Forwarded from CITY OF DAYTON …..

The Dayton Police Vice Unit has now established a hotline that individuals may use to report suspected prostitution activity.  The Vice detectives will act on the information accordingly, and it may lead to a letter being sent to the registered owner of a vehicle used by a suspected john or other action. In addition, the drug hotline can now accept complaints in Spanish.

333-VICE (8423)

We ask that you share this information at the neighborhood meetings and your newsletters, so the public is aware.  Please emphasize the importance of being specific with observed activity and descriptions.

The  Hotline should NOT take the place of calling the dispatch center [911] for crimes in progress.

DAYTON RESIDENTS USE YOUTUBE TO HELP WITH A HUGE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM AT A SUPERFUND SITE IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD.  A GROUP CALLED BVOCAL HAS MADE A SHORT VIDEO, “THIS IS OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!” TO TELL THEIR STORY WORLDWIDE AND TO ENCOURAGE STRONGER ACTION FROM THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY.

THEY WANT THEIR HOMES RETESTED FOR TRICHLOROETHYLENE, A DANGEROUS INDUSTRIAL CHEMICAL.

Here is the link to the video on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8tXRg3-bEg

Three years ago, people who live in the McCook Field neighborhood of Dayton Ohio learned that the former Chrysler Airtemp plant at Leo and Webster Streets, now owned by Behr, had leaked trichloroethylene (TCE), into the ground and that toxic vapor from the chemical was coming up into their houses at unsafe levels.  Over 400 homes have been tested for vapors and elevated TCE levels were found in more than half. Contamination levels as much as 650 times the official “action level” have been found. One school has been closed due to contamination. The USEPA says this is one of the worst contamination sites in the country and has made it a Superfund site.

Mitigation systems, which are a patch but not a fix for the problem, have been installed in many homes but the TCE plume continues to move through the groundwater causing levels under the homes to constantly change.  For that reason, all of the homes need to be periodically retested in order to insure that they are safe, something the USEPA has not yet agreed to do.

BVOCAL spokesperson Jerry Bowling says, “We want to tell our story and to encourage the USEPA to retest all of our homes on an ongoing basis until the problem is resolved.”

The Ohio Department of Health has found that TCE exposure is linked to kidney cancer, liver cancer, non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and several other types of cancer including Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cervical cancer.  A cancer incidence study of the McCook Field area completed by the Ohio Department of Health in August 2008 found that for all cancer types, the neighborhood had a significantly higher than expected number of cancer cases and that for 4 types of cancer associated with TCE exposure; liver, non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and cervical cancer, there were more observed cases in the area than would have been expected.

TCE exposure can also cause other health effects such as headaches, lung irritation, dizziness, coordination and concentration difficulties, skin rashes, nerve and immune system damage and damage to fetal development. Many of these problems have been reported by residents of the neighborhood.

Chrysler discovered the TCE contamination on its property in 1989 or 1990.  Almost 20 years later, the site is still not being cleaned up despite the severity of the contamination and the number of people affected.

Now that Chrysler has filed bankruptcy, it appears that it may try to completely walk away from it’s responsibilities to this neighborhood.  The BVOCAL group is working to make sure that doesn’t happen and that the USEPA does everything it can to protect this community.

BVOCAL can be reached at, bo68chev@att.net , 937-224-5058, 522 Herbert St., Dayton, OH 45404.

I love Bob Dylan’s music, or most of it anyway. I really do, in fact I’m listening to one his records [LP] right now as I write. .He sounds like the old Dylan [oh,crap, that's right, he is the old Dylan].

Let me be clear. I’ve seen Dylan in concert before and a great singer he’s not, a  stylistic Icon, yes…great singer, no. And from what I hear from folks who had seen him even earlier, he wasn’t all that great [as a singer] back then either.

As the opening croak of Lay Lady Lay tried to crawl off the stage in center field at the Dayton  Dragon’s ballpark July 10th, there was a palpable sense of seat shifting, a rustling, heads joined together, whispering, a quite rumbling, groaning. I said to my companion, ” I know he’s not a great singer, but, what was that!!??” She shrugged her shoulder and said” I don’t know but it sounds really awful.”

According to Wikpedia Lay Lady Lay “was originally written for the soundtrack of the movie Midnight Cowboy, but wasn’t submitted in time to make the final cut. ^[2]

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers has been quoted that Dylan offered them the song to record in the following way: The Everlys were appearing at the Bottom Line in New York, and after the show, Dylan went backstage to visit with them. Phil asked if Bob had any new songs they might record, and he said yes, there was one they could have. He picked up a guitar and sang, but so quietly that the Everlys could not clearly make out all the words, and thought they heard “lay lady lay, lay across my big breasts, babe.” Thinking it was a song about lesbians, Don Everly said “thank you, it’s a great song, but I don’t think we could get away with that”, and declined to record it. Dylan did not question them about it and went on to cut the track himself. Months later, they heard Dylan’s version on the radio and realized they’d misunderstood the words. The Everlys felt they’d missed a big opportunity and later recorded the song on their album, EB 84.”

Yep, Don and Phil blew a chance to sing and hit the charts with one of Bob Dylan’s greatest  love songs.
And then, sadly,  Bob blew it last night.

He wasn’t working on Maggies Farm no more, although his band was working, he was not. He might have been drinking some bad bad whiskey but, if he’d a’thought about it,  he would have known that in fact, it’s not alright, Ma. He might have been like a rolling stone, but to my ears he was lost somewhere out there with the highway 61 blues. And, I really really hate to say it, but the truth is it might just really be true that it’s all over now, Baby Blue..

