Clips from "Lifting the Veil"

OK, many of you are very busy, trying to enjoy life, promote uncontroversial projects, and survive. You don't have time to sit in front of your computer to watch and listen to almost two hours of political commentary, no matter how relevant. So . . . I've found three of the clips used in the political documentary "Lifting the Veil" that I posted yesterday. These are the full clips available on Youtube, some with more than what was presented in "Lifting the Veil", but without any of the visuals. The first two are relatively short, and Pilger's speech is 32 minutes. Be forewarned--Carlin is Carlin, and uses the kind of language he is famous for. If vulgar language offends you, simply don't watch it and move on to Chris Hedges' speech. Hope this helps.
_____

George Carlin
George Carlin - It's a big club and you ain't in it


__

Chris Hedges speaks in Lafayette Park before getting arrested in front of the White House (Dec., 2010).


__

This next clip is dedicated to all the right-wing nut-cases who say that Obama is a socialist threat to America! Huge joke--he is actually a threat to social & economic equality (social equality is closely tied to economic equality), justice, and democracy, even if not so threatening as many Republicans.

John Pilger
Author, journalist, film maker John Pilger, San Francisco 7-4-09.


__

Billy Bragg--Between the wars

Republicans are Hopeless, Democrats May Have Sold You Out in the Past, But Obama Will Save You? (Take it to the bank!) Absolutely Must See Video

Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy

“Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist democracy”, this film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements”, the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself. 

Original interview footage derives from Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Albert, John Stauber (PR Watch), Sharon Smith (Historian), William I. Robinson (Editor, Critical Globalization Studies), Morris Berman (Author, Dark Ages America), and famed black panther Larry Pinkney.



Non-original interviews/lectures include Michael Hudson, Paul Craig Roberts, Ted Rall, Richard Wolff, Glen Ford, Lewis Black, Glenn Greenwald, George Carlin, Gerald Cliente, Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Wollin and Martin Luther King.

Visit http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php  for more info.

"Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!" - Larry Pinkney - Editorial Board Member & Columnist - The Black Commentator

Viewer discretion advised -  Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war.
Posted March 11, 2011



See Also: http://www.vimeo.com/20355767

Billy Bragg--Between the wars





whatinthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com

Chomsky on Libya--Now & 20 years ago. (Videos)

A friend recently told me to post more often, even daily. Anything, I guess. I can stay pretty busy for a retired person, and I sometimes will gather so much information on a subject that I soon don't know where to begin--especially for a daily post. I told him that my plan was supposed to be to post more national and international news to my Facebook page, and to use the blog for more local issues. Fat chance I guess. Today was one of those days where I immersed myself in all that is Libya. Must have accumulated a bizillion links on western investments in Libya and the countries and corporations in Europe and the U.S. that are most heavily invested, and/or are dependent on Libyan oil. You know, the countries and corporations who either use or need the Libyan resources, or make a bunch of money off them, and are now deciding just how "humanitarian" they want to be. In essence, the picture that emerges is one of Western nations and corporations totally willing to do business with Gadaffi, without regard to the Libyan people, and who are now hoping for a more compliant "rebel" partner under the control of Western oil corporations and the idea of "democracy", American global capitalism style. Seems like all that info will have to wait for another day, or two, or three, but some of that is on my Facebook page.

What is informative, not to mention easy to post, are three YouTube videos from Noam Chomsky, who is now 82 years old and full of history and wisdom.

The first two (Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Paxman's BBC interview) are very recent interviews of Noam Chomsky concerning the situation in Libya and the Middle East. If you watch them, pay particular to the beginning of the first and the end of the second.

The third ("Libya has been a punching bag for 10 years" (1991)), is a Q&A given by Chomsky 20 years ago (1991) about Libya and Israel. Interesting context for those that don't remember. Chomsky is quite frank about Israeli motives, motives that are more than salient today, not that you have been paying attention.

