02/10/06 “ICH” — — The U.S. Department of Labor claims we have an unemployment rate of 4.9% [1]. According to “the Economist, however, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is over 8%, or 12.6 million Americans [2]. The difference is due to the fact that the U.S. Government doesn’t count people as unemployed after six months without a job [3].

I recently joined the ranks of our many unemployed citizens. The termination of my employment as a Vice President at Pfizer was subject to intense media interest [4], partly due to the fact that Pfizer notified the press before they informed me.

…Clearly the system we have today isn’t just broke. The system is utterly and completely sick and our weakest citizens are paying the price, every day. And while I have belatedly been forced to share some of the experiences of our poor, uninsured, and unemployed, my situation doesn’t even start to compare with people with no resources, no voice, nowhere to go and no one who listens to them. For those citizens we have something that’s called the Government; a government that is supposed to look out for the people who can’t look out for themselves, but instead focuses on “pay to play money.

Today’s system is built on greed. Greed is defined as an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than someone needs or deserves. Greed is not a corporate executive who builds an organization such as Microsoft, creates a lot of jobs, and happens to get rich. Greed is to become CEO for a drug company such as Pfizer, be responsible for a stock price drop of 40% over his five year tenure, twice as much as the AMEX Pharmaceutical Index [10], secure a $100 million retirement package [11] while firing 16,385 Pharmacia and Pfizer employees [12], and get a 72% pay increase to $16.6 million as his reward [13].
informationclearinghouse.info

Outraged intelligence professionals say President George W. Bush is “cheapening” and “politicizing” their work with claims the United States foiled a planned terrorist attack against Los Angeles in 2002.

“The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world,” says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. “He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington.”

Within hours of the President’s speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President’s remarks.

“He’s full of shit,” said one sharply-worded email.
capitolhillblue

What’s cooking in New Orleans? “Nothing,” celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse recently told the New York Post’s Cindy Adams. “The mayor’s a clunk. The governor is also a clunk. They don’t know their (derrieres) from a hole in the ground. All my three restaurants got hit. I’ve reopened Emeril’s, but only a few locals come. There’re no tourists. No visitors. No spenders. No money. No future. No people. It’s lost. It’ll never come back.”

Congressman Richard Baker believes New Orleans and its environs can come back if it can rebuild its housing stock and thus begin rehabilitating battered communities. The Baton Rouge Republican’s proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation (LRC) appears to be the only coherent plan for revitalizing the tempest-tossed Bayou State. It deserves the proper hearing it will get before the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 15.

Baker’s bill, H.R. 4100, would issue Treasury bonds to create a $30 billion revolving loan fund. Owners of Louisiana’s 240,000 damaged or destroyed homes and small businesses voluntarily could sell their property to the LRC. It would pay owners 60 percent of their equity and lenders up to 60 percent of their mortgage receivables. The LRC would consolidate these distressed or demolished properties and auction them off to private developers. Sales revenues would repay bondholders. Original owners could ask for first dibs on revitalized properties. The LRC would expire after 10 years.

Also, Baker’s $30 billion revolving loan fund would collect and repay 60 cents on the dollar. Even if it underwrote 40 cents on the dollar, that would involve a $12 billion outlay, not all $30 billion.

“In this case, there is basically no market. As such, people have little or no options,” Baker told BayouBuzz.com. Baker, who launched a still-operating real-estate agency at age 22 and enjoys a 91 percent lifetime American Conservative Union rating, added: “The situation calls for an unprecedented solution, through a corporation that basically remakes the market, reintroduces market forces, gets property back into commerce in a necessarily more comprehensive approach, and then gradually recedes from the marketplace over time.”

As public programs go, Baker’s proposal is a bit like a live-virus vaccine. A limited amount of government now, followed by better health, rather than illness and, eventually, even more government. Baker’s plan should inoculate against the alternative: an epidemic of mortgage foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, bank failures, and an inevitable bailout by federal regulators at greater expense in outlays and litigation.

“I don’t believe in taxing the good people of Kansas, New Hampshire, and California $30 billion on the grounds that otherwise you’ll tax them more later,” responds David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute.

While I usually agree that free markets should solve these things, New Orleans’ markets largely have washed away. Last November, I witnessed moderate to jaw-dropping flood damage from Lake Pontchartrain clear down to Marais Street, just above the French Quarter. Only the roughly 10-block-wide “Sliver by the River” abutting the Mississippi, stood essentially intact.

“The bottom line is this, it is difficult to understand how Louisiana rebuilds if its landscape is littered with the remains of over 200,000 unusable homes and business properties,” former Louisiana governors Mike Foster, Buddy Roemer, and David Treen, all Republicans, wrote President Bush Feb. 1. Without the Baker plan, they fear these deeds will stay “tied up in a legal mess impenetrable to the private market, for years and years to come.”
capitolhillblue.com

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid portrays convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s activities as involving only Republicans. But Abramoff’s billing records and congressional correspondence tell a different story.

They show Abramoff’s lobbying team billed for nearly two dozen contacts with Reid’s office in a single year to mostly discuss Democratic legislation that would have set the minimum hourly wage for the Northern Mariana Islands, an Abramoff client, initially almost $3 lower than other U.S. states and territories.

Reid, D-Nev., also wrote at least four letters to the Bush administration helpful to Indian tribes Abramoff represented, often collecting donations from Abramoff-related sources around the same time.