Ok, enough with the metaphors. And Ok,  you went  so you could tell your grand kids that you saw Bob Dylan in concert. That would be accurate. It would even be accurate if you said you saw him on stage performing. But, if you said you hear him singing, you’d  be uttering  a  terrible prevarication of the truth. Sounds yes. Croaks yes. Gravel tumbling through the sound system, yes. Singing? No.

I respect Dylan as a song writer, as a recording artist, even yes, as a singer. . He made it known that the Times They Are A Changing, he made Blonde on Blonde, he had us Knocked Out and Loaded in the live Hard Rain, took us to the Nashville Skyline and showed us Desire. But last night… last night he left Blood on the Tracks.

He showed us Another side of Bob Dylan,  and he shouldn’t have.

If you had a good time and you liked Dylan, good for you, your bucks were well spent, you saw the Icon on stage. Fine. That’s my only concession.

But, if you tell your grandkids you heard him singing,  you’d be lying.

BtW: I thought Willie Nelson was very good, even through the muddy mix that somewhat buried his voice in the music.  I was really pleasantly surprised by John Mellencamp, who gave a rockin’ interpretation of what happens when you put a really really good Bar Band on a big stage in front of thousands…they Rocked!

Time for Bank Rationalization

By Dean Baker Guardian(UK)

February 2, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/02/obama-bad-bank-plan

Leaks in the media indicate that the banks are about to inhale another helping of taxpayer dollars. This round is likely to be considerably larger than the $350 billion that they swallowed in the bailout last October.

The leaks from Obama administration officials without names suggest that the money will provide a further subsidy to bank executives and shareholders and may not even resolve the banks’ financial crisis. In other words, the banks may yet come back for more.

The rumored plan is for the government to buy up hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt from banks and place it in a “bad bank.” The bad bank would then resell these assets for whatever price it could get from private buyers.

The basic problem with this sort of plan is that it requires that the government overpay for the bad assets. If we just pay Citigroup, Bank of America, and the rest what their assets are worth, then they would be bankrupt. They have taken enormous losses on these assets. If they had to own up to their losses, it would wipe out the capital of many, if not most, of the banks in the country.

Recent estimates from Goldman Sachs and Nouriel Roubini put the cumulative losses to the banking system at around $2.0 trillion. There is a lot of room for guess work in such estimates, but there can be little doubt that this number is in the right neighborhood.

We are in the process of losing $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth. Most of this will be absorbed by homeowners, but if just 10 percent of this loss accrues to banks, that would be $800 billion. In addition, banks have lent $3 trillion to support a bubble in commercial real estate. If one third of these more speculative loans go bad, and half of that loss is incurred by banks, that gets us another $500 billion. Add in $200 billion each in losses on credit card debt, car loans, and small business loans, all of which are now far shakier because borrowers no longer have home equity as a backdrop, and you get to the $2 trillion neighborhood.

This $2 trillion loss compares with bank capital of just $1.4 trillion, a large portion of which is rapidly disappearing “goodwill.” In other words, the losses to the banking system will almost certainly vastly exceed its capital. This is why the banks need to tap our wallets.

If we go the bad bank route and pay too much for bad assets, then taxpayers are effectively subsidizing bank shareholders, who would otherwise be wiped out, and bank executives, who would otherwise be looking at big pay cuts or unemployment.

But it gets even worse. There is no reason to think that the bad bank route will be sufficient for resolving the banks problems, at least not in Round I, because they may not come clean with all their bad assets.

It is important to remember that these banks are run by people who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble. It is likely that they still don’t know the full seriousness of their problems. (The same can be said of Treasury Secretary Tim Geitthner and National Economic Advisor Larry Summers, the bad bank’s designers.)

Many of their loans have not yet gone bad. For example, underwater mortgages that are still current. The bad news on these loans will come when homeowners have to make short sales, which could leave banks with losses of $100k, or more, per loan. This means that the “bad bank” created under this plan will have to be an ongoing business, handing out more taxpayer dollars for the banks’ junk over the next several years.

There is a simple alternative, which can be called “bank rationalization” in order to avoid the “n” word. Under this scenario, the government would take possession of insolvent banks. This is not interference with the market, it is the market. Bankrupt banks go out of business, but due to their importance to the economy, we can’t let them be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings for years.

Dealing with the matter all at once can both allow for a quicker fix to the financial system and also ensure fairer treatment of bank creditors. First, the shareholders of bankrupt institutions must be forced to eat their losses. However, we may not want to honor all the debts of the banks at 100 cents on the dollar, which has been current practice.

While the government has guaranteed most deposits, it has not guaranteed the bonds and commercial paper of the banks, nor their commitments on credit default swaps (CDS) and other derivative instruments. If it takes possession of all the bankrupt banks at once, it can apply a uniform policy. For example, it could honor bonds at 90 cents on the dollar or only pay off full CDS obligations to those who actually own the bond that was being insured against default.

To force banks to own up to insolvency, bank rationalization can apply punitive terms to banks that fail subsequently and allow their creditors to hold bank executives personally liable for their losses. Such rules would lead to more truth telling from our bankers.

In short, bank rationalization is both much fairer and better for the economy than the bad bank plan. If only the people who missed the housing bubble can be forced to recognize this fact.