At the end of the post I've thrown in a few articles for those of you trying to kick the intervention habit.
__________

Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Paxman's BBC interview in full Part 1


Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Paxman's BBC interview in full Part 2.wmv

_____

Noam Chomsky: "Libya has been a punching bag for 10 years" (1991)


__

Kicking the intervention habit
Should talks of intervention in Libya turn into action, it would be illegal, immoral and hypocritical.
Richard Falk Last Modified: 10 Mar 2011 12:54 GMT
__

Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya

By Stephen Lendman

March 10, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- America's major media never met an imperial war it didn't love and promote, never mind how lawless, mindless, destructive and counterproductive.
__

WikiLeaks: FRENCH TOTAL-LED CONSORTIUMS ACCEPT LOWER PRODUCTION SHARES IN LIBYA

Summary: Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) renegotiated the terms of its production sharing agreements with France's Total and its partners in Libya (Germany's Wintershall and Norway's StatoilHydro), adjusting the existing stand-alone contracts to bring them into compliance with the Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement (EPSA) rubric. The renegotiation of Total's contract is of a piece with the NOC's effort to renegotiate existing contracts to increase the Libya's share of crude oil production.

__

How The So-Called Guardians Of Free Speech Are Silencing The Messenger

By John Pilger

March 10, 2011

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

Hedges: This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us

Today, as we consider whether Baker City needs tighter control over the behavior of citizens at Council meetings (today's Baker City Herald print edition), whether wolves have a right to inhabit their historic lands, whether the public workers in Wisconsin have a right to organize, whether the national budget should be reduced on the shoulders of the poor or at the expense of military empire, whether Americans have the right to truthfully blow the whistle on the military, whether President Obama should arm the Libyan rebels and declare war on Gaddafi by instituting a no-fly zone, and etc., Chris Hedges reminds us of the greater historically-based context of a pending planet-wide collapse. Laugh it off if you must, but you do so at your own peril. His warning is nothing new, as wise men and women have been warning the same for several decades, but at least take some time to consider it, because the warning signs, even if hidden from view by the popular corporate media and scorned by your beloved leaders, are everywhere.
__

This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
Mar 7, 2011

By Chris Hedges

. . . .

As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.
. . . .

Read entire article:
This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us
__


Bradley Manning could face death: For what?
Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning could face death: For what?
BY GLENN GREENWALD

Under 104(b)—almost certainly the provision to be applied—a person is guilty if he “gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly” (emphasis added), and, if convicted, “shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.” The charge sheet filed by the Army is quite vague and neither indicates what specifically Manning did to violate this provision nor the identity of the “enemy” to whom he is alleged to have given intelligence.

America's "Howling Hypocrisy" Regarding Libya

In the articles below, Eric Margolis, Suemas Milne and Chris Floyd help people understand why they might feel jolts of cognitive dissonance and paralyzing ambivalence when listening to the "Peace" President and his Secretary of State speak about the Libyan civil war.

I think I understand my own feelings in any event. As Chris Floyd put it: "The howling hypocrisy of the American response to the uprising in Libya has been so jaw-dropping and nauseating that I've hardly been able to address it." Yep.

The response of the American administration, Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular, has been so incredibly dishonest and hypocritical, that anyone with even a poorly developed sense of intellectual and ethical integrity would find their displays of audacious cynicism inconceivable, that is if such deception hadn't become a central feature of American foreign policy in recent decades. Even then, one fights the thought that our leaders are in fact following Hitler's example of telling their people the big lie. At least their actions and words do not yet reach the olympic heights of deception established by George W. Bush and the Neocons in pushing the US into to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is vying to become yet another American war criminal sitting in the oval office. Having lived through the Viet Nam era and so many frightfully immoral wars, criminal military assaults, and interventions since, one would think that I and others would know better than to think we Americans could ever produce great and peaceful leaders in a "democratic" system that is actually controlled by elites and corporate forces who know nothing better than how to control others in the pursuit of power and their own enrichment. "Hope springs eternal."

Included here is an interview from Antiwar Radio between Scott Horton and Eric Margolis, where Margolis explains that Gaddafi overthrew Libyan King Idris after a gentle nudge from the CIA in 1969. (Eric Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website for details)
__

Hillary Clinton Statement on Libya

February 27, 2011

SECRETARY CLINTON: Let me start by saying as strongly as I can that the United States and the American people support the aspirations and rights of the Libyan people. They are clearly sending as strong a message as they are capable of doing that it is time for Qadhafi to go. We think he must go as soon as possible without further bloodshed and violence.
We are also very conscious of the actions that have been taken against the Libyan people by the Qadhafi regime. And the Security Council resolution passed unanimously yesterday makes clear there will be accountability for crimes against humanity and war crimes and other atrocities that are being perpetrated against the Libyan people, including a referral to the International Criminal Court. And I want to underscore this unanimous message from the Security Council to those who are around Qadhafi that you will be held accountable for the actions that are being taken and have been taken against your own people.

