12:36:45 +0000

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The weak economy is crippling the government program that provides life-sustaining antiretroviral drugs to people with H.I.V. or AIDS who cannot afford them. Nearly 1,800 have been relegated to rapidly expanding waiting lists that less than three years ago had dwindled to zero.

Michael McElroy for The New York Times

As with other safety-net programs, ballooning demand caused by persistent unemployment and loss of health insurance is being met with reductions in government resources. Without reliable access to the medications, which cost patients in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program an average of $12,000 a year, people with H.I.V. are more likely to develop full-blown AIDS, transmit the virus and require expensive hospitalizations.

Eleven states have closed enrollment in the federal program, most recently Florida, which has the nation’s third-largest population of people with H.I.V. Three other states have narrowed eligibility, and two of them — Arkansas and Utah — have dropped scores of people from the program.
Last week, because of swelling numbers here in South Florida, the nationwide waiting list surged past record levels set in 2004, to 1,781 people, according to the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors. The growth is expected to continue when Georgia starts deferring enrollment in its drug assistance program on July 1. Illinois may soon follow, and New Jersey plans to cut eligibility on Aug. 1, removing 600 of the 7,700 people on its rolls.
Louisiana capped enrollment on June 1 but decided against keeping a waiting list. “It implies you’re actually waiting on something,” said DeAnn Gruber, the interim director of the state’s H.I.V./AIDS program. “We don’t want to give anyone false hope.”

Ten states’ programs have stopped covering drugs that do not directly combat H.I.V. or opportunistic infections. Unless money is found by Aug. 1, Florida plans to pare 53 of 101 medications from its formulary, including those for conditions that are often related to H.I.V., like diabetes, high blood pressure and anxiety.
In many states, there is a sense of reverting to the 1980s and early 1990s, before the development of protease inhibitors reversed the rise in AIDS deaths.
“The worry then was that there were no medications for AIDS,” said Dr. Wayne A. Duffus, medical director of the drug assistance program in South Carolina. “The worry now is that there are medicines, but you can’t afford them. A lot of patients are certainly old enough to remember what happens if you don’t get your medicines.”

For the moment, pharmaceutical companies have stepped into the breach, negotiating discounts for the state drug plans and accepting needy patients into programs that temporarily provide free medications. Although there is no data to prove it, state AIDS directors said a vast majority of people on waiting lists seemed to be getting medications one way or another.
But they concede that some patients may be going without, and that caseworkers are being diverted from critical tasks while navigating a thicket of cumbersome applications seeking drug companies’ help. “The drug companies are trying their best to lower prices,” said Carl Schmid, deputy executive director of the AIDS Institute, an advocacy group. “But we cannot rely on them to finance the health care of poor people living with H.I.V. and AIDS.”

Tim Sweeney, 49, a Fort Lauderdale man who has depended on the assistance program for a dozen years, said he was put on Florida’s waiting list because he was four days late to re-enroll, as is required every six months. Mr. Sweeney, who has AIDS, takes six H.I.V. pills twice a day, as well as three other medications. Their total retail cost: $4,500 a month. Unemployed for 18 months, Mr. Sweeney said he spent three days filling out forms to apply for aid from pharmaceutical companies. While awaiting responses, he is being supplied with drugs, one week at a time, by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a social service agency. The patchwork arrangement gives him little comfort. “My biggest fear,” said Mr. Sweeney, who credits the drugs with vastly improving his immune cell counts, “is that I’ve done all this hard work over 20 years and now I’m going to fall back.”

Scott Miller, 42, a northeast Florida truck driver who lost his health insurance in May along with his job, said he had never before sought assistance during five years with H.I.V. When his caseworker told him there was a waiting list, he asked what he was supposed to do.
“She just shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ ” Mr. Miller said. After several days without drugs, Mr. Miller qualified for a free three-month supply of his medication, Atripla, from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Hammering the Poor and Vulnerable

Dingo — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:58:38 +0000

There is a reason why, so many centuries ago, every major religion warned its adherents not to give too much power to the "merchant class." That reason is still here - the commercial drive knows few self-imposed boundaries, especially when it resides in large corporations.

A cruel manifestation of this singular drive for maximizing profit is how companies treat those who are most powerless, most vulnerable or most preoccupied.

Here are some illustrations that highlight the serious failures of law enforcement:

1. Pre-teen children. The direct marketing to children knows no limits of decency. Undermining parental authority with penetrating marketing schemes and temptations, companies deceptively excite youngsters to buy massive amounts of products that are bad for their safety, health and minds. Think junk food - loaded with fat, salt and sugar, that increases obesity, diabetes and predisposition for high blood pressure. (See http://www.cspinet.org.)

Obesity produces sickness, death, disability and large medical bills.

Marketers are selling ever more violent entertainment, and soft porn with delivery systems that escape parental review or supervision. Television is no longer the only route to children. Our fourteen year-old, then-startling book-Children First: A Parent's Guide to Corporate Predators-now reads as an understatement.

2. The poor. Whether white, African-American, Hispanic or Native American, merchants make the poor pay more. Loan sharks, shoddy merchandise, sub-standard food products and inadequate medical care have plagued the poor and been the subject of many studies and too few prosecutions.

3. People preoccupied by their bereavement are often preyed upon by the funeral industry. The Federal Trade Commission has an ample file on overcharges and deceptive practices from the unscrupulous merchants in that trade.

4. People with rare diseases often require so called "orphan drugs." Under a 1983 law, drug companies receive a seven year monopoly with no price restraints on these drugs. Drug companies are also given huge tax credits for research and development costs associated with orphan drugs.

The Wall Street Journal ("How Drugs for Rare Diseases Became Lifeline for Companies", Nov 15, 2005) called these drugs "lucrative niches." With no competition, these monopoly drugs come with staggering prices for desperate patients.

Here is one story of how your tax dollars are being used for hyperprofit corporate profits. Henry Blair was working on an experimental enzyme under government contract as a researcher at Tufts University Medical School. Working with scientists at the National Institutes of Health, they and he made the enzyme work as a treatment for Gaucher disease, which swells organs and deteriorates bones.

In 1981, Mr. Blair started the Genzyme company, got the government contract to make the enzyme which he brought to market in 1991. The average price was -get this - $200,000 a year per patient!

In 1992, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) (banished by Newt Gingrich in 1995) reported that Genzyme spent $29.4 million on the drug, with much of the initial research funded and done by government scientists at the National Institutes of Health.

Two years later, Genzyme found a much cheaper way of making the drug. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the Gaucher drug was still priced at $200,000 per patient each year. The company says it gives the drug at no cost to about 10% of the patients. For the rest, either rely on the insurance companies (good luck), or otherwise pay or die.

5. The Health Uninsured are charged by hospitals full price, which The Wall Street Journal reported "is far more than the prices typically paid by insurance companies." This is the case, the Journal added, in spite of an annual taxpayer subsidy of $22 billion to hospitals "to care for the uninsured."

6. Amputees who need prosthetic devices find that the devices in the United States are very highly priced (by comparison with other western countries.) Health insurance companies make these products leading candidates for rising co-payments. This can mean tens of thousands of dollars from the patients or they go without. These shocking co-payment requirements are often in the fine print.

Many of these devices also come about with taxpayer funded research and development. Profit margins are large because of the users' dire necessity to have them for mobility, for work, for human dignity.

7. Low credit score credit card holders. The relentless credit card economy requiring plastic to buy more and more things and services. The credit score becomes the hammer. A story recounted by MSNBC's Bob Sullivan in his engrossing new book Stop Getting Ripped Off describes: "the card promised an attractive 9.9% interest rate.

But there was a catch buried in the fine print: account setup fee: $29; program fee: $95; annual fee: $48; monthly servicing fee: $84 annually; additional card fee: $20 annually." Then this clincher sentence: "If you are assigned the minimum credit limit of $250, your initial available credit will be $71 ($51 if you select the additional-card option)."

No wonder the vendors call them "fee-harvesting" cards. Who needs loan-sharks? These credit card vendors fleece the poor wearing a three-piece suit and sitting in air conditioned skyscrapers.

Such is the fate of the poor or the vulnerable under the boot of commercial avarice.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

WEBSOURCE: commondreams.org/view/2010/07/02-2

It's a Republican Sabotage

Dingo — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:48:35 +0000

“It is very clear that the Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail. They see that things are beginning to turn around…. In cynical political terms, it doesn’t serve them in terms of their election interests if things are beginning to turn around,” says Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.)

She added that she’s “outraged about what has been happening,” and described the likely defeat today as “extremely serious.”

Of particular interest, Stabenow said Senate Republicans are “counting on the fact that no one knows what’s going on here.”

That’s clearly true — if the public realized the consequences of a successful GOP filibuster of this bill, I suspect there’d be quite a backlash.

But in some ways, that’s the pernicious beauty of the cynicism, at least as far as Republicans are concerned — they deny the Senate a chance to vote, the bill dies, the economy gets worse, and Democrats get blamed because they’re in the majority. Americans suffer, but for the GOP, that’s a small price to pay for a bump in the polls. Public confusion, coupled with inadequate media coverage, will mean rewards for those who were wrong, and punishment for those who were right.

Jonathan Chait defends the GOP’s motives:

"I think you have to be careful about making assumptions about motive like this. Establishing motive is always very hard to prove. What’s more, the notion of deliberate sabotage presumes a conscious awareness that doesn’t square with human psychology as I understand it. People are extraordinarily deft at making their principles — not just their stated principles, but their actual principles — comport with their interests. The old Upton Sinclair quote — “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it” — has a lot of wisdom to it…"

You can resist that kind of mental trap — it just takes a lot of intellectual discipline and integrity. I don’t think you’re going to find a great deal of that sort of intellectual discipline and integrity among high level politicians.

Well, then let me defend their behavior, sort of.

If you’re a right-wing Republican nutcase — which is to say, you are a Republican — then you think that Democratic policies are very, very bad for the country. If that is so, then what you fear is that the economy will improve, salvaging Democratic hopes for this November’s midterms. And that will lead to more Democratic policies than otherwise, which – in your view — will be very, very bad for the country.

So of course you want to “sabotage” any economic recovery over the next few months, because you believe that any temporary improvement will pale in comparison to the medium- and long-term damage that Democratic policies will cause. That’s a hard calculus, but it’s a pretty straightforward one, and perfectly reasonable if you accept Republican assumptions.

More than 1.3 million laid off workers won't get their unemployment benefits reinstated before Congress goes on a weeklong break for Independence Day. And hundreds of thousands more will lose their benefits in the coming weeks.

The House voted 270-153 Thursday to extend jobless benefits for people who have been laid off for long stretches, but the gesture was made futile by the Senate's inability to pass the bill. For the third time in as many weeks, Republicans in the Senate successfully filibustered a similar measure Wednesday night before senators adjourned for vacation.

A little more than 1.3 million people have already lost benefits since the last extension ran out at the end of May, according to the Labor Department. By the end of the week, the number will jump to 1.7 million. By the end of July, it would top 3 million.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama urges Republican Senate leaders to "end their obstruction of this critical aid."

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said "it is hard to understand how anybody can come to this floor and say, for 1.7 million people and their families, this is not an emergency."