The true measure of a man is what he does with the promises
he makes. During last years presidential race I remained
skeptical about all of the candidates. Heard it, seen it
 before. Would Obama be a further disappointment as well?
His unwavering& uncritical support for Israel and a
willingness to escalate the US military involvement  in
Afghanistan have particularly troubled me. It really sounds
simplistic, but really, war is NOT the answer. In today's
NY Times the columnist  Bob Herbert writes about The Afghan
Quagmire [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06herbert.html?th&emc=th]
and, on the Huffington Post, Tom Hayden offers an even
broader perspective.Will Obama piss of theprogressive/populist/left
base that helped put him in office? I hope not. At the same
time we cannot simply sit back and not be critical of
looming errors in judgment that could derail a much broader
agenda of hope and change.

Afghan War: A Time of Great Discontent Looming: Obama's Wars
By Tom Hayden
January 6, 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/obamas-wars_b_155669.html

On January 21, President Barack Obama will take
personal responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and
Pakistan launched under President Bush. The Afghan-
Pakistan war is uniquely Democratic in origin, however.
Since John Kerry's 2004 campaign, hawkish Democratic
security and political consultants have asserted that
Afghanistan is a good and necessary war in comparison
with Iraq which they label a diversionary one.

This argument has allowed Democrats to be critical of
the Iraq War without diminishing their standing as
hawks who will employ force to hunt down Al Qaeda. As a
result, the rank-and-file base of the Democratic Party,
and public opinion in general, remains divided and
confused over Afghanistan. As a result, opponents of
the Afghanistan escalation remain at the margins
politically for now, although backed by a healthy
public skepticism given the Iraq experience.

Back on July 14, I wrote "Chasing Needles By Burning
Haystacks" for the Huffington Post, a criticism of
Obama's Iraq and Afghanistan proposals. In other
writings for The Nation, I have been critical of the
decision by liberal Democratic donors in 2008 to defund
and shut down an independent media campaign that would
have carried television and radio messages against
"McCain's wars." Now that they are becoming Obama's
wars, the challenge will be more difficult, since so
many millions of Americans, myself included, want our
new president to succeed, restore hope, and launch a
new New Deal at home, not be distracted by a quagmire
abroad.

The war in Iraq already is fading from public view,
although more than 140, 000 American troops remain
stationed there. The major television networks have
withdrawn. US casualties are far fewer than in traffic
accidents on American streets. Iraqi violence is down
as well, with 8,955 civilian deaths in 2008 compared to
51,894 in the bloodiest years of 2006-2007. The shift
is towards a low-visibility counterinsurgency war like
those that ravaged Central America in the 1970s.

The conditions for a massive social movement against
the Iraq War are ebbing, for now, unless large-scale
fighting suddenly resumes or President Obama
unexpectedly caves in to the Pentagon and blatantly
breaks his promise to withdraw combat troops in 16
months and all troops by 2011.

That makes Afghanistan the growing focal point for
public debate over what counterinsurgency gurus call
"the long war" against Islamic jihad.

In everyday language, Obama's proposals for Afghanistan
and Pakistan can be described as either out of the
frying pan and into the fire, or attacking needles by
burning down haystacks.

The Pentagon paradigm is to defeat al-Qaeda militarily
while refusing to address, and thereby worsening, the
dire conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and al-
Qaeda operatives in the first place. Ahmed Rashid's new
Descent into Chaos [Viking, 2008] provides a horrific
portrait of Afghanistan in careful prose based on
reputable sources.

It is estimated by RAND that $100 per capita is the
minimum required to stabilize a country evolving out of
war. Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526,
while Afghanistan received $57 per capita in the key
years, 2001-2003;?- When the US installed the Hamid
Karzai government, Afghanistan ranked 172nd out of 178
nations on the United Nation's Human Development Index,
having the highest rate of infant mortality in the
world, a life expectancy rate of 44-45 years, and the
youngest population of any country; in 2005 95 percent
of Kabul's residents were living without electrical
power.?- Seven hundred civilians were killed in the
first five months of 2008 alone, according to the
United Nations.

Despite some gains in media and currency reform, plus a
modest increase in children in school, this was the
path of least reconstruction.

And despite media images of Afghan democracy that made
loya jirga tribal gatherings appear to be the birth of
participatory democracy, a warlord state was entrenched
by the CIA. The government is "shot through with
corruption and graft", from the police to the
presidential family, writes Dexter Filkins in the New
York Times. [Jan. 2, 2009]

There are some 36,000 US troops stretched across
Afghanistan, another 17,500 under NATO command, and
18,000 in counterinsurgency and training roles [New
York Times, July 14]. It costs the Pentagon $2 billion
per month to support the American troops.

The enlarged American forces are likely to "squeeze the
Taliban first". [New York Times, 12-24-08]. The target
will be the support networks of the Taliban which are
embedded in the vast tribal lands of Pashtun civilians,
which stretch from southern Afghanistan into Pakistan.
The enlarged American forces are likely to "squeeze the
Taliban first". [New York Times, 12-24-08].

Even Afghanistan's client president, Hamid Karzai,
complains of extra-judicial killings and civilian
casualties from the American air war, a pattern of
repression and suffering which will only worsen with
more American troops pouring into combat zones.

Meanwhile, the war in Pakistan and other Central Asian
countries will expand as the additional US troops seek
to recover supply lines closed by recent Taliban
attacks. [No one comments that the Pentagon is carrying
out precisely what it accuses the Taliban of doing,
using Pakistan as a supply and staging area for its
forces in Afghanistan. Eighty percent of those supplies
flow through Pakistan, according to the New York Times,
Dec. 31, 2008]

According to Rashid, "Afghanistan is not going to be
able to pay for its own army for many years to come --
perhaps never."