__

GADAFFI: HANG’EM HIGH!
March 04, 2011

War fever over Libya has gripped the United States and Canada. After a hiatus of nine years, in which he was a useful ally to western interests, Col. Muammar Gadaffi is once again the man we love to hate.

“On to Libya! Down with the Tyrant of Tripoli!” That’s the latest hue and cry from North America’s right wingers, media, and neoconservative lynch mob. Once again there’s talk of war against a small, almost defenseless nation that can’t seriously fight back.
 
The right thinks it sees  a golden opportunity in Libya’s current civil war to get rid of the unloved Muammar Gadaffi, “liberate” Libya’s high-grade oil, and to halt the wave uprisings now flaring across the Arab world.  
. . . .
There is enough hypocrisy over former ally Libya to float the US 6th Fleet.    
 
A US-British-French-Canadian invasion of Libya would be sugar-coated as a humanitarian mission to rescue Libyan civilians from supposedly murderous air strikes by Gadaffi’s totally inept air force.  
 
But no mention is made of the 65 Afghan civilians recently killed by a US air strike, or the nine Afghan boys collecting wood on a hillside massacred by US helicopter gunships last week Nor about repeated US air strikes on Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen that have killed large numbers of  civilians.  When we do it, it’s `collateral damage.’ . . . .

See Also:
GADAFFI: CRAZY LIKE A FOX
February 25, 2011
__

Intervention in Libya would poison the Arab revolution
Western military action against Gaddafi risks spreading the conflict and undermining the democratic movement

Suemas Milne
Wednesday 2 March 2011 22.00 GMT

It's as if the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan had been a bad dream. The liberal interventionists are back. As insurrection and repression has split Libya in two and the death toll has mounted, the old Bush-and-Blair battle-cries have returned to haunt us.

The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won't recognise.
. . . .

With Colonel Gaddafi and his loyalists showing every sign of digging in, the likelihood must be of intensified conflict – with all the heightened pretexts that would offer for outside interference, from humanitarian crises to threats to oil supplies.

But any such intervention would risk disaster and be a knife at the heart of the revolutionary process now sweeping the Arab world. Military action is needed, US and British politicians claim, because Gaddafi is "killing his own people". Hundreds have certainly died, but that's hard to take seriously as the principal motivation.

When more than 300 people were killed by Hosni Mubarak's security forces in a couple of weeks, Washington initially called for "restraint on both sides". In Iraq, 50,000 US occupation troops protect a government which last Friday killed 29 peaceful demonstrators demanding reform. In Bahrain, home of the US fifth fleet, the regime has been shooting and gassing protesters with British-supplied equipment for weeks.

The "responsibility to protect" invoked by those demanding intervention in Libya is applied so selectively that the word hypocrisy doesn't do it justice. And the idea that states which are themselves responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in illegal wars, occupations and interventions in the last decade, along with mass imprisonment without trial, torture and kidnapping, should be authorised by international institutions to prevent killings in other countries is simply preposterous. . . . .

__

Taking the Cake: The Creeping Militarization of the Libyan Crisis
By Chris Floyd
March 04, 2011

The howling hypocrisy of the American response to the uprising in Libya has been so jaw-dropping and nauseating that I've hardly been able to address it. Fortunately, Seamus Milne is on the case, [See article above--Chris] and voices much of my thinking about the matter:

"The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won't recognise."

Yes, does this not, as they say, take the cake ... and the plate and the forks and the napkins too? The United States pushing through a measure to refer Libyan leaders to an international court which the United States resolutely refuses to recognize -- lest its own leaders and their underlings find themselves in the dock for the most monstrous war crimes of this century? Yet even today, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was sternly wagging his finger at Gaddafi and his underlings, telling them they "will be held accountable" for their actions before the august institutions of international justice, which weigh the whole world in the balance ... except for the Peace prize-winning drone assassin and Continuer-in-Chief of a worldwide campaign of state terror, that is. . . . .