The GOP doesn't care about the average citizen, they only care about their wealth and interests.

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Listen All Y'all, It's a Republican Sabotage

Tuesday morning on CNBC, the spazzy white guys in lower Manhattan were debating how the administration and Congress can best repair the economy, and mainly the jobless numbers. At one point, Rick Santelli, the hyperkinetic shoutcaster and instigator of the tea party movement, began to flail around, waving his arms above his head while yelling, "Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending!"

And contrary to accusations from one of the other spazzy white panelists, Santelli insisted he wasn't calling for more tax cuts. Just a freeze in government spending. Somehow.

Fine. Show us another time in American history when a spending freeze -- and a spending freeze alone -- jump-started an economic recovery following a deep recession and high unemployment. Show us. Where in the world is Santelli getting this?

It doesn't really matter from which hole Santelli's latest television meltdown was extricated. Suffice to say, there is no historical precedent for any such thing. In fact, the often-referenced spending cuts of 1937 caused the opposite effect: a backslide in the economic recovery during the Great Depression. Oh, sorry. There we go again -- referencing actual "history" instead of just screeching incongruous, contradictory and unsubstantiated nonsense, which seems to be the accepted style of discourse these days.

Santelli's rant is just another performance in a broader strategy by the Republicans and tea party movement to deliberately sabotage the economic recovery. Not unlike Santelli's "stop spending" idea, this is a strategy which also, to the best of my knowledge, has no historical precedent. For the first time ever -- and this is worth repeating -- one of the two major political parties in America is sabotaging a delicate economic recovery for the sake of humiliating the president and his party, and subsequently recapturing a political majority.

More than a year ago, Rush Limbaugh both predicted this and set the table for it to occur. They want the president to fail, and now it's clear that they're willing to take the economic recovery down in order to make it so. Is there any doubt who leads the Republican Party?

Most recently, the Republicans have been filibustering all efforts to create jobs and to offer a safety net for the millions of Americans who continue to seek employment. They successfully filibustered the jobs bill after they, along with their Conservadem enablers, whittled the thing down to nothing. And this week, House Republicans successfully blocked the extension of unemployment benefits due to a two-thirds majority rule (who said super-majorities were reserved for the Senate?).

So how does this sabotage play out?

It begins with the cynical exploitation of the angry, screeching Republican base. Unlike the Democrats during a Republican congressional majority, it's clear that Republican voters generally don't care whether their lawmakers actually attain any legislative accomplishments short of blocking the other guys. In other words, there's no political demand from the GOP base to actually pass anything resembling a conservative piece of legislation. Consequently, there's no need to barter or compromise with the Democrats.

All they have to do is to block, and they'll use any means necessary to do so, be it self-contradiction or utter ridiculousness. Speaking of which, we have Tom Coburn (R-OK) who insists he's a fiscal hawk beating the "stop spending" drum, voting against unemployment benefits and filibustering jobs bills, while, at the same, time voting to continue paying $35 billion in corporate welfare to Big Oil every year. Yesterday, Coburn and Mitch McConnell, blocked the Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans With Children Act. Why? "Stop spending!" of course.

So the president has no choice but to zigzag his agenda through this Senate with those arcane filibuster rules, and in an era when the Republicans are given a free pass from their dittoheads and tea party hooples to scrap the GOP legislative agenda in lieu of obstructing the economic recovery (among other things).

They're counting on independents and voters in both parties to not grasp the intricate realities of the Senate. The Republican-enabling Conservadem senators often stymie the Democratic majorities, and the complicated filibuster/cloture procedures grant lopsided power to the minority party. They're counting on the most simplistic and obvious reaction: the Democrats are the majority party so they should be able to do... something. And since they can't, maybe the Republicans can. That's precisely how the Republicans might end up winning.

But if anyone believes a Republican majority in Congress will suddenly make things better, they're absolutely mistaken in so many ways. At least now, Congress and the president are able to pass reforms that will actually help real people regardless of party or politics. These achievements are often compromised and watered-down (how can they not be with this Senate?), and we might not agree with the motives of every line item, but despite how it's being painted in various circles, there hasn't been an era of significant reform like this one in generations. Yet, if the Republicans manage to take the House or Senate or both, not only will Congress "stop spending," but literally nothing will get done. Nothing. Except for endless investigations of the administration by zealots like Darrell Issa.

That's precisely what they want.

To get to that stage, the next step in the sabotage has to be continued high unemployment with the added stink of unemployed Americans losing their benefits and health insurance (no COBRA subsidies). In the simplest terms, the economic ripple effect will radiate concentrically into a decline in consumer spending, increased foreclosures, a lag in the house market and so forth. And due to a lethal mixture of Republican cynicism, voter ignorance and traditional media hackery, the president will ultimately be blamed for the continued pain -- paving the way for Wingnut Republican President X and mission accomplished.

"Stop spending!" is bullshit. Yes, long term debt at this level is ultimately unsustainable but so is long term unemployment and economic misery -- what Paul Krugman is calling the "Third Depression." But the president and the Democrats are trapped inside a box made of Johnny-come-lately deficit-reduction hysterics. There's very little the president can do at this point to ameliorate the jobless numbers, and that's proof the sabotage is working. Spending on job creation is no longer a practical option, so those numbers will remain trapped in this dead zone of nine or ten percent. Somehow, the Republicans have been able to convince enough people that "Stop spending!" is a better idea than creating jobs and providing unemployment benefits to one out of every ten Americans. One out of ten!

The Republicans are willing to let one out of every ten of your friends go broke in the name of foiling the president and reclaiming control over the government (which they say they hate). Think about that. They have no plan for fixing unemployment. No matter how often the president acquiesces to Republican demands, they still vote against anything the president intends to sign into law. They're using the filibuster. They're exploiting ignorance. They're lying about deficits. They're contradicting their own positions, sometimes in the same day or even the same sentence. They're passing off gibberish as statesmanship. They're holding the American economy hostage in the most obvious political ratfuck since the Nixon years, only this time, the stakes are deadly serious. Your job. Your money. The future of the economy. They're sabotaging all of it.

But "stop spending" fits nicely on a t-shirt or on a misspelled protest sign. So that's something at least.

(With apologies to the Beastie Boys.)

By Bob Cesca
June 30, 2010
WEBSOURCE: huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/listen-all-yall-its-a-rep_b_631380.html

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Recognized Collegiate Groups cannot exclude people due to religion or sexual orientation

Keysman — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:08:49 +0000

Court: Christian group can't bar gays, get funding
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By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer – 46 mins ago
WASHINGTON – An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won't let gays join.
The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law.
The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle" as being inconsistent with that faith.
But Hastings said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.
The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group's First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college's decision.
"In requiring CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion for the court's liberals and moderate Anthony Kennedy. "CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings' policy."
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent for the court's conservatives, saying the opinion was "a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country."
"Our proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom of express 'the thought that we hate,'" Alito said. "Today's decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom of expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country's institutions of higher learning."

Abraham Lincoln, Meet Client # 9

Denn — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:31:28 +0000

Comment

by KATHA POLLITT

The Nation

Saving scrap metal. Buying war bonds. Gathering around the radio for a fireside chat after a simple but nutritious Mom cooked meal made from rationed ingredients. It really can't have been much fun to work in a munitions plant while worried to a frazzle about your son or sweetheart overseas, but the domestic front of World War II has entered our collective memory as a safe and happy place full of solidarity, adventure, a sense of purpose and an egalitarian spirit.

If you think about it, many of our favorite American stories have that poor-but-happy feeling: Walden, Little Women,the Little House books, the Waltons, even Hucklebery Finn. Real life is a bit something else again. World War II was just about the last time Americans accepted the challenge of sacrifice in pursuit of common goals.

As many have noted, Jimmy Carter was mocked and scorned as a cardigan wearing wimp when he gave a fireside chat of his own in 1977, declaring the energy crisis "the moral equivalent of war" and calling for a massive panoply of conservative measures. No wonder George W. Bush urged us to go shopping after 9/11 and in the wake of the BP oil disaster, President Obama has suggested vacationing in the gulf region.

Pundits have to summon us to tighten our belts-practically every week. Tom Friedman calls for raising the federal gas tax-but they don't have to get elected. I would gladly pay higher taxes to prevent layoffs of teachers, cops and firemen; to improve schools and universities, keep libraries open,expand public transportation, and put unemployed people to work repairing our tattered infrastructure, building public housing, maintaining our parks, staffing child care centers.

And what about that green technology Obama used to talk about-wind power,solar power, high-speed trains? There is no shortage of important work to that needs to be done, and the costs of not doing it are very high. Unfortunatly, the same leaders who fear asking us to sacrifice by paying higher taxes have no qualms about spending the money we already gave them-and borrowing more-to pay for wars, war toys, and prisons, while organizing the tax structure around the greed of corporations and the richest sliver of the population.

The lavishing of treasure to pay for our militarized, increasingly unequal society is the sacrifice most of us are already making. is it any wonder that people respond to calls for sacrifice with defensiveness and cynisism? Adding to that difficulty of selling the public on sacrifice is that the salesman is usually a very rich and successful person who will barely feel the pinch of those policies he (or she) proposes.

"Americans have become masters of 'sacrifice avoidance,'" intones Eliot Spitzer in his Slate column. This immensely wealthy man, who spent more than $100,000 on prostitutes and thereby cost New York its best shot in a generation at a functioning state government, tells me to read the Gettysburg Address and be inspired to "a greater sense of national purpose"?

Multimillionares who argue for raising taxes should start by proposing taxes on themseves that would actually lower their standard of living. Until then, they're not really sharing the sacrifice they want to impose on the rest of us.

June 2010

Study: Drugs Reduce Spread Of HIV

Denn — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:40:08 +0000

Treated Patients Less Likely To Infect Partners

By JULIE STEENHUYSEN

Reuters

In a study that supports the widespread use of drugs to help control the AIDS pandemic, researchers said this week that HIV patients who took the drugs were far less likely to infect their partners.

Using the drug cocktail reduced the likelihood of transmission by 92 percent, the researchers reported in the journal LANCET.

They said the findings mean the drug cocktails known as antiretroviral therapy, or ART, might be a useful prevention tool as well as a treatment. "These results are...the strongest evidence to date that ART might decrease HIV transmission risk." Said Dr. Connie Celum, professor of medicine and global health at the University of Washington, who worked on the study.

The team analyzed 3,400 couples from seven African countries. In each couple, only one partner was positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. The team tested couples because they were easier to keep track of.

All the couples were given counseling on HIV prevention methods, and some were offered HIV drugs. During the study, 349 HIV infected partners were started on HIV drugs. Of the 103 people who became infected during the study, only one caught the virus after the infected partner started taking the drugs.

"These observational data strongly support they hypothesis that ART substantially reduces HIV infectiousness and transmission risk," Dr. Deborah Donnell of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Colleagues wrote.

Donnell said the drugs cut the concentration of HIV on the blood to very low levels, which may make people less infectious.

In people who took the drugs, the virus was suppressed to very low levels in nearly 70 percent of cases. Donnell said the findings offer a strong argument for starting treatment for HIV earlier.