As of 2006, Afghanistan's economy still rested on
producing 90 percent of the world's opium, an eerie
narco-state parallel with the US counterinsurgency in
Colombia from where most of America's supply of cocaine
originates.

Afghanistan is an unstable police state. By 2005, the
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission cited 800
cases of detainee abuse at some thirty U.S. firebases.
"The CIA operates its own secret detention centers,
which were off limits to the US military." Ghost
prisoners, known as Persons Under Control [PUCs] are
held permanently without any public records of their
existence. Warlords operate their own prisons with
"unprecedented abuse, torture, and death of Taliban
prisoners." And as the US lowered the number of
prisoners at Guantanamo, it increased the numbers held
at Bagram, near Kabul. As of January, 2008, there were
630 incarcerated at Bagram, "including some who had
been there for five years and whom the ICRC had still
not been given access to." After weeks of hunger
strikes about detention conditions, the Taliban
recently orchestrated a jailbreak of hundreds of
Afghanis from the Kandahar prison, an inside job.

As in Iraq, the US contracted for police training in
Afghanistan with DynCorp International; between 2003
and 2005, the US spent $860 million to train 40,000
Afghan police, "but the results were totally useless"
according to Rashid. Even Richard Holbrooke described
the DynCorp training program as "an appalling joke...a
complete shambles."

When the Taliban government was overthrown, the US
installed a Westernized Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, a former
lobbyist for Unocal, who had been out of the country
during the jihad against the Soviet Union. But the
Pashtun tribes themselves were violently displaced from
power for the first time in 300 years. They remain by
far the largest Afghan minority at 42 percent of the
population, heavily concentrated in Kandahar and the
southern provinces and across the federally-
administered tribal areas in western Pakistan. These
are the areas that the Pentagon, the New York Times,
and Barack Obama [like John Kerry before him] designate
as the central battlefront of the war on terrorism.

The question is not simply a moral one, but whether the
expanding war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fueled by
troop transfers from Iraq, is winnable, and in what
sense?

Transferring an additional 20, 000 American troops from
Iraq to Afghanistan, which Obama proposes, is symbolic,
a step on the treadmill of escalation. The American
troop level will be pushed to 58,000, in addition to
30,000 other foreign troops. Obama may be proposing an
escalation simply in order not to lose, a pattern well-
documented in Daniel Ellsberg's history of the Vietnam
War.

The questionable premise of the coming escalation is
that military success must precede any political
solution. "What we need are more troops in Afghanistan
because we need security, and eventually we will get a
strategy", says a former Special Forces officer now
with the think tank Center for a New American Security.
[Dec. 23, 2008] But it could deepen the quagmire and
turn more Afghans against Obama and the US as well.

In Pakistan, the Pentagon has fostered the ascension of
a new Pakistani general, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whose
background includes training at Fort Benning and Fort
Leavenworth. An unnamed US military official praises
Kayani "for embracing new counterinsurgency training
and tactics that could be more effective in countering
militants in the country's tribal areas. [New York
Times, Jan. 7. 2008] Over $400 million is being spent
to recruit a "frontier corps" of to "turn local tribes
against militants" [New York Times, Mar. 4, 2008] CIA
and Special Forces operatives already have invaded
Pakistan to set up a secret base from which to hunt
Osama bin Laden "before Mr. Bush leaves office" as well
as fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground and
from pilotless Predator drones. [New York Times, Feb.
22, 2008].

This constitutes another preventive war by the United
States, this one in violation of Pakistan's sovereignty
and the overwhelming sentiment of Pakistan's people. On
the Afghan front, the Taliban will be able to retreat
in the face of greater US firepower, or attack like
Lilliputians from multiple sides if the US concentrates
its forces around the Pakistan border. Further violence
and tides of anti-American sentiment could sweep across
the region into Pakistan with unpredictable results.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official once charged
with tracking down Osama bin Laden, suggests that the
American delusion is that "by establishing a minority-
dominated semisecular, pro-Indian government [in
Kabul], we would neither threaten the identity nor
raise the ire of the Pashtun tribes nor endanger
Pakistan's national security." Scheuer wrote this year
that "for the United States, the war in Afghanistan has
been lost. By failing to recognize that the only
achievable US mission in Afghanistan was to destroy the
Taliban and al-Qaeda and their leaders and get out,
Washington is now faced with fighting a protracted and
growing insurgency. The only upside of this coming
defeat is that it is a debacle of our own making. We
are not being defeated by our enemies; we are in the
midst of defeating ourselves." [Marching Toward Hell,
2008]

The beginning of an alternative may require unfreezing
American diplomacy towards Iran and considering a
"grand bargain" instead. Teheran is the single power,
according to CIA director Deutch, who could destabilize
the US withdrawal from Iraq. It happens that they were
America's ally against Afghanistan not so long ago. The
Iranians have lost thousands of police and soldiers
themselves in a border war against Afghan drug lords.
According to William Polk, "ironically, the only
effective deterrent to the trade is Iran." [Violent
Politics, 2008] In exchange for security guarantees
against a US-directed regime change, Iran may be
willing to discuss cooperation with the "Great Satan"
to stabilize its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Improbable? That depends on whether one thinks the
alternative is unthinkable.

The great reappraisal might be underway. In December
2008, Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley of the Center for
American Progress published an op-ed piece calling for
US-Iran talks over Afghanistan. The CAP is headed by
John Podesta, senior official in the Obama transition.