Chris Floyd--Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium
_____

Carter Niemeyer on Wolves; Parenti--Disposable Planet; "Diplomatic Immunity" for the CIA

In This Issue:

- Carter Niemeyer on Wolves;

- Parenti--Disposable Planet;

- "Diplomatic Immunity" for the CIA
__________

Been absent lately and thinking about a lot of things from the Middle East to Wisconsin, to Baker City, and to wolves and birds, but it is all pretty overwhelming right now. Still trying to get a handle on it all. I am reduced to forwarding some good links that I hope are worthwhile reading. Yes, I know about the wolf on cow attacks and ODFW collaring of Imnaha wolves in Wallowa County, and a good bit of hysteria coming out of the Middle East, but the available and incomplete isolated facts just don't mean much anymore--what we need is fewer emotional factoids and more background and context, which is too hard to come by. As things become clearer I will weigh in. In the mean time, here is a book and more worth considering:
_____

Carter Niemeyer's Wolfer, and Thoughts on the Wolf Wars

Posted February 23, 2011 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Louisa Willcox’s Blog

". . . . In his book [Wolfer], Carter describes his efforts to create an arena where common interests could be fostered: they were successful with some individuals, but did not go as far as he had hoped. He had early premonitions of the challenges he faced in this area: “I’d end up slitting my throat by taking the wolf specialist job. I went out and did what I thought was a thorough, honest job and because of it, I was branded a traitor. Every time I said a wolf didn’t do it, I got my ass chewed by my supervisor. But I was unflagging in my opinion: wolf might be a nuisance because they were new, but they were not monsters, and I wasn’t letting bureaucrats or congressmen or anyone else change my mind about it. I didn’t understand why others around me refused to acknowledge this is the truth. The few wolves that wandered into Montana had nearly undetectable effects on ranching and didn’t seem to be that interested in livestock. I didn’t believe that injecting a sudden, larger population of wolves into America’s Northern Rockies could create any sort of burden for most ranchers, except maybe a psychological one. Having wolves around used to be the cost of doing business”.

In 1994, when Carter became involved in the effort to reintroduce of wolves from Canada to Yellowstone and central Idaho, those were radical sentiments for someone in the Wildlife Services, a rogue agency that has killed over 114,000 mammalian carnivores just in 2009 (and over 2.2 million animals total a few years before), many unnecessarily. And sadly, those sentiments are still rare, even though Carter has mentored a number of others inside this agency and out. For his mentorship, we are very grateful—but much more is needed to turn this recalcitrant agency around.

Carter talks a lot about the vulnerability of wolves in his book, and how easy it would be to reverse the enormous progress made to date under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act. “Having been a trapper and a hunter, and understanding what I did about wolf behavior, I could kill them without much effort if that kind of order came down. I wondered how many people knew how easy it would be. Just give me wolves wearing radio collars, a helicopter, a shotgun, deep snow and calm winds.”

A chilling thought…and one that is especially relevant today as Congress considers a suite of bills that would legislatively removing federal protections for wolves, Montana’s Governor Brian Schweitzer encourages wholesale slaughter of wolf packs (even potentially packs that do not have a record of killing livestock), and the state legislatures consider deeply troubling anti-wolf bills, including one that would prevent Idaho from prosecuting illegal wolf kills. In such a climate, it’s not surprising that a growing number of people have deep reservations about turning the keys to the car of wolf management over to the states, which have demonstrated fundamental hostility to wolves. . . . ."

__

Profit Pathology and Disposable Planet

By Michael Parenti

". . . .
The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits.

This corporate system of capital accumulation treats the Earth’s life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, foliage, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, bays, rivers, air quality) as disposable ingredients presumed to be of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. As BP has demonstrated so well in the Gulf-of-Mexico catastrophe, considerations of cost weigh so much more heavily than considerations of safety. As one Congressional inquiry concluded: “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense.”

Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not to promote a healthy ecology but to extract as much marketable value out of the natural world as possible even if it means treating the environment like a septic tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course, so much so that the support systems of the entire ecosphere—the Earth’s thin skin of fresh air, water, and topsoil—are at risk.