But even in couples starting treatment late in the disease, the drugs offered benefits.

May 2010

Obama Celebrates Gay Pride as HIV Cases Rise

Dingo — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:13:41 +0000

As President Obama held a White House “Gay Pride” reception on June 22, 2010, the homosexual rights movement was quietly acknowledging that decades of “safe sex” education have failed and that cases of HIV/AIDS and illegal drug use are on the rise among gay males. Gay members of Congress scheduled a June 24 briefing on Capitol Hill to examine “the rising incidence of HIV, STDs and Viral Hepatitis among gay men in the U.S.” Incredibly, these gay males are the same ones demanding the “right” to donate blood that could be contaminated with HIV and other deadly diseases.

In Canada, a ruling is expected soon in a court case involving a gay rights activist who lied about gay sex during 18 blood donations. He is claiming the prohibition on gay blood, similar to the one in effect in the U.S., is a violation of his rights. He was sued on the ground that the rights of recipients of blood and blood products take precedence.

Under political pressure from liberal Democrats such as Senators John Kerry and Al Franken, a U.S. federal blood safety committee held meetings (PDF) on June 10 and 11 to consider lifting the gay blood ban. It voted 9-6 in the face of intense pressure from the gay rights lobby to keep the ban. The vote, however, was a mere recommendation and can be overturned by Obama political appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration.

In a presentation to the blood safety committee, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) argued that blood screening procedures have “virtually” eliminated the risk of HIV transmission through the blood supply in the U.S. In fact, however, as recently as 2007, there were 4 cases of the AIDS causing HIV virus being transmitted to transplant recipients in the Chicago area. Five million people a year get blood transfusions in the U.S.

The GMHC, whose original purpose was taking care of people with HIV AIDS, has become perhaps the leading organizational member of the gay rights lobby demanding a “right” for gay males to donate to the nation’s blood supply. It had previously released a report (PDF), “A Drive for Change: Reforming U.S. Blood Donation Policies.”

The GMHC noted that campus blood drives are being cancelled by colleges and universities because of charges by left wing student and gay activists that the ban on gay blood is unfair. The implied threat is that this campaign could lead to shortages of blood for blood transfusions if the “right” of gay males to donate blood continues to be thwarted.

In its 2009 annual report, the organization acknowledges that “Gay men are still jeopardizing their lives and health with crystal methamphetamine addictions that lead to risk-taking behaviors and an increase in HIV infections.”

Taking on the gay lobby, however, several speakers at the federal blood safety meetings argued that the ban was necessary because of the threat of a “new HIV” or an emerging pathogen in the blood of gay males that could threaten the general population.

The failure by authorities to quickly ban gay blood when the HIV AIDS crisis was developing led to the deaths of thousands of recipients of blood transfusions in the U.S. and Canada.

In a development related to the Canadian blood case, which was mentioned during the U.S. blood safety meetings, a “human rights complaint” that was filed in 2007 by a group of Canadian homosexuals against the government of Canada insists that the ban on gay males donating blood is “discriminatory.”

At the same time, the complaint acknowledges that gays and lesbians are at higher risk for a number of deadly diseases and disorders that reduce the life spans of gay and bisexual men by 20 years compared to the average man in Canada. The complaint also contends that:

Gays and lesbians commit suicide at a rate from twice to 13.9 times more often than the general population.

Homosexual smoking rates are 1.3 to 3 times higher than the general population.
Alcoholism rates among homosexuals are 1.4 to 7 times higher than the general population.
Illegal drug use is 1.6 to 19 times higher among homosexuals than the general population.
Rates of depression are 1.8 to 3 times higher among homosexuals than the general population.

The Canadian gays insist that these problems are the result of “homophobia” and the “marginalization” of gays and lesbians. As a result, it says the government of Canada should spend another $8 billion on health care for homosexuals.

(The above article has been abridged)
WEBSOURCE:
http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/04-376/

Team America COINdinistas Afghanistan

Dingo — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:12:26 +0000

Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops. From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

"The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

Read the entire article free of charge by going directly to Rolling Stone Online – click on this link to go there!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=0

Obama's Real McChrystal Problem: Afghanistan Plan in Trouble
by Glenn Thrush

Gen. Stanley McChrystal's MacArthur Moment was more than an embarrassment for the White House - it was a reminder of just how badly Barack Obama's "good war" in Afghanistan is going. The challenge facing Obama in responding to his loose-lipped Afghan commander has an obvious parallel in Harry Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

But it may actually be more comparable to a more chronic presidential leadership crisis - Abraham Lincoln's dilemma during the Civil War, when he was forced to repeatedly reshuffle his general staff in the face of vacillating public opinion, insubordination and, above all else, uncertainty about how best to win a bloody war he couldn't afford to lose.

"Afghanistan is a mess, and it's getting worse. To make matters worse, the president's been dealing with internal squabbling on this for some time," says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, who has written extensively on Afghanistan.

"If there's a bright side to all this, it's that the president has an opportunity to reattach himself to a new policy, fire this guy and start with something new," Clemons added. "It's a tremendous opportunity to reset. But he can't do anything until he fires McChrystal."

The general has already apologized for comments attributed to him and his leadership team in a caustic Rolling Stone story, in which his aides reportedly portrayed his commander in chief as a disengaged dilettante - and blasted Obama's Afghanistan team as feckless. He's been summoned back to Washington to face an infuriated Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who could remove him from command, reprimand or demote him.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to say whether McChrystal would remain as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

"All options are on the table," Gibbs said.

Yet even if Obama sacks his Afghan commander, McChrystal's comments have laid bare a nasty internal battle among members on Obama's joint military civilian Afghanistan team splintered by personality conflicts and divided by approaches to ending the longest war in American history.

Underlying everything is a far bigger problem. Obama's strategy of shifting the military's focus - and 30,000 troops - from Iraq to Afghanistan hasn't yet yielded a major breakthrough. And it's not clear how many troops he will be able to pull out of the country by next July, his self-imposed deadline for commencing a withdrawal.

The disaster in the Gulf has obscured a steadily increasing drumbeat of bad news and ill omens on Afghanistan. After mixed results in the campaign to retake Marja, the Pentagon was forced to delay a critical summer offensive in Kandahar, the cradle of the Afghan Taliban insurgency.

Earlier this year, simmering tensions between the administration and Afghan President Hamid Karzai broke into the open with U.S. officials sharply criticizing Karzai on issues ranging from corruption and nepotism to the fitness of the country's fighting forces to electoral reform - set against the backdrop of a resurgent Taliban.

Then came Gen. David Petraeus's fainting spell as he testified about Afghanistan before a Senate committee earlier this month, which many on the Hill saw, fairly or not, as a bad omen. That lack of tangible success seems to be splitting official Washington, slowly but inexorably, into camps of hawks and doves, with Gates bearing the flag for those who favor a relatively open-ended large-scale commitment of troops in Afghanistan, with Vice President Joe Biden and others pushing for a far more scaled down approach. Obama is somewhere in the middle.

People close to Obama say the president recognizes the McChrystal situation isn't just about any one general but recalibrating policy after a delay of the summer offensive in Kandahar and harmonizing a fractious team of military and civilian advisers.

The president, they hope, will use the McChrystal imbroglio to iron out differences among an array of key players, including Gates, Biden, Petraeus and a pair of strong willed State Department advisers - AfPak troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

It won't be easy. Obama - whose appeal to the Democratic base is rooted in his opposition to the Iraq War - faces strong popular headwinds on the war, with poll after poll showing a majority of Americans supporting some kind of withdrawal.

Many in the military still view the Afghanistan war as winnable and argue that this biggest threat is defeatism back home.

In the Rolling Stone piece, freelance reporter Michael Hastings, illustrates the difficulty in selling a rapid drawdown to the Pentagon: "Facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fuckedd up things are in Afghanistan. ‘If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular,' a senior adviser to McChrystal says."

Such realism," Hastings adds, "doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. ‘There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here,' a senior military official in Kabul tells me."

Gates hasn't gone that far. But he has expressed optimism the U.S. has a chance of prevailing if commanders are allowed to finish the job - which includes winning the hearts and minds of civilians.

That seems to put him into conflict with Biden, an Afghanistan skeptic, who recently told Obama biographer Jonathan Alter to "bet on" on a significant percentage of U.S. troops departing the country when withdrawal begins in July 2011.

Last fall, when the White House was in the midst of reviewing its Afghan strategy, McChrystal said a counterterrorism strategy, Biden's approach to the war, would lead to "Chaos-istan," during a question and answer session at the Institute of International and Strategic Studies in London.

That comment led to a meeting with Obama on Air Force One, which was parked on a tarmac in Copenhagen where Obama had gone to promote Chicago's unsuccessful bid for the Olympics.

The White House pushed back against the anecdote, arguing that Biden had been rushing out the door when Alter quoted him - and Gates questioned Alter's veracity.

But administration sources say Biden's remarks were in keeping with his long-standing opinions - and McChrystal reportedly recognized Biden as an adversary.

One McChrystal aide's nickname for the vice-president: Joe "Bite Me."

Like everything else surrounding the war, opinions on how Obama should punish McChrystal are divided.

The president made a misstep by summoning McChrystal to the White House, says John Ullyot, a Republican strategist and former press secretary for the Senate Armed Services Committee. Obama's decision to summon the general to Washington has plucked the disciplinary decision out of the military chain of command and politicized it, Ullyot says, while giving the media an extra day to ruminate on dissension in the ranks.

"While it's easy to say yes you should fire him, you're in the middle of an operation here, and you've got to really worry about the kids on the ground," said Larry Korb, a defense expert with the Center for American Progress, who noted that McChrystal wasn't quoted directly in the piece disparaging Obama.

"If I were McChrystal, I would offer my resignation and then if the president takes it, you go gracefully, and it's a win-win," Korb said.

But a trio of Senate hawks often critical of Obama's foreign policy stances - John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) - suggested they would support McChrystal's removal.

"We have the highest respect for Gen. McChrystal and honor his brave service and sacrifice to our nation. Gen. McChrystal's comments, as reported in Rolling Stone, are inappropriate and inconsistent with the traditional relationship between commander in chief and the military," they wrote in a statement released Tuesday.

"The decision concerning Gen. McChrystal's future is a decision to be made by the president of the United States."

Websource:
commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/22-15

BP: Beyond Punishment

Denn — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:42:32 +0000

Capitolism

CHRISTOPHER HAYES

The Nation

"I think it's part of this blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe accidents happen."

-Rand Paul on Good Morning America

-Speaking about the BP oil spill-

Of all the crazy-ass things Rand Paul has said during his brief, disastrous turn in the national spotlight, this is the most insidious. A week after Paul's comment, David Brooks made the same point a touch more artfully, chalking up the disaster to "the bloody crossroads where complex techinical systems meet human technology," the inevitable result of "living in an imponderably complex technical society."

Society must have seemed "imponderably complex" to those living through the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, but luckily for us, activists of the day simply refused to say, "Shit happens" and move on.

