Center for Media and Democracy's Financial Crisis Portal
The Wall Street Bailout Cost table is produced and updated monthly by the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes SourceWatch. The total is reflected on the Financial Crisis Tracker widget (to the left). This calculation was peer-reviewed by economists at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. This table represents a unique accounting of actual funds disbursed. Our total includes major programs of the U.S. Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and other government agencies to assist the financial sector and institutions that had a role in the crisis. It does not include stimulus funds, unemployment, student loans, auto bailout and other initiatives to create jobs or support citizens.
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”
I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface. While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the deeper history and the broader implications. CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.
If the peace settlement does not include relocation assistance (economic), the settlers who want to relocate will be left ruined–at the same time that the government has ruined them, it plans to once again ruin Lebanon. Apart from economic equity for the relocatable settlers, a regional water management treaty that is fully transparent and enforceable through international sanctions against Israel as needed, are essential elements of any sustainable regional peace plan that integrates prosperity for all.
When Israeli Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled said recently that a war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was “just a matter of time” and that such a conflict would include Syria, most observers dismissed the comment as little more than posturing by a right-wing former general. But Peled’s threat has been backed by Israeli military maneuvers near the Lebanese border, violations of Lebanese airspace, and the deployment of an anti-missile system on Israel’s northern border.
The Lebanese are certainly not treating it as Likud bombast.
“We hear a lot of Israeli threats day in and day out, and not only threats,” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri told the BBC. “We see what is happening on the ground and in our airspace…during the past two months—every day we have Israeli airplanes entering Lebanese airspace.” Hariri added that he considered the situation “really dangerous.”
Benny Raz put up a “For Sale” sign outside his home last year, but he admits there is little hope of finding a buyer. The house itself is a three-bedroom property on a quiet street, with a garden and terrace offering views across rolling hills dotted with olive trees.
The problem is one of location: Mr Raz’s house sits on the outskirts of Karnei Shomron, a Jewish settlement built in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He bought the house 15 years ago for $130,000 (€97,000, £87,000). Today, Mr Raz says, no buyer is willing to pay more than $70,000 for the property – not nearly enough for the family to afford another place inside Israel itself.
Like thousands of so-called “economic settlers”, the 57-year-old moved to the West Bank for the cheap housing, the tax breaks and the promise of a comfortable life. Now, many of them find they are stuck. “The government said: I will help you buy a house in Karnei Shomron, so I went with my family. I came for economic reasons, not ideological reasons. I came because I wanted a cheaper house,” says Mr Raz.
Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing wrong with Israel, or the United States of America, that could not be fixed by restoring informed participatory democracy. Right now both governments are out-of-control and totally corrupt monsters, both cancers encroaching on everything they touch.
(So cool, so ill) Read the rest of the story fr NY Times
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.
The goal of the wiki is to organize the world's energy information. Parts of it are open for contributions from the general public.
Open Energy Info (OpenEI) is a platform to connect the world’s energy data. It is a linked open data platform bringing together energy information to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data. OpenEI follows guidelines set by the White House’s Open Government Initiative , which is focused on transparency, collaboration, and participation. OpenEI strives to provide open access to this energy information, which will spur creativity and drive innovation in the energy sector.
What an interesting search, thank you. Here are some links that came up in a broader search that we import to Phi Beta Iota with a tip of the hat to the anonymous searcher.