Since twists and turns seem to be the only pattern in
divide-and-conquer strategies, it is possible that
Obama thinks being tough towards Afghanistan and
Pakistan is a defensive cover for withdrawing from
Iraq, and he will follow up with unspecified diplomacy
after he takes office. But history shows that creeping
escalations create a momentum and constituency of their
own. Obama might get lucky, lower the level of the
visible wars, and embrace a diplomatic offensive. But
North and South Waziristan could be his Bay of Pigs.

How can this war be opposed effectively? If Obama
appears to be negotiating a diplomatic solution with
some success, he will enjoy wide support within the
media and Congress. If the additional 20-30,000
American troops appear to be "stabilizing" the
situation, public criticism may be modest in scale. But
there is widespread, if latent, public opposition to
anything resembling an occupation or quagmire in
Afghanistan-Pakistan, especially with the American
economy in dire straights. The time is coming when
these will be known as Obama's wars, and seen as an
unproductive distraction from his main mission as
president. The deployment of top journalists like the
Times' Dexter Filkins to the Afghan front already has
increased the quality of press coverage. International
protest is certain to grow, given official reservations
already expressed by governments in Germany, Italy,
Spain and Poland over civilian casualties, air strikes,
human rights violations and counter-narcotics missions.
The massive human rights violations in Afghanistan will
also begin to produce a round of worldwide
condemnation. An international anti-war movement is on
the horizon.

The cost of Afghanistan will be seen as unsustainable
as well; the $36 billion for annual military operations
is certain to climb, while the $11 billion spent since
2002 on non-military development cannot begin to
address the country's problems. Whether Obama can
afford guns-and-butter in Afghanistan as America's own
infrastructure and social services fall apart is a
question that could move to action "cities for peace"
campaigners, health care advocates, Iraq veterans and
military families, among many others. And if these wars
continue through Obama's first term, a great moral
discontent will grow among many Americans who voted for
peace in 2006 and 2008.

[Tom Hayden is a founder of 'Progressives for Obama'
and the author of Ending the War in Iraq [2007], The
Voices of the Chicago Eight [2008], and Writings for a
Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader [2008].

By Max Blumenthal/Senior Writer for The Daily Beast
Posted January 5, 2009 | 08:17 AM (EST)

Almost as soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a
veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. “Israel is
so scrupulous about civilian life,” Charles Krauthammer claimed in the
Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the
Israeli attack on Gaza, “Perfectly ‘Proportionate.’” And in the New
York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country’s
airstrikes as “highly efficient.”

While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their
team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles
tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a
graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshipers to pieces (including six
children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the
elite American International School, killed five sisters while they
slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to
kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at
least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of
children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white
phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against
Kurdish rebels.

“It was Israel at its best,” Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.

By New Year’s Day, Israel’s cheering squad had turned the opinion
pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper
room. Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the
Israel’s war on Gaza began, to my knowledge only one offered a
skeptical view of the assault. But that editorial, by Israeli novelist
David Grossman, contained not a single word about the Palestinian
casualties of IDF attacks. Even while calling for a cease fire,
Grossman promised, “We can always start shooting again.”

Israeli public relations agents fanned out to broadcast studios from
the US to Europe, fulfilling an aggressive strategy conceived after
the country’s catastrophic 2006 attack on Lebanon. An analysis by
Israel’s foreign ministry of eight hours of coverage across
international broadcast media concluded that Israeli representatives
received a whopping 58 minutes of airtime compared to only 19 minutes
for Palestinians. “Quite a few outlets are very favorable to Israel,
namely by showing [its] suffering. I am sure it is a result of the new
co-ordination,” said Major Avital Leibovich, an IDF spokesperson who
has become a fixture on cable news in the past weeks.

But while Israel’s PR machine cranked its Mighty Wurlitzer to full
blast, drowning out all opposing voices with its droning sound, a
surprisingly substantial portion of the American public decided to
dance to its own tune. According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll
[LINK: ] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/americans_closely_divided_over_israel_s_gaza_attacks_
(so far the only measure of US opinion on the Gaza assault), while
Americans remained overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, they were
split almost evenly on the question of whether Israel should attack
Gaza — 44% in favor of the assault and 41% against it. The internals
are even more remarkable.

While Republicans supported the assault on Gaza by a large margin, a
predictable finding, only 31% of Democrats did. Members of the
Democratic base thus stood in sharp contrast to most of their elected
representatives (freshman Rep. Donna Edwards is a notable exception),
who backed the latest Israeli assault in lockstep, and seem to support
Israel no matter what it does. The rift between the progressive base
and the party played out on Barack Obama’s Change.gov site, which was
deluged in recent days with demands for a statement condemning
Israel’s assault on Gaza.

So what accounts for the surprising trend in American opinion on Gaza?
The proliferation of progressive online media and social networking
sites could be a factor, but I have another theory: The same pundits
who are cheerleading Israel’s assault on Gaza once sold the occupation
of Iraq to America, and with a nearly identical set of arguments. In
their voices and those of the grim Israeli PR agents carted out for
cable news, many Americans hear echoes of the Bush administration’s
most fantastical lies. When they see images of Gazans under withering
bombardment, they flash back to Fallujah and the assorted horrors of
Iraq. When they look at Israel, they see themselves during the darkest
days of the Bush era.

Now, an increasing share of Americans know what Israel is doing to
Gaza. And they reject it, even when Israel is “at its best.”
_______________________________________________

The suspicious, disturbing death of election rigger Michael Connell
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 20, 2008

Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various interviews and a deposition Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.

Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama’s election: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now.” Connell wrote: “This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.”

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove’s emails. Some of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.

Revised December 21, 2008

———-
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION…, available at www.freepress.org , where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3320

I’m trying my best to understand the current economic crisis. I thought the the following article was very illuminating.