It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than their profits. So they defame environmentalists as “eco-terrorists,” “EPA gestapo,” “Earth day alarmists,” “tree huggers,” and purveyors of “Green hysteria.”

In an enormous departure from free-market ideology, most of the diseconomies of big business are foisted upon the general populace, including the costs of cleaning up toxic wastes, the cost of monitoring production, the cost of disposing of industrial effluence (which composes 40 to 60 percent of the loads treated by taxpayer-supported municipal sewer plants), the cost of developing new water sources (while industry and agribusiness consume 80 percent of the nation’s daily water supply), and the costs of attending to the sickness and disease caused by all the toxicity created. With many of these diseconomies regularly passed on to the government, the private sector then boasts of its superior cost-efficiency over the public sector.
. . . ."

__

American Detained in Pakistan is a CIA Operative Linked to Blackwater

Democracy Now--Headlines for February 22, 2011

U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for allegedly murdering two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense.

President Barack Obama: "With respect to Mr. Davis, our diplomat in Pakistan, we’ve got a very simple principle here that every country in the world that is party to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations has upheld in the past and should uphold in the future, and that is, if our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution."

U.S. News Outlets Knew about CIA Links, Kept Quiet at Government Request

The Guardian newspaper of London first reported Raymond Davis’s CIA link on Sunday and added that many U.S. news outlets knew about his ties to the CIA but did not report on it at the request of the U.S. government. On Monday, the New York Times and the Washington Post confirmed the CIA link and admitted to withholding the story. Dave Lindorff is an investigative reporter who has been closely following the story. ....

Dave Lindorff: “The rather amazing thing about this story with Raymond Davis is how the New York Times and some other American news organizations hid this from the American public. They actually knew that Davis was working for the CIA even as the President at a press conference was saying that he was a diplomat, and they allowed that lie to get printed, for instance, in the New York Times without a correction, which is worse than hiding the information: it’s actually allowing the President to lie.”

__

This CIA agent is no diplomat

Craig Murray
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 February 2011

". . . . But one thing I can state for certain: Davis (as we will call him for now) is not a diplomat and does not possess diplomatic immunity. There is some doubt as to who he really is, with the charges against him in Pakistan including one that he obtained documents using a false identity.

Watching Barack Obama's presidency has been a stream of bitter disappointments. His endorsement of Davis as "our diplomat" and invocation of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations was, in its sheer dishonesty, as sad an Obama moment as any.

As a general rule, international treaties are written in very plain language and are very accessible. That is certainly true of the Vienna convention. Unfortunately I can see scant evidence that any journalists have bothered to read it. . . . ."

__

Warren Zevon

"The Envoy" (1980-82)

The Rich Steal With Impunity, The Poor Go To Jail; Plus Wolves Of Another Sort

In This Edition:

- Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

- Wolf News
__________

When I began to read the following article about Wall Street crimes, I was taken back, once again, to my memory of a black teenager being hauled off in a police car from a Von's (now Safeway) parking lot in San Diego County, some 20 or 30 years ago. She had stolen a bottle of wine, having been put up to it by an older male who was still sitting in his car in the parking lot. I thought of the poor and sometimes desperate folks in Baker City who are hauled off to jail on a daily basis for various, sometimes minor, crimes. I thought of Phil Ochs' words sung by Joan Baez in the song "There but for fortune."

In the in-depth article that follows, Matt Taibbi, one of the best investigative reporters in our world, vividly elucidates the crimes that have been committed by the Wall Street scamsters, and the stark differences between our treatment of the crimes of rich and poor. God it is long! But perhaps that is the price of understanding.

He describes how Wall Street scamsters brought our country to its knees while raking in millions of dollars--Crimes that went unpunished by a complicit government.

Here are the final paragraphs (but please read the entire article if you get some time):

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
By Matt Taibbi
FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET
. . . .

". . . .the system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner or later jumps ship for those fat NBA contracts [big money on Wall Street, or as consultants or whatever]. Or, conversely, graduates of the big corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in government service for a year or two. Many of those appointments are inevitably hand-picked by lifelong stooges for Wall Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. "The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we're not ready to believe it," says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. "He's really fucking us over like that? Really? That's really a JP Morgan guy, really?"

