Guest Column — The War On The Poor — Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

The American poor are being driven into the ground. Not only is owning a home out of the question, but also the poor can’t even afford to rent. They lack the money for a damage deposit, and they lack the cash for the large deposits that utility companies require in order to have utilities connected.

The declining ability of the poor to rent is adversely affecting those who provide rental shelter to the poor.

For the dispossessed middle class, foreclosure on a home is often just the beginning of trouble. If, for example, a bank forecloses on a home with a $200,000 mortgage and sells the house for $100,000, under some circumstances the IRS treats the $100,000 difference as income to the foreclosed homeowner and requires the bank to issue a 1099 form to the homeowner showing taxable income of $100,000. http://www.irs.gov/uac/Home-Foreclosure-and-Debt-Cancellation

Alternatively, if the sale does not cover the mortgage, the bank can come after other property that the foreclosed homeowner might possess, such as a second home, car, work equipment, checking account balance. For example, a construction subcontractor who loses his home and moves his family into the office or construction trailer on the lot where he keeps the backhoe loader and work truck can find himself dispossessed of these assets in order to apply the proceeds to the difference between his mortgage and the price at which the bank sells his foreclosed home.

Americans who have not been personally affected by foreclosure have little idea how the system is rigged in favor of the banks that caused the problem and against the victims of financial deregulation.

In the article below, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn show that the assault on the poor began with the Clinton administration.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: The War on the Poor”

2013/09/20

David Swanson: Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima’s Coming Mega Meltdown

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

The Crisis at Fukushima 4 Demands a Global Take-Over

By Harvey Wasserman, WarIsACrime.org

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima's Coming Mega Meltdown”

2013/09/182013/09/18

Chuck Spinney: Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

The author is one of the best journalists in the Middle East.

Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran

Jonathan Cook

Counterpunch:, 2013-09-18

Nazareth.

President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted “red line” around Syria’s chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.

It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene should that happen.

According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for a US military response.

It is worth remembering that Obama’s supposed “dithering” on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel’s “daring” strikes on Syria – at least three since the start of the year.

It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria.

That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

To understand the respective views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

Israel and its ideological twin in Washington, the neoconservatives, rallied to the cause of toppling Saddam Hussein, believing that it should be the prelude to an equally devastating blow against Iran.

Israel was keen to see its two chief regional enemies weakened simultaneously. Saddam’s Iraq had been the chief sponsor of Palestinian resistance against Israel. Iran, meanwhile, had begun developing a civilian nuclear programme that Israel feared could pave the way to an Iranian bomb, ending Israel’s regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The neocons carried out the first phase of the plan, destroying Iraq, but then ran up against domestic opposition that blocked implementation of the second stage: the break-up of Iran.

The consequences are well known. As Iraq imploded into sectarian violence, Iran’s fortunes rose. Tehran strengthened its role as regional sponsor of resistance against Israel – or what became Washington’s new “axis of evil” – that included Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Israel and the US both regard Syria as the geographical “keystone” of that axis, as Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Jerusalem Post this week, and one that needs to be removed if Iran is to be isolated, weakened or attacked.

But Israel and the US drew different lessons from Iraq. Washington is now wary of its ground forces becoming bogged down again, as well as fearful of reviving a cold war confrontation with Moscow. It prefers instead to rely on proxies to contain and exhaust the Syrian regime.

Israel, on the other hand, understands the danger of manoeuvring its patron into a showdown with Damascus without ensuring this time that Iran is tied into the plan. Toppling Assad alone would simply add emboldened jihadists to the troubles on its doorstep.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran”

2013/09/182013/09/18

Berto Jongman Et Al: Navy Yard, Drugs, Story Unravels

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War

Berto Jongman: Was Navy Yard Killer on Anti-Depressant Meds?

Jon Rappoport: Navy Yard shooting: Aaron Alexis narrative crumbling

Phi Beta Iota: The CIA has a long history of using drugs to make people do terrible things. We now know that anti-depressants are unstable medications, and life insurance companies have begun to deny life insurance to people known to be taking anti-depressants. A broad literature has emerged that shows the pharmaceutical industry — and ignorant doctors that do not do their homework — to be terribly irresponsible, ignorant, and ultimately liable for malpractice.

2013/09/162013/09/17

Greg Palast: Senate Puts Summers Back Into Shit Can

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Monday, 16 September 2013

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, “What would Goldman think of that?”

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?

A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he’d turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on “what Goldman thought.” As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

R.I.P. Larry Summers
On Sunday afternoon, facing a revolt by his own party’s senators, Obama dumped Larry as likely replacement for Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Until news came that Summers’ torch had been snuffed, I was going to write another column about Larry, the Typhoid Mary of Economics. (My first, in The Guardian, 15 years ago, warned that “Summers is, in fact, a colony of aliens sent to Earth to turn humans into a cheap source of protein.”)

But the fact that Obama even tried to shove Summers down the planet’s throat tells us more about Obama than Summers—and whom Obama works for. Hint: You aren’t one of them. [Emphasis added.]

Full email story below the line.

Continue reading “Greg Palast: Senate Puts Summers Back Into Shit Can”

2013/09/16

Winslow Wheeler: Adam Ciralsky Seven Part Vanity Fair Article on F-35 Mis-Management

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Long in the making, Vanity Fair is today releasing, on-line, it's article on the F-35 — to appear in a future issue. The article focuses on the atrocious management of the F-35–from the very start from all parties, including the absence of oversight by DOD of either Lockheed-Martin or the military services, especially the Marine Corps.

Note the Marines' refusal to respond to the question of the appropriateness of their declaration of a pre-mature IOC, and note as well the glib and fact free assurance of a viable program future by JPO head Lt. Gen. Bogdan, who seems to assume, for example, a smooth path for the program's budget — in an era when sequestration levels of spending are the new fact of life.

Note also some important insights about the Helmet Mounted Display, which may never be completely fixed and may never be viable even if it is.

Find author Adam Ciralsky's revealing tour through F-35 mis-management in a seven part Vanity Fair article at

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter-lockheed-martin.

2013/09/162013/09/16

Marcus Aurelius: George Will on Bay of Pigs — the Unfinished Battle

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War

The Bay of Pigs’ unfinished battle

By George F. Will, Published: September 13

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there were never commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year’s Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba.

According to Jim Rasenberger’s history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “The Brilliant Disaster,” Phillips was “a handsome 37-year-old former stage actor” who “had been something of a dilettante before joining the CIA.” There, however, he was an expert. And in April 1960, he assured Richard Bissell, the CIA’s invasion mastermind, that within six months radio propaganda would produce “the proper psychological climate” for the invasion to trigger a mass Cuban uprising against Castro.

The invasion brigade had only about 1,400 members but began its members’ serial numbers at 2,500 to trick Castro into thinking it was larger. Castro’s 32,000-man army was supplemented by 200,000 to 300,000 militia members. U.S. intelligence was ignorant of everything from Castro’s capabilities to Cuba’s geography to Cubans’ psychology.

Fifty-two years and many misadventures later, the invasion still fascinates as, in historian Theodore Draper’s description, “one of those rare events in history — a perfect failure.” It had a perverse fecundity.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: George Will on Bay of Pigs — the Unfinished Battle”