Irving Fisher (1867 – 1947) was perhaps the most noted economist of his day. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics calls him “one of America’s greatest mathematical economists and one of” its clearest writers. He earned special acclaim for his work on monetary and statistical theory, policy, index numbers, econometrics, and the distinction between real and nominal interest rates.

He’s also remembered for having made one of the worst and most ill-timed ever stock market calls that cost him his reputation and millions in the subsequent crash – on October 17, 1929 (a week before Black Thursday) when he said “stock prices had reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

He made the call in a climate much like mid-2007 – one of economic growth and easy credit producing speculative excess, bubbles, and the belief that good times would continue unabated. They didn’t then and never do but only in hindsight are those lessons learned.

Investors forget what Keynes once taught when he said: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise become the bubble on a whirlwind of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” So it was in the 1920s, in the 1990s, and post-2000, but even Keynes was wrong in 1927 when he said: “We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

After the 1929 crash and deepening downturn, Fisher analyzed what happened and in 1933 wrote his “Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.” It raised disturbing questions about the roles of the Fed, Wall Street and Washington, and, as a result, was largely ignored. Given the book’s relevance today, this article reviews the most significant of his “49 tentative conclusions.”

He believed two major factors cause depression – excess debt (based on easy credit and loose lending practices) and deflation, especially in combination. Others also affect business cycles, but they’re secondary to the main ones.

Financial expert and investor safety advocate Martin Weiss recalls what his father, Irving, taught. He lived through the 1920s, the 1929 crash, and Great Depression and tracked data as it was released “to figure out what might happen next. (He) was an analyst and that was (his) job.”

“Years later economists like Milton Friedman and (his) young friend Alan Greenspan (tried) to decipher what went wrong. They concluded that it was mostly the government’s fault, especially the Federal Reserve. They developed the theory that the next time we’re on the brink of depression, the government has got to step in and nip it in the bud. Bah! Those guys weren’t back there back then (like Irving was).”

He “saw exactly what the Fed was doing in the 1930s: They did everything in their power to stop the panic. They coddled the banks. They pumped in billions of dollars. But it was no use. They eventually figured out they were just throwing good money after bad. The real roots of the 1930s bust were in the 1920s boom. That’s when the Fed gave (loads of) cheap money to the banks.” They loaned it to brokers who loaned it to speculators, and a bubble was created and imploded.

“In 1929, our economy was a house of cards. It didn’t matter which cards we propped up or which ones we let fail. We obviously couldn’t save them all. So no matter what we did,” and the longer we denied reality, “the worse it was for everyone. The sooner we accepted it, the sooner” a real recovery was possible. Fisher understood it also and wrote about it in his book.

Besides the early years of the Great Depression (before its full impact or length could be known), he used the Panic of 1837 as an example. It was caused by heavy demand for loans to buy land, build businesses, and invest in the country’s development. Prices began rising, economic strains built up, and a speculative bubble developed that burst in New York on May 10 when every bank stopped payment in specie (gold or silver coinage). A five year depression followed. Many banks failed, and unemployment soared to record levels.

Andrew Jackson was blamed for requiring that gold and silver currency (not fiat paper) be used to pay for government land. Also for not renewing the Second Bank of the United States charter and withdrawing government funds from the bank. Most historians believe it but more recent scholarship cites other causes instead. What’s not disputed was the speculative excess that came to a painful end.

The Panic of 1857 ended the boom years following the 1846 – 1848 Mexican War. It gave America undisputed control of Texas, established the US – Mexican border at the Rio Grande River, seized the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and opened this vast new area to speculation and development. Much of it was to expand railroads. It proved unsustainable and led to crisis.

The failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Co. was the proximate cause. It ignited panic as a result of massive embezzlement and heavy losses on depreciated railroad investments. Eroded public confidence took over, setting off a chain of events as follows:

– investment money dried up;

– British investors pulled out of American banks because of fears of their unsoundness;

– grain prices fell and heavily impacted rural areas;

– inventories piled up in warehouses;

– massive layoffs followed;

– railroads failed because of over-building;

– 5000 businesses failed within a year; and

– land prices collapsed ruining thousands of investors.

A further blow was losing 30,000 pounds of San Francisco Mint gold at sea intended for eastern banks. Confidence eroded further in the government’s ability to back paper currency with specie. In October, a bank holiday in New England and New York failed to avert runs in the states. Panic spread to Europe, South America and Asia and, while brief, didn’t fully abate until the 1861 War Between the States (the American Civil War).

The Panic of 1873 (near the onset of the Gilded Age) was called “the real Great Depression” by some. It began eight years after war ended and started a six-year depression until 1879. It was triggered by the Vienna Stock Exchange crash in May (the so-called Grunderkrach or “founders’ crash”), then spread to America in the fall.

The key event was the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s preeminent investment bank, the principal backer of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and holder of most government wartime loans. It triggered a series of events that followed.

The New York Stock Exchange closed for 10 days. Credit dried up. Banks demanded payment of their loans. Investors rushed to sell stocks. Foreclosures increased, many banks failed and most major railroads. Factories then closed, unemployment soared, and many reasons were cited as the cause – post-war frenetic growth, unregulated speculative abuse, and the extreme overbuilding of the railroads causing panic and depression.

Another factor was also involved. Like today’s Wall Street banks, the railroads crafted complex financial instruments promising a fixed return. Few investors understood them or that in case of default they’d get nothing. Initially the bonds sold well, but fell after 1871 when investors doubted their value. As prices weakened, railroads assumed short-term bank loans to keep expanding. When rates skyrocketed in 1873, they were in trouble, and when Jay Cooke (in September) defaulted on his debt the stock market crashed. Hundreds of banks failed, the panic continued for five years and even longer in Europe.