Pace, Paul and Brooks, the public wants to see BP held accountable, and with good reason: early indications are that the company is guilty of a host of mortal sins-from ignoring repeated internal warnings about its safety proceedures to harassing workers who raised safety concerns. According to reports from the Guardian and NPR, after the fatal explosion BP sequestered the surviving workers at sea, refused to let them contact their loved ones, and bullied them into signing forms that indemnified BP for the accident.

After some initial foot-dragging, the Obama administration finally seems to understand that justice demands an aggressive stance. Attorney General Eric Holder annouced that the Justice Department is opening a criminal probe into the accident, which claimed the lives of eleven workers; then the White House came out in favor of a bill that would raise the $75 million liability cap on damages from the spill under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. And, of course, President Obama famously told Matt Lauer that he's trying to figure out "whose ass to kick."

That's all well and good. But despite the public outrage at BP and the thirst for justice from the battered residents of the Gulf Coast, there's a decent chance BP will, like Exxon before it, escape fairly unscathed. The reason is the legal and social shift in how we approach punishment for powerful corporations-a shift that contrasts sharply with the trends in punishment for citizens, particularly those without money or power.

First, lets look at corporate accountablity. Ideally, this is the kind of thing you'd want the government to pursue, but as has been dramactically demonstrated, the state's regulatory apparatus has, in many areas been gutted or co-opted. Which leaves it primarily to private parties to pursue accountablity through the courts. In tort law, damages are divided into two types: compensatory and punative. The former are designed compensate victims of negligence for their economic damages: lost income, property destruction, etc. Punitive damages are awarded above the compensatory costs as a means of, well, punishing the wrongdoer.

For a long time, conservatives and big corporations have hated punitive damages. The amounts are decided by juries, who have a tendency, when faced with stories of corporate malfeasance, to stick it to the bastards. In the 1980s conservative began a legal assault on punative damages, in "an effort coordinated very closely with the Chamber of Commerce." says Standford law professor Jeff Fisher. "The first few fits and starts didn't work, but they kept hammering away."

In the 1990s enemies of punitive damages found the perfect case when an Alabama doctor sued BMW for having sold him a repainted new car without disclosing the repainting to him; a jury awarded him $4,000 in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages. The Supreme Court found that punitive damages violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but it didn't specify the guidlines for the level of punitives damages that would run afoul of the constitution.

Which brings us to the catastrophic American oil spill: the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Five years after the spill, an Alaska jury found Exxon guilty of reckless disregard for allowing a drunken sailor to steer it's ship. Exxon paid $907 million in compensatory damages, and the jury assesed it $5 billion in punative damages.

After several round of appeals, the courts cut that award in half. In 2008 the Supreme Court invalidated the award, stating that in the Exxon case, no more than a 1:1 ratio between a compensatory damages and punative damages was allowable. As Senator Patrick Leahy pointed out at a recent Judiciary Committee hearing on liability caps, the descision profoundly altered the incentives faced by firms like BP. "It reduced the consequences of their misconduct to a discounted cost of doing business. That's almost like saying, 'We're giving you a green light to do whatever you want to do.' I can't imagine why anyone would be surprised that...oil companies cut corners and compromise safety." ( Leahy's collegue Sheldon Whitehouse has introduced a bill that would overturn the 1:1 cap for maritime law.)

Aside from the practical consequences of altering the incentive structure, the Exxon case and other stautory caps on liability present a deeper threat to the American moral fabric. Set against the increasingly punitive posture of the state towards its citizens over the past several decades, the arbitrary limits on punishment available to a party like Exxon make a mockery of equal justice under the law.

Our criminal justice system is the most punitive of any industrialized democracy. We have '2.3 million people incarcerated,' half of them for non-violent property and drug offenses. At least two dozen states have three strike laws, and in some cases citizens can face life imprisonment for minor nonviolent offenses. In 2003 the Supreme Court upheld a fifty-year sentence for a California man caught stealing videotapes.

And things are even harder for Americans unlucky enough to need succor from the state to survive, aka poor people. Just one drug-related felony conviction can get you booted from welfare, or from public housing, (though if you own a house, the IRS will still allow you your mortgage-interest deduction). Under federal law, a drug bust disqualifies a college student from all federal student aid. As a result, between 2001 and 2006 almost 200,000 students lost access to aid. The greatest Congressional champion of this unforgiven policy was Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who resigned after revelations of his affair with a staff member. In his farewell speech, he took solace in the possibility of forgiveness.

A punitive society is not the best kind of society: there's a real virtue in forgiveness, in second chances. But for years we've been applying Rand Paul's "accidents happen" principle to those at the top while heaping blame, scorn and draconian punishment on those at the bottom. Punitive damages are capped for corporations, while punitive policies proliferate for citizens. This tears the social contract apart, and the only way to repair it is to apply the same principles of accountablity up and down the social hierarchy. We should start with BP.

June 2010

AIDS Phobia Still an Epidemic of Fear

Dingo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:09:21 +0000

In a recent QA Kenny asks, “When you guys see a non HIV related doctor, have you ever come across a doctor that decidedly seems uncomfortable and almost scared to "doctor" on you?” There are two diseases that strike fear in most everyone; "cancer," and "AIDS."

And that fear is completely rational and understandable. But in the matter of AIDS, what happens if that fear takes control of your life? What if you fear the possibility of being infected with HIV so much you are unable to go on with your day to day life? When you fear the potential of infection or fear that you have already been infected even in the face of a handful of negative HIV tests, you may be suffering from a real condition called AIDS phobia. After 14 years of caring for people living with HIV and counseling those who think they have been infected, I've seen that AIDS phobia is real and have also seen how people can better manage their fears. (Editors Nite: These two articles were written with the past 12 month period 2009 – 2010.)

What Is AIDS Phobia?
Phobia is "an irrational or obsessive fear or anxiety, usually regarding something particular," according to Webster's Dictionary. AIDS phobia, then, is an irrational fear of HIV and AIDS. While it is understandable to be afraid of becoming infected, those with AIDS phobia have irrational fears. Fear takes control of your life, out of proportion from your actual risk, and makes it almost impossible to carry on day to day. It's a fear so strong and overwhelming that even a negative HIV test will not put the fear to rest. There are people so convinced they are infected that all the negative tests in the world won't ease their fear. Feeding their fear is the concept of acute HIV. Acute HIV is the period of seroconversion when symptoms and HIV infection are present but their test is negative; negative because the body has not had enough time to produce detectable HIV antibodies. People will explain their negative tests on acute HIV, even if the time for acute HIV has long passed.

There is another group of people who would do absolutely anything to avoid getting infected. HIV prevention is a good thing, but people with AIDS phobia take HIV prevention to another level.

HIV Prevention to the Extreme
There is another aspect of AIDS phobia that some refer to as a silent epidemic. Because of an overwhelming fear of being infected with HIV, some people take dramatic steps to avoid infection. You might think of a mailman who will not deliver mail to the local HIV; or a man who baths in the dark for fear of finding Kaposi's Sarcoma lesions; or a woman who refuses to donate blood. In these examples, people are so fearful of getting HIV infected they take irrational means to prevent being exposed.

What's the Trigger - Why Do People Develop AIDS Phobia?
The reason people develop phobias is not clearly understood. The fact that phobias are defined as irrational may say a little about their cause. However, there are theories as to the cause of phobias. Some experts feel it may be a matter of genetics; the tendency to develop a phobia may be part of your genetic make-up.

There's another theory that people may develop phobias as a result of the events and experiences of their lives. A fear of the water for example may result from knowing someone who drowned. Likewise, someone may develop AIDS phobia because they know others who have AIDS or are aware of what life with HIV is like.

Another factor that can precipitate AIDS phobia is guilt from an act the person perceives as wrong and which could have exposed him to HIV. Typically these are sexual encounters the person regrets: for instance, a married man who has sex with a prostitute, commits adultery, or has his first sexual encounter with another man. These circumstances carry the risk of HIV; add to that the guilt the person feels for the act and AIDS phobia may results. In these circumstances, people continue to obsess over the encounter even after several negative HIV tests. Despite the negative HIV tests, the person finds it hard to believe that he or she has not been HIV infected. In their mind, HIV infection is a natural result of the act they consider to be wrong. They feel HIV infection is their punishment for what they have done. Even if the HIV tests are initially negative, the person feels they will eventually be positive because after all they need to be "punished" for their wrong.

Finally, many people believe culture plays a role in the development of phobias. A person's beliefs, cultural surroundings, and religion can feed AIDS phobia. Certain cultures view people with AIDS with prejudice, discrimination, and ignorance. Those who share that perspective fear being lumped into that group mistreatment. Thus, people with AIDS phobias may fear being treated the way they see HIV positive people being treated.

Fighting AIDS Phobia
As irrational and consuming AIDS phobia can be, it can be avoided if you understand the cause of phobias in general and you understand HIV and how it is spread from person to person. Knowing these things helps you avoid the paralyzing fear of AIDS phobia.

Understand the ways HIV spreads from person to person; specifically having contact with infected blood, semen, or vaginal fluids as well as ingesting breast milk of an infected woman.

Remember that casual contact such as kissing and hugging and sharing utensils, glassware, or towels are not ways to get infected with HIV.

Realize that you can protect yourself from HIV by using condoms during every anal, oral, or vaginal sexual encounter.

Understand that today's HIV tests are very accurate and can be depended upon to give you reliable results you can count on.

Despite the attention devoted to AIDS, a related epidemic has gone unnoticed, variously termed by doctors as AIDS phobia, AIDS panic, pseudo AIDS, AIDS stress, AIDS hysteria or AIDS anxiety. It consists of unfounded fears of having contracted AIDS, incorrect beliefs as to how HIV is transmitted, producing bizarre attempts to avoid the illness. American Psychiatrists have even suggested the acronym FRAIDS or fear of AIDS.

Some recent examples in Britain include: a man who regularly immersed his penis and feet in undiluted bleach after entering public toilets; a young girl who gave up her piano lessons because she was convinced there was infected blood on the key board since her tutor's wife worked in the blood transfusion service, the AIDS phobic's lips were raw from continually being wiped, in case she had got someone else's spit on them; a woman who bathed only in darkness to avoid finding AIDS lesions on her skin; a man who operated all household gadgets with a sterile wooden stick to avoid catching AIDS from any surfaces; yet another man stopped eating and drinking altogether for fear of ingesting the HIV virus.

Meanwhile in the USA a New York postman refused to deliver mail to an AIDS public health office as he feared catching the disease from their letters; hairdressers have refused to cut the hair of AIDS victims and clergy asked AIDS sufferers to stay away from church for fear of infecting the congregation.

Since all these people are physically completely healthy they are the 'worried well'. Research among university students found 24% thought AIDS could be picked up from toilet seats, 14% were convinced it could be caught from trying clothes on in a store, while 10% believed money touched by AIDS victims was contagious.

The term pseudo AIDS is used because these worries produce anxiety and depression, which are associated with physical responses similar to AIDS symptoms, like weight loss, night sweats, malaise, lethargy, loss of appetite and headaches! These features reinforce the erroneous belief of AIDS infection.

It could even be argued that stringent guidelines set out by the Department of Health last week (2010), where health authorities must now inform patients who received treatment from HIV infected medical staff, is just such an example of AIDS phobia.

