CIO HEROES!!
Edward Snowden!
Edward Snowden is an American hero who has significantly raised public awareness about the United States' government's threat to global freedom by using extreme and illegal measures of surveillance.
ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE U.S.
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NASA Study Says Ice Caps Melting at a Much Faster Rate
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Michigan … and the rest of the country … is screwed.
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Michael Moore To Rachel Maddow On Wisconsin: ‘This Is War’
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6 Billion Ways – Accumulation by African Dispossession
6 Billion Ways – Accumulation by African Dispossession, By @Nishmadoshi, March 6, 2011, Political Dynamite
This is the second in a series of reports by Political Dynamite writers from the 6 Billion Ways Conference on 5-6 March. The speakers in this session, entitled ‘Africa: From Charity to resistance’, were Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Esther Stanford-Xosei (Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe), Nnimmo Bassey (Friends of the Earth International) and Firoze Manji, (editor of Pambazuka News) in the chair.
Capitalism has been spurred on by dispossession. Every accumulation of capital is not free, but a debt to that which has been dispossessed. Our capital accumulation is a blood debt. A debt that we’ve incurred through colonialism and resource exploitation.
It’s a shame Samir Amin could not attend this session on Africa; capital accumulation by dispossession was the underlying thesis of this discussion, with supporting evidence provided by Nnimmo Bassey and Patrick Bond. Introduced by Firoze Manji of Pambazuka Press, the session was a clear move away from the standard aid versus trade discussion, instead accepting that capitalism was the root of current social, political and environmental crises. In all senses, capitalism had exploited Africa, tearing its roots apart through enslavement of labour, the consumption of all natural resources and the continued robbery of human rights.
This crisis of capital is not new. Where growth had reached its peak in the late 1800s, drastic changes were made to ensure European hegemony. That change was the carving out of Africa – the slicing of homelands and peoples that resulted in blood, death and more blood. And it was black blood that was spilt, and that history is forgotten. All this for capital accumulation? If it can be said without connotations – the true time for change is now.
Nnimmo Bassey explained how it was in 1895 that the first Nigerian people were massacred for access to Palm Oil. Now, over a century later – there has been no change, except now it’s crude oil.
Even with postcolonialism, structural adjustment has ensured exploitation has been institutionalised. The state is merely the shoeshine boy for the corporation. Democracy is a farce – it is a ballot box dream where you think you have some choice, some power. We have sold out. We have sold our sovereignty to state power.
But we can win the war. The way to win any battle is through international solidarity. Because our struggles are the same. In Egypt, our struggle can be found within. The same in Tunisia and Algeria. We’re fighting for true sovereignty and democracy, all of us.
And it is the idea of capital accumulation that has blinded us. Even in the richest African national, wealth creation in real figures only shows that the average person is only paying for the resources they produce. Patrick Bond’s presentation was clear – capitalism has whiplashed so-called developing nations into paying a bill for a debt they never caused. And it’s a debt like bonded labour – there is no end to the payment and dependency.
There is a way out, and we’ve seen that way out in North Africa. This struggle has started well before the uprisings we see now. And it will still take time for that to come through. But we cannot let this opportunity to pass. We must work together on this – work with solidarity in our minds. Austerity and African exploitation are part of the same doctrine. And that is NOT our doctrine.
There is a better world and there are 6 billions ways to achieve that. Let’s use those ways together.
This post also appears at http://thetopsoil.org.uk/
Posted in AUSTERITY, BILLION, CAPITAL, CAPITALISM, EDUCATION, GLOBALIZATION, postcolonialism
Tagged Africa, austerity, billion, CAPITAL, dispossession, Nnimmo Bassey, Patrick Bond, postcolonialism
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Bill Daley, White House Chief Of Staff, Pressed About Lack Of Jail Time For Wall Street Culprits
By Sam Stein
HUFFINGTON POST
Daley’s past work on Wall Street makes him, perhaps, not the best spokesman for the administration on this front — serious-minded observers would dispute his claim that the law signed by the president ends too-big-to-fail. And his acknowledgment that the industry in which he served opposed (however slightly) the president’s regulatory reform laws only underscores the fact that the White House has been as concerned with courting the support of the financial sector as they have been with prosecuting its transgressions.
WASHINGTON — White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley declined on Sunday to bring the president into the debate over why no major player in the collapse of the financial system in 2008 has gone to jail.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Daley, who worked as an executive at JP Morgan prior to joining the White House, said it wasn’t the role of a politician, let alone a president, to weigh in on judicial matters. Besides that, he added, the reforms that Obama instituted years after the crash occurred were indicative of his dissatisfaction with the financial sector.
“I think the president, no one has been more out front on the need for financial reform,” said Daley. “Obviously the justice system will take its place and the politicians should not engage in trying to say who should be prosecuted or who should not. That is not a responsible thing to do. You have a number of attorney generals moving forward on cases that are legitimate. But the president felt very strongly — that’s why he fought so hard for national regulatory reform — that the system has got to change.