What harmed the public, banks, and railroads created opportunity for well capitalized industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Cyrus McCormick. It let them buy assets at fire-sale prices, began the so-called Gilded Age, and triggered the onset of powerful business concentration.

Small factories and businesses were out of luck. Many shut down. Tens of thousands of workers lost jobs. Unemployment in New York alone reached 25%. Workers demonstrated in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere demanding work, and some of the most violent strikes in American history followed. One was a nationwide railroad action in 1877 in which mobs destroyed hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, MD. Times were even harder in Central and Eastern Europe and lasted longer.

The panic of 1893 caused another depression until 1897 that according to some was as severe or worse than the 1873 crisis. Various factors were blamed – railroad overbuilding, shaky financing, the usual kinds of speculation, and a run on the gold supply among others.

In early May, the New York stock market fell sharply and crashed by late June. A severe credit crisis followed. About 15,000 businesses, 600 banks and 74 railroads failed, and unemployment tripled from one to three million by mid-1894.

Workers responded in the first ever march on Washington. Businessman populist Jason Coxey led his “Coxey’s Army” (numbering about 500) from Massilon, Ohio (beginning March 25, Easter Sunday) to the nation’s capital to demand jobs and present Congress with “a petition with boots on.” Local police intervened. The marchers were disbanded. Coxey was arrested, spent 20 days in jail for disturbing the peace and violating a local ordinance prohibiting walking on the grass, was never charged, and then released.

Other panics followed in 1903, 1907, and then the big one in 1929 – the Great Crash on three days – Black Thursday (October 24), Black Monday (October 28) and Black Tuesday (October 29) – triggering bank failures and the Great Depression throughout the 1930s until WW II ended it.

Fisher discussed its cause and attributed it to debt and deflation. He also explained “cycle theory” – the instability around equilibrium and the influence of “forced” (like seasons) and “free” (self-generating like waves) cycles. He stated:

“Exact equilibrium….is seldom reached and never long maintained. New disturbances are….sure to occur, so that….any variable is almost always above or below ideal equilibrium.”

“….at most times there must be over or under-production, over or under-consumption, over or under spending, over or under-saving, over or under investment, and over or under everything else.” Believing in perfect equilibrium is like assuming the Atlantic Ocean is without waves.

“In the great booms and depressions, each of the above-named factors has played a subordinate role as compared with two dominant factors, namely over-indebtedness to start with and deflation following soon after; also that where any of the other factors do become conspicuous, they are often merely effects or symptoms of these two.” This is key.

Fisher then discussed nine interacting factors under debt and deflation conditions that can lead to a Great Depression. Over-indebtedness leads to liquidation “through the alarm either of debtors or creditors or both.” The following “chain of consequences” follows:

(1) “Debt liquidation leads to distress selling and to

(2) Contraction of deposit currency, as bank loans are paid off, and to a slowing down of velocity of circulation.” Deposit and velocity contraction (from distress sales) cause

(3) “a fall in the level of prices, in other words, a swelling of the dollar.” If price declines aren’t “interfered with by reflation or otherwise, there must be

(4) A still greater fall in the net worths of business, precipitating bankruptcies and

(5) a like fall in profits.” That, in turn, causes

(6) “A reduction in output, in trade and in employment of labor. These losses, bankruptcies and unemployment, lead to

(7) Hoarding and slowing down still more the velocity of circulation.” Velocity refers to the rate at which money circulates, changes hands, or turns over. Greater velocity means greater demand and faster growth. It’s computed by dividing the output of goods and services (GDP) by the total money supply.

The above eight changes cause:

(9) “Complicated disturbances in the rates of interest, in particular, a fall in the nominal, or money, rates and a rise in the real, or commodity, rates of interest.

….debt and deflation go far toward explaining a great mass of phenomena in a very simple logical way.”

Fisher explained that loose monetary policy causes over-indebtedness fueling speculation and asset bubbles that aren’t sustainable. “Easy money is the great cause of over-borrowing. When an investor thinks he can make over 100 per cent per annum by borrowing at 6 per cent, he will be tempted to borrow, and to invest or speculate with the borrowed money. This was the prime cause leading to the over-indebtedness of 1929. Inventions and technological improvements (at the time) created wonderful investment opportunities, and so caused big debts.”

Fisher then described “distinct phases” driving public sentiment:

(a) the prospect of “big dividends or gains in income in the remote future;”

(b) selling at a profit for a capital gain “in the immediate future;”

(c) “the vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations” or the notion that good times are self-sustaining, and

(d) “the development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.”

Fisher’s debt, deflation and instability theory is summarized as follows:

(1) “economic changes include steady trends and unsteady occasional disturbances (that result in various type) cyclical oscillations;”

(2) among the “disturbances” are new investment opportunities;

(3) these among others create over-indebtedness;

(4) this “leads to attempts to liquidate;”

(5) “unless counteracted by reflation,” these cause price declines “or a swelling dollar;”

(6) “the dollar may swell faster than the number of dollars owed shrinks;”

(7) as a result, liquidation doesn’t liquidate; it aggravates debts, “and the depression grows worse instead of better;”

(8) extricating from this is either by bankruptcy or reflation through monetary and/or fiscal policies.