8000 people directly linked with the three recent cases of doctors suffering from HIV infection have been tested - but none of them has yet been found to be infected with the virus. National AIDS phobia may explain the vast sums we spend on AIDS to the neglect of other serious medical problems. Emeritus Professor of Public Health at Glasgow University, Gordon Stewart, complained recently in the press that the 700 million the UK has spent during the past decade on AIDS research, was ten times that spent on cancer. In 1988, AIDS hysteria produced dire predictions of the future - Government committees forecast that by now there would be up to 40,000 AIDS sufferers, instead the total is actually 7,000 cases in Britain to date.

However, to be diagnosed genuinely AIDS phobic, the required symptom is irrational avoidance of AIDS - yet this seems an implicit paradox - can it ever be illogical to go to extremes to elude deadly diseases?

AIDS fear produces hyper-vigilance - a characteristic response to any fearful situation. This leads to a 'better safe than sorry' - 'you can't be too careful' approach which has served our species well historically, otherwise we would not have survived to write articles complaining about AIDS phobias. In fact fear is a vital evolutionary legacy that leads to threat avoidance; without fear, few would survive long under natural conditions.

However there is an optimal amount of fear - too little produces carelessness, too much and we are so paralyzed that performance deteriorates. Hence the dilemma for public health programs and concerned AIDS doctors, who are partly responsible for generating AIDS hysteria; will AIDS phobia save us, or cause more distress than AIDS itself? As a nation will we divert so much resource to AIDS because of AIDS fear, that other more prevalent diseases will be left unfettered to kill many others?

This is not a new predicament, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) favorite poet of Queen Elizabeth I, 'Fear is more pain than the pain it fears'.

While professionals' views are based on actual or expected mortality figures, research has shown the public's assessment of risk is determined more by feelings of dread for the unknown and the unobservable, particularly events which they are exposed to involuntarily. For example skiers will accept risks involved in sport roughly 1000 times as great as they would tolerate from involuntary hazards such as food preservatives.

Today we are likely to feel the world is a riskier place than ever before, although this runs against the views of professional risk assessors. This produces the paradoxical situation where in the West the wealthiest, best protected and most educated civilization, is on its way to being the most frightened.

Yet in fact it may be precisely our anxieties and fears which have reduced our risks. Research has suggested that AIDS fear is heightened among less promiscuous homosexuals who are actually at smaller risk. It may be that it is precisely their greater fear which results in less promiscuity, so reducing their risk.

AIDS phobia has undoubtedly contributed to the remarkable changes in Gay risk behaviours over the last few years, the most dramatic voluntary changes in health-related behaviours in history. As a direct result of these AIDS prevention strategies, other diseases transmitted in the same way, like syphilis and gonorrhea, have declined dramatically in incidence since 1985.

Contrast this situation with cigarette smoking, which has been the most preventable cause of death and disease in the UK for some time, yet has actually increased among women over the last few decades.

But generating FRAIDS does not just simply save lives - extreme fears of death, can also kill. The billionaire, Howard Hughes developed an obsessional disorder and illness phobia leading him to become a recluse, refusing to see doctors. When he became seriously physically ill, a doctor could only be brought to him when he was unconscious and on the point of death. By then it was too late, yet elementary medical attention much earlier could have saved him. It was his fear of death which killed him.

WEBSOURCES:
Fritscher, L.; "What Causes Phobias?"; About.com: Phobias; 18 Jul 2008; Retrieved from phobias.about.com/od/causesanddevelopment/f/phobiacauses.htm
Persaud, R.; "AIDS Phobia: An Epidemic of Fear"; Healthy Place; 7 Dec 2008.
healthyplace.com/sex/diseases/aids-phobia/menu-id-66/

Whacking The Old Folks

Denn — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:20:14 +0000

COMMENT

By WILLIAM GREIDER

The Nation

In setting up his National Commission on fiscal responsibitlity and reform, President Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.

Obama's commission is the vehicle created to achieve this deal. He ducks questions about his preferences, saying only that "everything will be on the table" But the White House lieutenants are privatly talking up a bargain along those lines. They are telling anxious liberals to trust the president to make any moderate cuts. Better to have the Democrats cut Social Security, Obama advisers say, than leave the task to bloodthirsty Republicans.

The president has stacked the deck to encourage this straegy. The eighteen-member commision is top-heavy with fiscal conservatives and hostile right wingers who yearn to dismantle the retirement program. The Republican co-chair, former Senator Alan Simpson is especially nasty, he likes to get laughs by including wheezy old folks. Democratic co-chair Erskine Bowles and staff director Bruce Reed secretly negotialed a partial privitization of Social Security with Newt Gingrich back when they served in the Clinton White House, but the deal blew up with Clinton's sex scandal. Monica Lewinsky saved the system.

Any recommendations require fourteen votes, and Obama has at least five loyalists who will protect him-Senators Dick Durbin and Max Baucus, Representatives Jim Schakowsky and Xavier Becerra, and former SEIU president Andy Stern. On the other hand, if Obama really wants to make a deal these commisioners will very likely support him.

The people, once again are kept in the dark. The Obama commission will not report its recommendations until after this fall's elections-too late for the voters to express objections. Both parties assume they can evade blame by holding hands and jumping together. What's extrodinary about this assault on Social Security is that a Democratic president is leading it. Obama is arm and arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pere Peterson, who for decdes has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some twelve million among economists, think tanks, foundations and assorted front groups to sell his case.

If Obama pulls the deal off, this will be his version of "Nixon goes to China"-a leader proving his manhood by going against his party's convictions. Even if he fails, the president will get some protective cover on the deficit issue. After all. he is targeting Big Governement's most beloved and trusted program-the New Deal's most prominent pillar.

Obama's iniative rests on two falsehoods spread by Peterson's propaganda-the notion that Social Security somehow contributes to the swollen federal decifits and that cutting benefits will address the problem. obama and his advisers do not say this in so many words, but their rhetoric implies that Social Security is a big source of the deficit problem.

Major media proves the same falsehoods. Here is what the media don't tell you: Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus-2.5 trillion now, rising to 4.3 trillion by 2023. This vast wealth was collected over many years from workers under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act [FICA] to pay in advance for baby boom retirements-unless Congress double crosses workers by changing the rules. This nest egg does not belong to the governments, it blongs to the people who paid for it. FICA is not a tax but involuntary savings.

As a candidate, Obama assured voters that any shortfall was in the distnt future and could be easily resolved with minor adjustments. As president, he has abandoned this accurate analysis and turned rightward without explaining why. He faces an awkward problem, however. Despite conservative propaganda, cutting Social Security will have no impact on the deficit problem that stirs public anxiety. The White House knows this, and some advisors admit as much. So why is the president targeting Social Security?

Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve chair and advisor to the president declares, "In my view, we can deal with the Social Security problem fairly promptly." Cutting benefits, Volcker adds, "is going to deal with the deficit problem in the short run, but it's confidence building". John Podesta of the center for American Progress, another advisor, agrees but says, "Reforms could starkly demostrate to skeptical dept markets that the United States is willing to take on a politically difficult fiscal issue".

In other words, targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reasure foreign creditors, and avoid confronting the true source of US indeptness. The politicians might instead address the cost of fighting two wars on borrowed money, or the tax cuts for the rich and corporations or the deregulation that led to the recent financial catastrophe and destroyed vast wealth. But those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests. Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, lets whack the old folks while they're not watching.

This issue is a seminal fight with the potential to scramble party politics. If Democrats can no longer be trusted to defend Social Security, who can be? The people from the left to right overwhelmingly support the program ( 88 percent), and a majority( 66 percent) believe benefits should be increased now to cope with the loss of jobs and savings in the Great Recession.

Citizens can win this fight if they mobilize smartly. We can do this by arousing public alarm right now, while members of Congress face a treacherous election before Obama can work out his deal. Some liberal groups are discussing a "take the pledge" campaign that demands senators and representatives sign a commitment to Keep Hands Off Social Security Benefits. If politicians refuse to sign, put them on the target list for November. Barack Obama is standing on the third rail of politics-let's give him a warning jolt.

June 7 2010

Ragheads Rednecks Peculiar Politics

Dingo — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:26:49 +0000

Prior to the 1960's, the state Democratic Party was firmly in control of the government of South Carolina at all levels. The state Republican Party was little more than a country club group organized to reap the benefits when a Republican was in the White House. Most voters in South Carolina were Yellow dog Democrats, but Governor Strom Thurmond's run for President as a States' Rights Democrat in 1948 opened up the possibility of voting for a party other than the national Democratic Party. The Republican Party did not gain relevancy in the state until Strom Thurmond, as a United States Senator, switched parties in 1964 from Democrat to Republican. From 1964 to present, the Republican Party has gradually gained strength and by the 1990's it became the dominant party of the state.

The Wonderful World of South Carolina Politics

South Carolina has had a reputation for bare-knuckle politics for decades, but since Gov. Mark Sanford confessed to an affair with a woman from Argentina last summer, it's been on a roll. The primary season has brought out some of the best the Palmetto State has to offer. Here is a retrospective of South Carolina politics from Sanford to now.

Appalachia . . . Argentina . . . Whatever!
It took a lot to top the Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards sex scandals. But Gov. Mark Sanford hit the top of the charts last June when he confessed to carrying on a torrid love affair with an Argentine mistress. Adding to the drama and anticipation were the explanations his staff had given for his mysterious absence during the week before his confession -- aides said he could not be contacted because he was hiking along the Appalachian Trail. But when a reporter caught him returning to the States from South America, he came clean and the bigger picture unfolded. It wasn't your average politician's fling. Sanford's public confession revealed a deep passion behind the relationship -- and in turn fueled the political fallout. The subsequent year was filled with probes and calls for his resignation, but Sanford, who weathered a divorce from wife Jenny during that period, stayed in office.

Don't Feed the Constituents
Note to the lieutenant governor -- no matter how much you dislike a policy, comparing your constituents to "stray animals" to make a point will backfire every time. Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer learned this in January after he compared welfare recipients to hyper breeding street animals that should not be fed. The comment came during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn, S.C. "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply…” "They will reproduce," Bauer said, "especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better." The remarks set off a firestorm in the Palmetto State. Bauer later said he regretted the remark though he stood by the premise that welfare breeds dependency.

Two Timing ... Two Times?
Ironically, or fittingly, the Republican primary race for Sanford's seat was marred by allegations of affairs in the final stretch.
State Rep. Nikki Haley, after coming from behind in the polls, was hit in May by the searing claim of a blogger and former communications consultant that he had a relationship with the front-runner. She denied it. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had endorsed her, also tore into blogger Will Folks for making the claim at such a volatile moment in the campaign.The out-of-the-woodwork allegations didn't stop there. Shortly afterward a consultant who had been working for Haley opponent Andre Bauer claimed he had a one-night stand too. Again, Haley denied it. But Bauer kept the scandal alive by challenging Haley to take a lie detector test and then proceeding to take one himself -- he released the results the day before the election and claimed they proved that he had nothing to do with his consultant coming forward. On Election Day, Haley won the most votes but was forced into a runoff with Rep. Gresham Barrett. The saga continues.