“Most of the laws that the financial sector worked under were enacted closer to the Civil War than to this century. He fought, it was tough, to be honest with you, I was in an industry that… fought many of it, not all of it, probably 85 percent of it the industry wanted. They wanted to stop too-big-to-fail and a number of other of things. But it was controversial, difficult, but he hung in there and got what he wanted.”
Pressed a bit further, Daley refused once again to say whether “it is illegitimate or not” for the people to demand jail time for the culprits of the crash. “Politicians should not get involved. Producers, directors can do that. But politicians should not get involved.”
The director to whom Daley was referring was Charles Ferguson, who won an Academy Award for his documentary “Inside Job” — which looked at the cause and scope of the crash — and who bemoaned the lack of jail time for the primary offenders during his acceptance speech.
Daley’s past work on Wall Street makes him, perhaps, not the best spokesman for the administration on this front — serious-minded observers would dispute his claim that the law signed by the president ends too-big-to-fail. And his acknowledgment that the industry in which he served opposed (however slightly) the president’s regulatory reform laws only underscores the fact that the White House has been as concerned with courting the support of the financial sector as they have been with prosecuting its transgressions.
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Senate Dems Consider Health Care Fix That Could Hit Poor Consumers The Hardest
By Sam Stein
HUFFINGTON POST
“It would cause a significant number of people, through no fault of their own, to have a significant liability at the end of each year,” said Ron Pollack, the founding executive director of Families USA, a national lobby for health care consumers. “And that is going to be both puzzling and troubling for people affected. The second problem is, as more and more people learn about these problems, fewer people will seek tax credit subsidies to help them afford premiums. So I think this would undermine the ability to provide affordable health coverage for many middle- and moderate-income people and families, and that would undermine a key goal of the Affordable Care Act.”
WASHINGTON — Democrats on the Hill are growing increasingly convinced and, in some cases, concerned that in an effort to offset the cost of repealing a tax requirement in the president’s health care bill, the party will settle on a policy that jacks up insurance prices for low-income Americans.
The policy prescription, known as a “true-up,” and well-outlined by Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler, is the favored approach of House Republicans. Under the true-up, individuals who receive subsidies to help purchase insurance would be subject to heightened penalty from (or payback to) the IRS, starting in 2014, should they move up income brackets.
Up until last weekend, it seemed likely that Senate Democrats would balk at such an approach, wary that it would come off as penalizing the poor and discouraging those in need from taking subsidies to purchase insurance. But now, sources with knowledge of the conversations say, the party is leaning toward adopting the House GOP language in an effort to pay for the repeal of the law’s 1099 provision — an unpopular requirement that requires small business owners to make excessive tax-reporting requirements.
“This is very real,” said one knowledgeable Senate source who was adamantly opposed to the proposal. “There are people talking to [leadership], letters from members, who are trying to make this not happen. But it is very, very real.”
A Senate Democratic aide confirmed that assessment.
Under current law, households that receive subsidies to purchase health care and work their way into higher income brackets would only be forced to pay the IRS back $600 or less. Those receiving federal tax credits based on their 2013 income level, the theory goes, should have to pay back some of that money if they get richer by 2014, since the lower the recipient’s income, the more generous the subsidies.
The revised law, which the House passed and the Senate is now considering, would raise the penalties — in some cases, by thousands of dollars. Households that move into an income bracket of 300 to 400 percent above the federal poverty line would have to pay up to $2,500 back to the IRS. For those that move into the range of 200 to 300 percent above poverty, that cap is $1,500. For those who move into the 100 to 200 percent range, it is $600. Those who move above the 400 percent range, which is the limit for qualifying for a subsidy in the first place, coule face a payback even higher than $2,500.
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$1.2 Trillion: The Real U.S. National Security Budget No One Wants You to Know About
$1.2 Trillion: The Real U.S. National Security Budget No One Wants You to Know About, by Chris Hellman, Tomdispatch.com, Alternet, posted on March 1, 2011, printed on March 3, 2011
What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.
Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range — close to $700 billion for 2012 — but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.
Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.
So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn’t been passed by Congress — even the 2011 budget hasn’t made it through that august body yet — but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.
For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.
To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.
Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category — a kind of department of chump change — that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.
So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:
$703.1 billion dollars.
Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.
For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what’s called “International Affairs” in two: that is, into an annual “base” budget as well as funding for “Overseas Contingency Operations” related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department’s contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to:
$711.8 billion.
The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security” — of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to:
$765.3 billion.
The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).
This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of “covert operations” such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won’t have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There’s little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let’s be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on “intelligence.” Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon’s 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don’t know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we’re at:
$818.4 billion.
Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans’ hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we’ve reached:
$947.7 billion.
If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:
$965.7 billion.
As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:
$1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)
When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.
Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:
$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)
A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don’t for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world’s “known unknowns.” Explaining the phrase this way: “That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know.” It’s a concept that couldn’t apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can’t calculate them.
To take one example, how much of NASA’s proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force’s facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don’t know.
Other “known unknowns” would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans’ benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.
There’s a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.
Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.
© 2011 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150086/