Like Keynes, Fisher believed that reflation should be limited and temporary, not long, sustained or extreme like under Greenspan and Bernanke. Otherwise short-term solutions cause much greater problems, now playing out and may become more severe ahead. As a per cent of GDP, total credit market debt is now double its 1929 level at about 350%. It’s rising fast with continuing new new liquidity injections that show no signs of diminishing. Reportedly the Fed may now issue its own debt – an astonishing move if it happens as it will create unlimited debt amounts and leave the Fed unaccountable to no one for doing it.

As in 1873, 1929, and other financial panics, speculation has been rampant, much more extreme than earlier, and debt levels are unprecedented and growing. As a result, large banks are effectively insolvent, hoard cash, and won’t lend. Credit is scarce. Households are too over-indebted to borrow. Lenders won’t extend it anyway. Unemployment is skyrocketing, and the potentially greatest ever economic crisis is worsening – so much so that London-based GFC Economics predicts successive 2009 months of one million layoffs in the US.

And unprecedented-sized bailouts assure greater trouble ahead. Using inflation-adjusted numbers, Jim Bianco of Bianco Research said that bailout-related debt cost more than the following combined:

– the Marshall Plan – cost: $12.7 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $115.3 billion;

– the Louisiana Purchase – cost: $15 million; inflation-adjusted cost: $217 million;

– NASA’s Apollo human spaceflight program – cost: $36.4 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $237 billion;

– the S & L crisis – cost: $153 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $256 billion;

– the Korean War – cost: $54 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $454 billion;

– the New Deal – cost: an estimated $32 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: an estimated $500 billion;

– the invasion and early months of the Iraq War (not the total war cost to date that’s far higher) – cost: $551 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $597 billion;

– the Vietnam War – cost: $111 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $698 billion; and

– NASA since inception – cost: $416.7 billion; inflation-adjusted cost: $851.2 billion.

Total: $3.92 trillion compared to around $8.5 trillion in bailout funds allocated or pledged thus far with these numbers certain to go higher.

Will deflation and depression follow? Who can know, but Nouriel Roubini understands the seriousness of over-extended debt and explains the consequences of falling prices. It affects “the real value of nominal liabilities,” and makes them rise “as do real interest rates once the nominal interest rate hits” zero. Hoarding cash and saving “instead of investing is thus self-reinforcing as (a) deflationary spiral takes hold.”

He sees the threat of “stag-deflation (recession/ stagnation and deflation) and “debt deflation” that’s “already forced the Fed into a liquidity trap (with investors preferring to hold cash) as the Fed funds rate is effectively close to 0% and an informal policy of ‘quantitative easing’ has already….flooded financial markets with over $2 trillion of liquidity” – now even more than when he wrote this in late November and, for the first time (on December 9), the Treasury sold $30 billion of four-week bills at zero interest. On July 31, 2001, they were auctioned for the first time, to be continued weekly along with regular 13 and 26-week bills. Back then, they yielded around 3.5%.

Roubini sees lots of negatives from current policies, even depression, but he doesn’t predict it. He states: “Desperate times and desperate economic news require desperate policy actions.” However “partially necessary” they may be, they’ll “eventually lead to much higher real interest rates on the public debt and weaken the US dollar once this tsunami of implicit and explicit public liabilities and monetary debt (the result of rising twin fiscal and current account deficits) hits a world where the global supply of savings is shrinking. As most countries move to fiscal deficits (and reduce global savings), foreign investors (may) start to ponder the long-term sustainability of the US domestic and external liabilities.”

With the economy “in free fall,” debt obligations at unprecedented levels, and “stag-deflation” deepening, the worst of possibilities may unfold and spread contagion everywhere.

The Bank for International Settlements (the so-called central bank for central bankers) showed concern in its December Quarterly Review. It questions the soundness of near-zero interest rates that may disrupt money markets and “discourage banks from lending to other banks.” It’s also worried about the “scope and magnitude of the bank rescue packages (because) significant risks (from toxic debt have) been transferred onto government balance sheets” in amounts great enough to risk future default.

Only in time will we know, but the worst of possibilities are real, especially in America where debt levels are hugely unmanageable, yet they continue to be added to recklessly.

What will unfold and how it will end can’t be known. The human fallout already is huge. It may end up overwhelming but not as fast as in the 1930s. According to Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, GDP fell 26.6% between 1929 and 1933, personal income declined 25.7%, and consumption expenditures dropped 18.2%.

Given a three-decade US standard of living decline to the present, exacerbated by the intensifying current crisis (very likely to be protracted and deep), it’s very possible those 1930s numbers may be matched or exceeded going forward. If so, it may just take longer before their full effects show up and are felt.

But look how big businesses are advantaged. Smaller ones will fail, and the giants will get even bigger through asset acquisitions at fire-sale prices. As they say, what goes around, comes around but much to the public’s detriment as it always is.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on www.RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays through Fridays at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11325
Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman

Well,  CRAP! The decision by Senate Republicans to sink the proposed “bailout/loan” for Detroit automakers
is going to have a very direct impact on the Miami Valley. A BAD impact.

In a blatant right wing assault, Southern Senators, led by Sen Shelby of Alabama, have sought to blame the Auto workers union’s for the crisis. The reality is  that errors in decision making by the Big 3 MANAGEMENT brought this crisis on.

It is said that crap rolls downhill,  and surely this is one hell of a hill we are standing on. Will GM and Chrysler be able to continue making and selling cars [that no one is buying now]  while in bankruptcy proceedings? Obviously the answers will not come easily, nor painlessly. Buckle up, friends, ’cause the ride to the bottom of this hill is going to very rough.

This mornings NY Times had the following depressing story in it…

Senate Abandons Automaker Bailout Bid

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