And in the midst of the contacts, Abramoff’s firm hired one of Reid’s top legislative aides to lobby for the tribal and Marianas clients. The aide then helped throw a fundraiser for Reid at Abramoff’s firm.

The activities _ detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press _ are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff’s firm, lobbying partners and clients.
capitolhillblue.com

(CBS) Former President George H.W. Bush has expressed dismay and anger at attacks on his son, President Bush, at the funeral for Coretta Scott King.

“In terms of the political shots at the president who was sitting there with his wife, I didn’t like it and I thought it was kind of ugly frankly,” the former president said in an exclusive radio interview with CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer.

“Anybody that shoots at the president of the United States at a funeral, I just didn’t appreciate that,” Mr. Bush added.

Former President Carter and the Rev. Joseph Lowery criticized the president during remarks they made at the King funeral in Atlanta.

The Rev. Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., drew a roaring standing ovation when he said: “For war, billions more, but no more for the poor” – a takeoff on a line from a Stevie Wonder song. The comment drew head shakes from Mr. Bush and his father as theysat behind the pulpit.

Former President Carter brought up the government response to Katrina, saying, “We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi” to know that inequality exists. He also noted that the Kings once were “victims of secret government wiretapping” – echoing Mr. Bush’s domestic spying program.

Former President Bush also had praise for his friend, Bill Clinton: “I thought President Clinton was maybe the best. It was his crowd. They talk about Bill Clinton being ‘the first black president,’ well when you walk into that church with 12,000 or whatever it was, I mean it was very clear who that crowd loved and respected.”
cbsnews.com

Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.

Cheney was one of the “superiors” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby said had authorized him to make the disclosures, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Libby’s discussions with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame.
washingtonpost.com

The political system has not been corrupted. It is working effectively, like always. The backbone is the patronage system. Politicians have wonderful memories. They know who they owe. Prostitution is a profession, allegorically the oldest one. Politics is a business. At one time it was popular to think that if someone rich enough were to get elected, he (at that time it would surely be a he) would be immune, but who can owe as much as the rich?
informationclearinghouse.info

Government without Representation: A Call to Action
There are events in human history that galvanize a people into action. Such events are so profoundly wrong and troubling that they can no longer be ignored by the great majority of the citizenry. Instinct tells us that we are nearing a crossroads in the history of our nation, when we must decide upon a course of action. In this momentous decision there can be no neutrality. It is understood that there can be no reconciliation with corrupt power and authority. Either we stay the course and witness the systematic destruction of not only our own nation, but perhaps the entire world; or we refuse our allegiance to this system of inequity called capitalism and operate upon a new premise, or paradigm.

Upwards of eighty percent of the people recognize that they have essentially no representation in government. They appreciate the political process for the sham it is and many of them refuse to participate in it. In the process they allow a small minority to elect people to office, some of them as servants to the people, others not.

Inside the Global Dominance Group
…At the beginning of 2006 the Global Dominance Group’s agenda is well established within higher circle policy councils and cunningly operationalized inside the US Government. They work hand in hand with defense contractors promoting deployment of US forces in over 700 bases worldwide.

There is an important difference between self-defense from external threats, and the belief in the total military control of the world. When asked, most working people in the US have serious doubts about the moral and practical acceptability of financing world domination.
Catchy name.

…In the best of all possible worlds, ExxonMobil might recognize the sources of its good fortune and give something of reasonable scale back to the American people (beyond the relatively modest amount it donates to the arts, education and other causes).

It might, for instance, help make heating oil available to low-income citizens, as Venezuela is doing in Massachusetts, New York and Maine.

Or it could simply contribute money to help offset the pain: Appropriations for the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program for this fiscal year are only $2.1 billion, nearly $3 billion short of what Congress authorized.

Beyond this, ExxonMobil could make a major contribution to helping rebuild New Orleans, where it has an important refinery. Private citizens have donated about $3.2 billion so far to the rebuilding effort. The $13 million contribution ExxonMobil touts on its Web site is a mere one-eighth of 1 percent of the increase in its 2005 profits.

Actually, given its New Orleans refinery, ExxonMobil might do very well by doing good: It could protect its investment by getting serious about helping the city build strong Category 5 levees and restoring hurricane-slowing wetlands. The estimated total cost is $31 billion – $5 billion less than ExxonMobil’s 2005 huge profit flows.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a world where significant, voluntary “give-backs” to American society are common.
baltimoresun.com

Chavez just rejected an Exxon Mobil bid because they won’t get with his program.Oil corporations working in Venezuela are obligated to ‘do good.’

WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.
Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.
Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries – Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan – have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia’s aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing “would antagonize the Bolivian military,” he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.
iht.com

Engineers in Uganda are secretly draining Lake Victoria to generate electricity, flouting an international agreement to protect the world’s second largest freshwater lake, according to a new report.
Daniel Kull, a hydrologist with the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction in Nairobi, Kenya, says the country is directing more of the lake’s waters than agreed 50 years ago under an international pact.

Mr Kull has calculated that the water level in the lake is almost half a metre lower than it should be. Official reports on the hydroelectric dam operations published for March and November last year show that water releases were almost twice their permitted rates, he says. The report is published by a US environmental lobby group, International Rivers Network.
guardian.co.uk