The 'Raghead' Riff
As a sideshow to the already unhinged gubernatorial race, state Sen. Jake Knotts got himself in a bind for calling state Rep. Nikki Haley a "raghead" in an interview with a local news show a week before the election.
"We've got a raghead in Washington, we don't need a raghead in the Statehouse," he said. It was during an interview with a casual-themed program called Pub Politics. Haley, whose parents are from India, had a Sikh upbringing but says she is Methodist. Knotts apologized, but a local Republican Party committee later called for him to resign. Knotts said they won't get their wish.

Mystery Victory
While the political gurus were eyeing the Republican gubernatorial race in South Carolina, somebody probably should have been watching the Democrats in the U.S. Senate primary.
Somehow, the candidate nobody expected to win ... won. Alvin Greene, an unemployed Army veteran, pulled out a victory over former state legislator Vic Rawl who, unlike Greene, had actually raised money and campaigned for the seat. What happened? That was the question state Democrats were asking themselves as they tried, to no avail, to convince Greene to step aside for the November race against Republican Sen. Jim DeMint. Greene's interviews after the election suggested he had a limited grasp of the policy matters a U.S. senator would be expected to handle. His past felony charge for allegedly showing porn to a college student didn't help his case either. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., claimed Greene was a "plant." Greene wants to put all that aside. "We have to be pro South Carolina -- not anti-Greene," he said. Slap that on a campaign sign.

Ragheads, Rednecks and Greene Machines; Peculiar Politics in South Carolina

Written by Tom Turnipseed

Peculiar politics in South Carolina is a never ending saga. On June 15, South Carolina Republican State Senator Jake Knotts of Lexington told the South Carolina Senate he is proud to be a redneck and would not resign from the Senate for having called Nikki Haley and President Obama ragheads. Haley is a former Sikh of Indian ancestry and front-runner for the Republican nomination for Governor in the June 22nd run-off.

On June 17, Democrat Alvin Greene's stunning landslide victory in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate seat held by Jim De Mint was upheld by the SC's Democratic Executive Committee's 38.5 to 7.5 vote after hearing a protest by his opponent Vic Rawl. Rawl's witnesses argued that voting machines malfunctioned to provide a landslide victory for Greene. Greene, a Forrest Gump figure, is an unknown, unemployed, African-American veteran, who also faces a felony obscenity charge. In a brief phone interview Greene said. "They did the right thing," "I am the best candidate for the United States Senate in the state of South Carolina." Rawl is a former judge, and legislator whose 59 to 41% loss shocked the political establishment. Rawl said he didn't have enough time to prepare his case before the hearing.

Jake Knotts said the Lexington Republicans who asked him to resign for his raghead comments were hypocrites because he had been called a redneck and no one came to his defense. He said he is a true redneck if that means a farmer who works from dawn to dusk and whose neck is red from the sun. When Knotts said, "If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the party is going to have one hell of a void," he was telling it like it is.

In 1968, the party of Lincoln devised a Republican Southern strategy to co-opt George Wallace's appeal to white bigotry which has been the building block for Republicanism in the South ever since. I was a Wallace staffer from 1967-71 and became Executive Director of the Wallace Presidential campaign. I witnessed Wallace's clever appeal to the prejudices of working class white folks.

In 1970, Wallace spoke to a crowd of textile workers in Alabama railing against the "Northern, liberal media who want the Federal Government to control every phase and aspect of our daily lives."

"I mean, the long-haired, pointy-headed, pseudo-intellectuals writers at the New York Times, who don't have enough sense to park their bicycles straight. They look down their noses at us and call us pea pickers and pecker-woods, lint-heads and red-necks. If they call us red-necks because our necks might be red from an honest day's toil in the Summer sun, then call us rednecks because there's two things about them; they wouldn't do an honest day's work in the summer sun and their hair's so long their necks wouldn't get red anyway."

"When Fidel Castro was launching his offensive in the hills of Cuba, the New York Times called him the Robin Hood of the Caribbean and we all know he is a Communist."

"But if you had asked any cab driver in the streets of New York City or Montgomery, Alabama what they thought about Castro when the New York Times was singing his praises, the cab driver would have told you that he was a Communist. The cab drivers know this by instinct. They are everyday people like us who have fierce contact with life."

We had fierce contact with some contentiously contested election protests when I served on the Democratic Executive Committee of South Carolina in the 1980s and ‘90s, but never one as interesting as when Vic Rawl made his case for a new primary election for the Senate race. Rawl's attorney argued that they did not have to prove corruption, but only that because the machines were unreliable, the outcome was not correct.

Rawl's protest focused on the voting machines that leave no paper trail to substantiate their reliability. The Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines use software whose reliability was criticized in the 2008 Presidential election race in Ohio. Dr. Duncan Buell, a mathematician and computer science professor from the University of South Carolina testified that" "We should treat these machines with an enormous amount of skepticism."

Rawl's protest claimed that: the machines are susceptible to accidental or intentional modification, alteration or tampering; numerous voters experienced difficulty in trying to cast votes for Rawl; that the results cannot be verified; and that inherent unreliability of the machines constitutes evidence that the election is invalid.

Big money controls politics. The US Supreme Court has just ruled in the Citizens United case that money counts as free speech. Money talks in America. If the votes were accurately counted, and the candidate who spent no money on media ads, signs, or a web site won, it would be a good thing for our democracy.

When South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860, James L. Petigru, a former South Carolina legislator and Attorney General said, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." Considering our ragheads, rednecks and the Greene machines, Petigru's description still applies.

Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and peace activist in Columbia, SC.

Websources: CommonDreams.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_South_Carolina

Leather Origins and Hanky Codes

MachoMan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:46:41 +0000

The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities and eroticism (‘kink‘). Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Leather culture is most visible in gay communities and most often associated with gay men (‘leathermen’), but it is also reflected in various ways in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and straight worlds. Many people associate leather culture with BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sado/Masochism, also called ‘SM’ or ‘S&M’) practices and its many subcultures. But for others, wearing black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.

Popular and Social Origins

Gay male leather culture has existed since the late 1940s, when it likely grew out of post-WWII biker culture. Early gay leather bars were subcultural versions of the motorcycle club. Pioneering gay motorcycle clubs included Satyr, established in Los Angeles in 1954; Oedipus, also established in Los Angeles, and the New York Motorbike Club. Early San Francisco clubs included the Warlocks and the California Motor Club.

These clubs, like the motorcycle culture in general, reflected a disaffection with the mainstream culture of post-World War II America, a disaffection whose notoriety---and therefore appeal---expanded after the sensationalized news coverage of the Hollister ‘riot’ of 1947. The 1953 film The Wild One starring Marlon Brando wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a leather jacket, and muir cap, played on pop-cultural fascination with the Hollister ‘riot’ and promoted an image of masculine independence that resonated with some gay men in a culture which stereotyped gay men as effeminate. To that end, gay motorcycle culture also reflected some men's disaffection with the coexistent gay cultures more organized around passing, high culture, popular culture (especially musical theater), and/or camp. Perhaps as a result, the leather community that emerged from the motorcycle clubs also became the practical and symbolic location for gay men's open exploration of kink and S&M.

Representations

The more specifically homoerotic aesthetics of men's leather culture drew on other sources as well, including military and police uniforms. This influence is particular evident in the graphical illustrations of leathermen found in the work of Tom of Finland. The pornographic films of one of his models Peter Berlin, such as his 1973 film Nights in Black Leather, also reflected and promoted the leather subcultural aesthetic.

Styles of dress associated with gay men's leather culture also had influence on mainstream pop culture. It may be seen in the chains and leather or denim and leather look espoused by heavy metal bands. The first practitioner of this look in a heavy metal context was Rob Halford, the lead singer of the influential NWOBHM band Judas Priest. Halford wore a leather costume on stage as early as 1978, a look he described as originating in the gay leather subculture.[1] The subsequent influence of his costume may be seen in many metal bands, particularly in the widespread and creative appropriation of the codpiece in metal rockers' costumes.

Aspects of leather culture beyond the sartorial can also be see in the 1970 murder mystery novel ‘Cruising‘ by Jay Green. The novel was the basis for the 1980 movie ‘Cruising,’ which depicted aspects of the men's leather subculture for a wider audience.

And lastly, perhaps no figure has more vividly represented the leather subculture in the popular imagination than the leatherman portrayed by Glenn Hughes of the Village People.

Association with BDSM
In recent decades the leather community has been considered a subset of BDSM culture rather than a descendant of gay culture. Even so, the most visibly organized SM community has been a subculture of the gay community, as evidenced by the International Mr. Leather organization. Meanwhile, other subcultures have likewise appropriated various leather fashions and practices.

Gay and Lesbian
The Leatherman's Handbook by Larry Townsend, published in 1972, epitomizes the association of the leather subculture with BDSM. This book also encoded what is retrospectively described as Old Guard leather culture. This code emphasized strict formality and fixed roles (i.e. no switching). Other Old Guard practices emphasize discipline, honor, brotherhood, and respect, and are said to promote a stricter lifestyle, education, and intra-community privilege based on successive ranks or levels.

New Guard, or new leather (which describes an era in leather culture that started roughly around the early 1990's), embraced switching and a greater variety of approaches to eroticism. An increasing number of pansexual clubs evolved as well.

Goth
Leather subcultural practices have also become a common, though perhaps not widespread, element of the goth subculture.

Modern Paganism
Leather culture also infiltrates modern paganism, particularly in the organized neopagan religions, where the Occult importance of the ‘color’ black and sexual self-knowledge again combine, such as in Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, where the ritual practice of BDSM is public knowledge.

Demographics
Relatively few lesbian women or heterosexuals were visible during the early emergence of the leather subculture. Pat Califia, who was a lesbian activist in the San Francisco leather subculture, is credited for defining the emergence of lesbian leather subculture. In 1978, Califia co-founded one of the first lesbian S/M groups, Samois. S/he went on to be a prolific contributor to lesbian BDSM literary erotica and sex guides.

In North America, with the possible exception of Quebec, gay men's leather culture continues to be associated with men above the age of 40. In Europe younger men have combined the aesthetic and exploration of sexual power with the gay skinhead movement and social-fraternal organizations like BLUF.

Today, while some may still use the term strictly in the old fashioned sense (i.e., Old Guard), more than ever the leather subculture in the 21st century represents the activities of several major sub-communities. These include BDSM practitioners, whether high or low protocol, and whether gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, or pansexual. They also include people who have a preference for aggressive or masculine sexual styles; people who love motorcycles; people involved in kink or leather fetishism; and people who participate in large-scale cultural and marketing events such as Folsom Street Fair or leather-themed circuit parties.

Handkerchief Code

The handkerchief code, also known as the hanky code, bandana code, or flagging, is a way of indicating, usually among gay male casual sex seekers or BDSM practitioners in the leather subculture in the United States, Canada and Europe, whether they are a top or bottom, and what kind of sex they are seeking, by wearing cotton color-coded handkerchiefs (bandanas), usually in the back pocket. This code was widely used in the 1970s, but is much less used today. (The terms bandana code, hanky code, or flagging are much more widely used among those in the leather subculture than the term handkerchief code.) It should be noted that this code has come into more general usage today. Therefore, while flagging a particular fetish/color is accepted as a valid indication of a fetishist's interests, it is not necessarily an indication that the wearer is a member of the leather subculture.