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. [My preference would be to seriously fine those that hire illegals.]

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality."

[Emphasis added, not that it was needed]
______

Wolf News

This first one is slightly dated, but adds a little context.

Do ranchers have a right to predator free landscape?
By George Wuerthner, 11-22-10
. . . .
One of the unquestioned and unspoken assumptions heard across the West is that ranchers have a right to a predator free environment. Even environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife more or less legitimize this perspective by supporting unqualified compensation for livestock losses to bears and wolves.  And many state agency wolf management plans specifically call for compensation to livestock producers—but without any requirements that livestock husbandry practices be in place to reduce or eliminate predation opportunity.

In a sense, ranchers have externalized one of their costs of business, namely practicing animal husbandry that eliminates or significantly reduces predator losses. Most of these proven techniques involve more time and expense than ranchers have traditionally had to pay, in part, because they have been successful in making the rest of us believe it was a public responsibility to eliminate predators and not a private business cost.
. . . .
See link above for rest
__


The Information Below is from Wally Sykes of Northeast Oregon Ecosystems:

[The first story may or may not be true. Wolf hysteria is easily whipped up by sloppy confirmations of wolf kills by federal investigators and then reported by news outlets, only to be overturned by more thorough ODFW investigations. ODFW has not been involved in these investigations, and while they could be true, there is plenty of room for skepticism.

The billboard, below, featured on previous blogs, was taken down yesterday due to objections from the landowner. It will hopefully be reposted in an alternative location before long. Doesn't the fact that the property owner felt compelled to remove the message speak for itself?]


Wolves kill two cows in Wallowa County
Wallowa County Chieftain
February 16, 2011

Also covered on OPB blog:

Washington Livestock group files suit over wolves
February 16, 2011
KOZE
Group sues USFWS to force a review of federal wolf protections

Wolf Awareness Week Poster Image Entries Wanted
Ashland Current
February 16, 2011
The theme for the 2011 posters is “Why Wolves? Wolves’ Role in a Healthy Ecosystem.”

Wolf de-listing bill on fast track in DC
February 15, 2011
Spokesman Review

From Ralph Maughan:
Cuts to Wildlife Services proposed by Obama. His budget will not become law due to the giant faceoff between Rs and Ds, but many of the specific cuts could survive.

Elsewhere in the West:

Dangerous Threats:
New York Times
February 15, 2011
NYT Editorial blasts Representative Rehberg’s veiled threat against a federal judge as well as his effort to undermine that judges decisions.

AP News Break – Montana won’t wait to kill wolves
Idaho Statesman
February 16, 2011
Defying federal authority over gray wolves, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer on Wednesday encouraged ranchers to kill wolves that prey on their livestock - even in areas where that is not currently allowed - and said the state will start shooting packs that hurt elk herds.

The Story in:
USA Today
Helena Independent Record
GOP Bill Would Lift Wolf Protections
Associated Press
February 16, 2011

Idaho wolves in lawmakers’ sights
Idaho Mountain Express
February 16, 2011
Idaho wolves are in the crosshairs as efforts to control and delist the predators escalate on the federal and state levels. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was the first to take aim last week, publishing a draft environmental impact statement on Thursday that proposed allowing Idaho to reduce the Lolo wolf population—in north-central Idaho—by more than half.

Styler on Wolves
February16, 2011
Salt Lake Tribune
2 LTE responses to DNR Director's outrageous wolf claims
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/51229201-82/assertions-wolf-director-grazing.html.csp
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/51229255-82/utah-natural-park-reintroduction.html.csp

Elsewhere in the country

Study of wolf population underway in Michigan
Suite 101
February 15, 2011
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment needs help in the northern portion of Lower Michigan to find signs the gray wolf has returned.

Cry Wolf
Express Milwaukee
February 16, 2011
Someone very close to me worries a lot about wolves. She doesn’t worry about being attacked by packs of wolves. Nor is she afraid that when she goes through the woods to grandmother’s house, a wolf will be in granny’s bed wearing a frilly bonnet. She worries that Wisconsin can hardly wait to wipe out all the wolves again.
_____