Origin
The wearing of various colored bandanas around the neck was common in the mid- and late-nineteenth century among cowboys, steam railroad engineers, and miners in the Western United States. It is thought that the wearing of bandanas by gay men originated in San Francisco after the Gold Rush, when, because of a shortage of women, men dancing with each other in square dances developed a code where the man wearing the blue bandana took the male part in the square dance, and the man wearing the red bandana took the female part (these bandanas were usually worn around the arm or hanging from the belt or in the back pocket of one's jeans).

The modern-day version of this bandana code actually dates from the '70s when the New York City newspaper, the Village Voice, published an article suggesting that it would be easier for gay men in the Village to pick each other up if they didn't only have to rely on wearing their keys in their back pockets, left to denote active, right passive. The story suggested that they should all get down to the surplus store at the intersection of Christopher and Washington Streets where they could buy color-coded Levi's bandanas.

Although it was originally said in a sarcastic manner, the gay community took the recommendation to heart, not only in New York, but eventually across the globe. Although the code isn't as strong as it once was, it still exists in some circles.

How the bandanas are worn
The bandanas are worn on the left side of the body for tops and the right for bottoms. Today, they are almost exclusively worn (or ‘flagged’) in the rear jeans pocket, just as tops wear their keys on the left belt loop and bottoms on the right. In the 1970s it was very common for men to wear their hanky tied around their neck (with the knot positioned on either the left or right side), or around the ankle, especially when wearing boots, or, when undressed. The bandanas have been worn hanging from the left or right side of one's belt. A go-go dancer at a gay club may wear the bandanas around the right or left side of his g-string to indicate what kind of sex he is interested in if he meets someone after his performance.

There is no universally understood color code, and there have been some regional variations. There is general agreement upon the colours for more common practices, particularly those with an indexical relation between the color and the practice (eg: yellow for watersports, brown for scat, black for SM, orange for very advanced, very kinky, green for sex for money), but there is no absolute consensus for the more uncommon practices (those appearing toward the bottom of the list, or unlisted). The colours shown below represent a more or less common consensus.

Color Meaning Practice
Orange
Few limits Wearers of orange bandannas are among the most experienced of leathermen or fetishists. Their fetishes are so numerous, the wearing of numerous bandannas would be impractical, and unwieldy. Instead, these men flag orange. When worn on the left, orange indicates that the wearer will top in relatively any fetish, anytime, anywhere. Conversely, when worn on the right, it indicates the wearer will bottom in relatively any fetish, anytime, anywhere. In a 2006 article on InternationalLeatherman.com, site owner Tom Ferrari, a well-known and predominant leatherman of today who self-identifies as a highly experienced bottom, states that he, himself, flags orange. In the article, he relates that the Internet is awash in the misconception that orange flagged on the right indicates, ‘nothing right now’ or ‘just cruising’. He states that he traced much of this by direct contact with site owners who admitted cutting and pasting their pages of hanky codes from other websites. This was supported by typographical errors, and by underlying source for web pages. Mr. Ferrari cites, ‘Going back to the oldest records, and to our eldest members of the gay leather/BDSM community, we find that any color worn on the left indicates a preference for topping, and any color worn on the right indicates a preference for bottoming. The color indicates the fetish of interest.’ Mr. Ferrari also cites, ‘An excellent reference, and one of the oldest sources of this information is, The Leatherman's Handbook, by Larry Townsend’. Mr. Ferrari is an occasional presenter at leather/BDSM/fetishist workshops and conferences.

Black
Heavy S&M
Indicates the wearer's interest in heavy sadism and masochism. This may involve whips, or other painful fetishes such as cock and ball torture. A top (sadist) wears black on the left, whereas a bottom (masochist) wears it on the right.

Grey
Bondage
Involves rope, straitjackets, handcuffs, duct tape, cling wrap (for mummification), sleep sacks, vacuum sacks (or beds), cages, and other devices and modes of limiting the bottom's ability to move or to escape.

White
Mutual masturbation

Chamois
Motorcycle sex
Indicates the wearer is looking for biker sex or motorcycle sex. Most commonly, this involves a motorcycle as a prop, or as a sexual device. It may involve one or more bikers in the sexual activities. If the top has a motorcycle, the bottom wearing chamois may be asked or expected to wash or to polish the motorcycle.

Red
Fisting

Light blue
Oral sex

Robin Egg Blue (Pale Robin Egg Blue) 69

Navy Blue
Anal sex

Pink (Hot Pink)
Dildos

Charcoal
Latex, PVC, or Rubber Fetish

Yellow
Watersports
Urine fetish

Medium Blue
Uniform fetish
Wearing police uniforms or uniforms worn by other authority figures

Turquoise Blue (Printer's Cyan) Aquaphilia
Having sex in water, like in a bathtub or swimming pool.

Teal
Cock and ball torture

Lime
Sitophilia
Eating food off someone's body or having food eaten off one's body

Sandalwood Carpenter sex Having sex in a work environment such as a carpenter's shop or automotive repair shop

Khaki
Military Sex (Uniform fetish)
Wearing military uniforms

Grey Flannel (not cotton) Suit and tie fetish

Coral
Foot fetish (pinkies)
Kelly green
Hustler
John (left) or prospective sugar daddy (right)

Hunter green
Daddy/boy sex Looking for a boy (left) or looking for a daddy (right)
Mauve
Navel fetish

Brown
Scat

Dark Pink
Tit torture

Purple (HTML/CSS color) [5]
Piercings

Lavender (Bright Lavender) Cross dressing / Gender play

Mustard (Gold Ochre)[6]
Size queen
Has big cock (left) or wants big cock (right)

Gold (Golden)
Menage-a-trois
Two looking for one (left) or one looking for two (right)
Apricot
Chubby chaser

Beige[7]
Rimming
Anal-oral contact
Peach
Bear or cub who is interested in sex with another bear or cub
Camouflage
Rugged outdoorsman Having sex outdoors
Rust
Ponyism
Dressing as horses (may also include dressing as cowboys)
Dark Red (Maroon) Piercing
Piercer (left) or piercee (right)
Magenta (Printer's Magenta) Armpit fetish Enjoys licking armpits (left) or having armpits licked (right)
Fuchsia
Spanking
Enjoys spanking (left) or being spanked (right)
Gold (Metallic Gold) lamé (not cotton) Muscle sex Looking for sex with bodybuilders

Silver (Metallic Silver) lamé (not cotton) Starfucker
Looking for a rock star or male groupie

Doily
Tea room queen Having sex in tea rooms

Black Leather (not cotton) bandana Leather fetish

Tie-dye
Phone sex

Baby blanket Infantilism
Enjoys dressing as an infant (diapers, bonnet, etc.)

Is Complacency Regarding Contracting/Spreading HIV Growing?

Keysman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:08:12 +0000

From Times Online
June 15, 2010
HIV and the rise of complacency
Is it time to revive the ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ message of the Eighties?
The HIV virus about to snag a host T-cell receptor for cell fusion.
Carol Midgley

* 1 Comment

Recommend? (2)

There’s a scene in Jonathan Harvey’s play, Canary, in which two gay men — one young, one middle-aged — are about to have sex with each other for the first time. The younger one announces that he is into “BB” — barebacked sex or sex without a condom. His older conquest is appalled. “What if I’m HIV?” he demands. The younger man shrugs. “So what if you do give me something?” he replies. “I’ll just take pills.”

Of all the scenes in Harvey’s acclaimed drama about homosexual experience over the past five decades this one is attracting the most attention. This is because it epitomises an issue worrying many people within the gay community — a new complacency about HIV.

Many older gay men now believe that some younger ones are blasé, even reckless about contracting HIV. There’s a significant minority, they believe, who regards it as no more serious than any other sexually-transmitted disease, comforted by the availability of powerful anti-retroviral drugs and the message that it’s now a “manageable illness”.

There are even claims of some men knowingly exposing themselves to the virus thinking it “no big deal”. Critics say that health campaigners have been so concerned to destigmatise HIV that they have softened its image.

Harvey, 42, noticed the shift about five years ago, and believes that it coincided with HIV-infected people surviving for many years on combination therapy. He says that he is aware of “younger people who see unsafe sex as an option, a risk worth taking, and more enjoyable and exciting”. They “see an interest in safe sex as boring and fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned”. As the young man, Toby, says in Harvey’s play “HIV’s like an old man’s disease. It’s so last century”.

Of course, those under 23 weren’t even born when the grim tombstone public health adverts blitzed our TV screens in 1987. Most of today’s young gay men have never attended the funeral of someone who has perished from Aids. They probably cannot imagine just how much stigma there was. Life has moved on and for the straight community too. HIV has dipped beneath the radar. We vaguely assume it’s a virus that has been conquered. It hasn’t.

Within the past decade the infection rate in this country has doubled. Statistics from the Terrence Higgins Trust show that in 2008 there were more than 7,000 new diagnoses. Ten years earlier in 1998 there were fewer than 3,000. Of those new diagnoses in 2008, 38 per cent were among men who have sex with men. Roughly two-thirds of the total of infected people were male. The largest proportion of the heterosexual group is black Africans, many of whom would have caught HIV in Africa but have received the diagnosis in the UK. In 2008, 571 people died from HIV-related illness.

Many gay men believe that tougher campaigns are needed. Karl Riley, 24, a journalist who writes about gay issues says this is a “confused generation” receiving conflicting messages. Recent health campaigns have focused on how to “minimise the risks” rather than vetoing unprotected sex. Meanwhile, a culture is flourishing, fuelled by gay pornography, glamorising “barebacking”, perpetuating the message that “only unsafe sex is real sex”. Riley says: “Our generation has not lost people to this disease. We’ve had a very different experience of HIV . . . but we need to be told the top line. We need to know how many people are getting it and to have a better awareness of what HIV can do.”

It was Riley who broke the story about three young men who contracted HIV on the British set of a porn film, shot without condoms. One of them, interviewed for Boyz magazine and Newsnight said that he “wasn’t bothered he had HIV, and that being gay he always knew he’d get it”. In a debate on the issue, Time Out’s Paul Burston told of a conversation he’d had with a 22-year-old in Liverpool, who said he was more worried about catching gonorrhoea than HIV. As Riley says of his generation: “We’re not scared of HIV, and it’s no wonder. Sex education in schools barely touches on HIV and gay sex ... HIV prevention charities [should] catch those who fall through the net. Yet instead of giving us a picture of what our lives could be like if we bareback, they choose to empower us.”

This new insouciance is also giving rise to wild claims, such as that some actively seek out the virus wanting to belong to its “community”. A subculture known as “bug-chasing” in which individuals pursue sex with HI- infected people has its own Wikipedia entry though most experts say there is no evidence to support it and it’s largely a myth.

Harvey, who wrote Beautiful Thing, the BBC sitcom Gimme, Gimme, Gimme and is a scriptwriter for Coronation Street, says one of the things which motivated him to write Canary was that, because most gay men don’t have children, important stories weren’t being passed down the generations. “I know all about my family from my grandma but if you don’t have kids who do those stories get passed on to?” he asks. “I’ve lived all my sexually active life knowing about HIV and Aids. There wasn’t a time when I didn’t know you had to wear a condom . . . it’s different for this generation. But the show isn’t just about this. It’s about a bigger apathy. In my day we had Thatcher and one of the benefits of that was that she made such horrible laws about gay people we all clubbed together and made a stand. It kept the community together. That’s lacking now. There’s not really a common cause to fight against.”

Is it, as some suggest, time to resurrect clunking-fist campaigns?

Alan Wardle, head of health promotion at the Terrence Higgins Trust, denies the suggestion that campaigns are too soft. “We try to give people the best information we can to make the best choice they can. But it is an ongoing challenge — there are only so many different ways you can say ‘use a condom’. We know from the anti-smoking campaigns that fear isn’t enough to stop people doing it.”

He says the number of people with HIV in this country continues to grow with groups most at risk being gay men and black Africans of both sexes. But he defends the young gay generation against accusations of recklessness. “There’s this notion that there’s a whole host of young, gay men dispensing with condoms and thinking it’s a risk worth taking but I don’t think there’s the evidence to back it up.” Though contracting HIV is “not the death sentence it used to be”, he says, “you will be putting quite toxic medicine into your body for the rest of your life and HIV is still quite highly stigmatised.”

Some think that “dread ad” campaigns are self-defeating and that the issue is too complex for a sledgehammer approach.

Trevor Hoppe, an American academic specialising in sexuality and sociology and a well-known voice in health activism in the United States, believes that public health scare tactics have in some cases caused a backlash. He says: “This isn’t the perspective of the majority of gay men, by far, but a minority who are very vocal and proud of their rejection of HIV prevention. I believe that is their right, and at the same time I think it is the product of abstinence-only, fear-mongering health promotion that laid the Orwellian foundation for such a visceral and at times militant resistance.”

Hoppe says that for today’s young gay men “Aids just isn’t their starting point for understanding their sexualities. That doesn’t mean that they are careless about HIV — on the contrary, my research with young gay men suggests that they’re well aware of HIV and do what they can to avoid contracting it. This varies geographically, of course.

“I’m shocked to discover that my students — both gay and straight — at The University of Michigan often have little idea of how HIV is transmitted. The less information they have, the more scared they are about HIV. They are a product of Bush-era abstinence-only education, and they are totally clueless. That is a tragedy.”

Some believe that another price to pay for a new HIV epidemic would be a return to the dark days of extreme prejudice.

“Gay people feel no different from straight people which is great in terms of how times have changed,” says Jonathan Harvey. “But I don’t think homophobia has disappeared in the same way that I don’t think racism has disappeared. It’s just that the gay community has become visible and strong and is answering back. But it doesn’t mean that a boy comes out of a club and doesn’t get beaten up.”

As the older man in Canary says, if the young heed the safe sex warning and stay healthy then the wretched, skeletal souls we remember from the 1980s won’t have died for nothing.

Canary is at Cambridge Arts Theatre from today to June 19, then touring until July 3

Activists protest against outrageous pricing for Reyataz by Bristol Myers Squibb

Keysman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:52:49 +0000

TOMORROW: Scores of AIDS Activists to Protest BMS CEO Andreotti at Goldman Sachs Health Care Conference

Protesters to Demand BMS Lower the $13K Price for AIDS Drug Reyataz at Andreotti’s First Presentation to Investors as CEO; BMS Continues to be Only Major AIDS Drug Maker to Refuse to Offer Add’l Discounts to Nation’s Cash-Strapped AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs)

Activists Chanting “Shame on BMS” and “Drug Company Greed Kills” Expected to Take Over Avenue of the Stars Outside Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel At 10:00 AM Prior to Andreotti Presentation, Carrying Oversized $100 Bills, Handmade Posters and 3’ x 6’ Banners Featuring Image of Andreotti Surrounded by Piles of Cash

Press Release Source: AIDS Healthcare Foundation On Monday June 14, 2010, 4:56 pm EDT

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AIDS Healthcare Foundation:

WHAT:
PROTEST Re: BMS’ Pricing of AIDS Drug, Reyataz, one of the most expensive first line AIDS treatments in the US

WHEN:
TUESDAY, June 15th, 10:00 AM Pacific

WHERE:
outside the Goldman Sachs Global Healthcare Conference 2010

Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel
2025 Avenue of the Stars – Century City, CA

VISUALS:

* 3ft x 6ft “Shame on BMS” and “How do you spell GREED? BMS” banners & placards with image of CEO Andreotti surrounded by Piles of Cash
* Protestors, marching with signs and chanting slogans, including “Drug company greed kills”, christening BMS with new name: “Big Money Scheme”
* Protestors, wearing MASKS of BMS CEO Andreotti’s face

Up to one hundred AIDS activists are expected at a protest tomorrow, Tuesday, June 15th at 10:00 AM, hosted by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), targeting New York-based Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (BMS) over the pricing and policies for its key HIV/AIDS drug, Reyataz, one of the most expensive first-line AIDS treatments in the US. The protest is scheduled to take place outside the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Century City just prior to an 11:30 AM presentation by Lamberto Andreotti to investors—his first as BMS’ CEO—at the Goldman Sachs Global Healthcare Conference 2010. Protestors are expected to take over Avenue of the Stars, carrying oversized $100 bills symbolizing the BMS’ greed, as well as posters and banners including several featuring the phrase “Shame on BMS” accompanied by an image of Andreotti stuffing a bill in his pocket while surrounded by piles of cash. Activists will chant slogans including “Drug company greed kills” and “How do you spell Greed? BMS!” and will christen the company with a new name: “BMS=Big Money Scheme.”

As federally-funded, state-run ADAPs try to provide AIDS drugs to an increasing number of low-income people in need, the steep price of such lifesaving drugs is becoming a more crucial issue. The Average Wholesale Price (AWP) for Reyataz (atazanavir) stands at $13,046 per-year. By contrast, other commonly prescribed first-line AIDS drugs are priced $3,000 to $5,400 less. Moreover, BMS has increased the price of Reyataz year over year; since it was first approved in 2003, the price of Reyataz has increased by over 25%. AHF officials note that Reyataz must be taken with at least two other HIV/AIDS drugs as part of an effective antiretroviral (ARV) treatment regimen.

Bristol-Myers Squibb is currently one of the only major AIDS drug manufacturers that has refused to offer additional discounts to ADAPs, despite the current dire circumstances of the state programs—including twelve states with patient waiting lists. ViiV Healthcare, Gilead Sciences Inc., Merck and Company, Johnson & Johnson’s Tibotec Therapeutics and Abbott Labs are among the AIDS drug makers that have recently offered significant price cuts, freezes, price rebate adjustments and other concessions on the pricing of their lifesaving AIDS medications to ADAP.

“By pricing Reyataz up to two and a half times more than other AIDS drugs—and refusing to budge while nearly every other major AIDS drug company has offered additional discounts—, Bristol Myers Squibb is placing greed above people’s lives,” said Michael Weinstein, AIDS Healthcare Foundation President, in a statement from South Africa. “As incoming CEO, Andreotti should be leading the way toward ensuring that BMS’ lifesaving product is being accessed by people who need it most. Instead, it appears his company is trying to squeeze every last dime out of government programs like ADAP, threatening to bankrupt such programs and placing AIDS patients’ lives at risk. We call on BMS, and in particular incoming CEO Lamberto Andreotti, to do the right thing and immediately lower the price of Reyataz.”

AHF recently sent postcards to thousands of BMS employees and neighbors in the Princeton area, where BMS operates a site consisting of 1.67 million square feet of office space situated on 280 acres. The mailer included an image of Andreotti standing among piles of cash accompanied by the words “Shame on BMS.” In addition, banner ads are currently running at the Princeton Junction Station targeting BMS employees and surrounding community with the message: “BMS, Do the Right Thing!” along with AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s web address, www.aidshealth.org. An e-letter campaign launched last week has already generated hundreds of e-letters from AIDS advocates from all areas of the country to BMS CEO Andreotti asking him to do the right thing and immediately lower the price of Reyataz.

“All of AHF’s efforts, including this protest, are designed to let people know that BMS is causing great harm to people with HIV/AIDS with its unwarranted pricing of Reyataz,” said Jessie Gruttaudaria, Public Affairs Director for AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “At $13,000 per patient per year, it is the cost of drugs like Reyataz that threatens to bankrupt state programs like ADAP, harming the patients who rely on such programs for the lifesaving medications they need. ADAP is the lifeblood for thousands of people with AIDS who are uninsured and cannot afford their medications. This cannot continue. BMS should lower the price of Reyataz immediately.”

AHF has seen firsthand the impact of high priced AIDS drugs like Reyataz. In California, for example, since 2000 the number of new ADAP clients has only increased by 50%, but AIDS drug spending has increased by 165%. New data from a recent report released by the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) yesterday regarding the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), supports the need for drug company price cuts. The National ADAP Monitoring Project Annual Report notes: “Drug spending by ADAPs has increased more than seven-fold (617%) since 1996, more than twice the rate of client growth over this same period.” This startling statistic demonstrates that a large percentage of ADAP funding increases are being applied toward rising drug costs, instead of to increasing the number of patients accessing lifesaving AIDS medication.

Background on AHF Advocacy on BMS’ Drug Pricing

In addition to the postcard, banner ad and e-letter campaigns describe above, AHF hosted a protest last month in New York City—where BMS is headquartered—during the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch 2010 Health Care Conference in advance of an investment presentation delivered by BMS executives at the conference.

Previously, AHF reached out directly to BMS asking the company to lower the price of Reyataz. In a letter to BMS’ CEO dated March 30, 2010, AHF President Michael Weinstein states: “Across the country, states have been forced to make cuts to ADAP services and enrollment because of high cost AIDS drugs like Reyataz. States can no longer afford to provide treatment to many of their current ADAP clients, and as costs increase more people will be put at risk of losing access to services. Ultimately, this means that the more people who go on high-priced Reyataz, the fewer who can receive services.”

In addition, AHF officials brought their concerns to the attention of the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS)—one of the largest public pension funds in the nation and a long-term owner of BMS stock, with more than 7 million shares currently worth over $190 million dollars. The investment fund sent a letter of inquiry to BMS regarding concern about the impact of the price of Reyataz.

In the letter, CalSTRS’ director of corporate governance states: “…we would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this matter with BMS as well as the accommodations that your company makes to the many state programs that provide this drug to this patient population. AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs) are a lifeline for low income patients in the State of California and elsewhere in the country and the ADAP programs necessarily depend on companies like BMS to support them in their efforts to reach the greatest number of patients in the HIV/AIDS community.”

Today AHF officials are in Sacramento requesting similar action from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), provider of retirement and health benefits to more than 1.6 million public employees, retirees, and their families and more than 3,000 employers.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and services to more than 130,000 individuals in 23 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean the Asia/Pacific region and Eastern Europe. www.aidshealth.org

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Contact:

AIDS Healthcare Foundation
Lori Yeghiayan
Assoc. Director of Communications
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Ged Kenslea
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E-mail: gedk@aidshealth.org